More nonsense for teachers to avoid

I recently ran a staff survey asking for comments and suggestions about our peer-coaching programme. Within this questionnaire, I also asked what teachers would find interesting to read on this blog and one response asked for something on using Neuro Linguistic Programming as an effective way of communicating to students.

So, here’s a whirlwind tour of NLP and a brief explanation for why it’s utterly misleading nonsense.

What is NLP?

NLP began back in the 1970s as a systematic approach to understanding how charismatic individuals managed to quickly form a rapport and manipulate others. It developed as a form of psychotherapy, ostensibly reproducing the way that skilled therapists created rapport with their clients. The basic idea is that our picture of the world is a subjective representation based on the five senses and that by manipulating these sense-based subjective representations, the behaviour of individuals can be modified.

NLP claims that…