Magic Valley NLP

NLP Presupposition: Anything can be accomplished

when the task is broken down into small enough chunks.

Events are real, however names have been changed. 

I was offered the opportunity to test drive a new program from a company called Iris Media, Inc.  The course was called Managing Middle School Classrooms.   This is an online training consisting of about 8 lessons called modules. Each lesson presented a different concept on being a proactive middle school teacher.  The material presented was all material  I had learned before, but it was presented in an interesting way and I enjoyed it as a quick review.  It reminded me of things I could change easily and quickly to make my class a place where students want to be.  

            I chose as a topic for this article one of the NLP presupposition.  NLP practitioners find people who excel in their field, then break down what they do for excellence into small chunks or steps.  The practitioners then can teach the processes to others.  The presupposition is:  Anything can be accomplished when the task is broken down into small enough chunks.  This is exactly what Iris Media did.   They found excellent middle school teachers and modeled what they did. Iris Media then took  what good middle school teachers did and chunked it down into small chunk tasks and ideas.  They created a curriculum with short video segments of a teacher modeling the small chunk making it very doable. 

            I had committed to evaluating the program and wanted to give it a fair evaluation so I put it to the practical test, my classroom.  My evaluation was a good lesson in learning strategy.  I enjoyed the short video with a teacher modeling the behavior that Iris Media had identified as an indicator for success.  I noted that the small chunk lessons allowed me to quickly incorporate a small change into my behavior, test it out and see if it worked.  They were well-chosen and always worked. This success made me eager to try the next strategy.  At the end of the eight lessons I found I had indeed changed and my classroom did feel like a friendlier place.

            As I evaluated I thought about the process I had gone through. I had been able to see the video, I had been able to hear it read out loud or alternately I could read it to myself.  Then I got to try it out.  All three major learning modalities had been incorporated into the program.  The small chunks made the learning quick and easy to incorporate and the success made for lasting results.  This is also what I strive for as a teacher and a developmental specialist, take a large amount of learning, chunk it down into smaller pieces, then teach it in interesting ways that will motivate my students to put their learnings into practice.  This was a good lesson for us all in what makes a good learning activity.

© by Debrah Roundy 2008