Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

simply aligned goals, although when he was awarded an A star in his chemistry coursework I grounded him for a week. His actual GCSEs did include a number of As but they were there because he wanted them to be, not because I wanted them there.
    By the way, I’m not setting myself up as the world greatest parent, far from it, but I have children so I may as well experiment.
    I mentioned this to a group of teachers in Cornwall and it caused a great deal of heated debate and controversy amongst what was a high-achieving academic staff. In the break a lady came up to me, though, and said to me, ‘I was pushed to get A grades but wished I’d got Bs and a life. I won’t be 16 again.’
    I was observing a year ten PE theory lesson a while back and, at the beginning of the lesson, the teacher handed back to the students a modular test they had sat the previous lesson and that he had subsequently marked. As is always the case the students looked at their own mark, looked at their friends’ marks and then the teacher said, ‘OK class, put them away now. Let’s get on with today’s lesson’. What he missed was the metacognitive opportunity to say, ‘OK, who got question three right? Who got it wrong? If you got it wrong you’ve got two minutes to go and find someone who got it right and tell you, not the right answer, but
how
they got the answer right.’ In other words,
how
did they remember the difference between an ectomorph and a mesomorph or whatever it was? That way, more students would have been able to pass the test next time around.
    The logical extension, then, is that we should be encouraging our students to copy, not preventing them. This, of course, is not cheating because that way, as it says in the Teachers’ Guide to Classroom Clichés, you are only cheating yourself. Rather it is what in Neuro-Linguistic Programming circles is known as ‘modelling’.
    There has been a great deal written about the use of NLP 3 in schools, some of it very positive, some if it quite scathing. For my part I am very much pro-NLP and have found it an invaluable, but not inviolate, tool in my work with young people and teachers as well as in my own personal development. It grew out of the work that linguist John Grinder and undergraduate psychology student Richard Bandler undertook in the 1970s at the University of California. Those words ‘undergraduate’, ‘California’ and ‘1970s’ have been enough to put many academics off the whole NLP idea, but all I would suggest, if you have not done so already, is to find out more about it and work out for yourself what you can take from it. In case you didn’t know, the whole idea of VAK in the classroom, that we have a preferred way of taking information on board during learning, a preferred ‘modality’ that is either visual, auditory or kinesthetic, comes from NLP. This is, as academics are quick to point out, neither rocket science nor strictly accurate, 4 yet it is, in my experience, a really useful way of helping young people get past specific learning blocks and helping teachers make sure they teach outside their own preferred way of learning. (For example, many of the maths classes I have observed have been delivered in a predominantly auditory way, the information coming to the students through their ears. Yet I, and many of the students in the classes I speak to, have a visual preference when it comes to maths and what made no sense in auditory form makes complete sense when presented visually. As a student I had often wished I had been clever enough to understand my maths teachers. Now I was.)
    Bandler and Grinder’s early work involved looking at patterns of language and behaviour, in particular effective hypnosis and therapy to understand the ‘difference that makes a difference’. What do people who are successful in their field do to achieve that and how can that then be shared with others to achieve similar success? This works at a very broad level too. If you want to be a great teacher simply act like ‘a great teacher’, if you want to think like a great entrepreneur approach each challenge as if you were Richard Branson. It can also work at a far more subtle level, too, where you examine the patterns of language the ‘great’ practitioner uses, the tonality and submodalities of their speech, their facial expressions, their entire body language, even their eye movements. Observing other people in such detail – and such acuity is a big part of