Getting to the Information
One of the things that I find most fascinating about people and learning is how our societies tend to make us unwilling to be open about many of our deeper feelings and ideas. Often those who help us to learn can do so much more for us if they are more aware of where we’re coming from in a psychological sense.
It might be, for example, that I have spent many years of my early life in a very competitive setting and generally ‘failed’ because I was competing at things that neither interested me nor at which I was naturally adept. Of course, living a life like this would tend to influence how I thought of competition and the competitive spirit later on in years. If as a learner those who taught me did not understand this, they might assume that competitive quizzes and tests would encourage greater effort from me, when it almost certainly wouldn’t.
One of the reasons that people don’t open up seems to be that when we talk to others in what we might call the counselling role, they are all too obviously ‘there’ in the conversation. What someone with a problem needs is to be able to talk to themselves through the medium or with the help of someone else, but without that other person intruding into the conversation.
A psychologist called David Grove developed a technique to reduce the way in which counsellors tend to subtly steer interviews by rewarding things that fit with their model of the world. This technique goes by the name Clean Language because it is clean of the influence of the questioner.
Using this technique we can often encourage people to be very open with themselves and to develop models and metaphors for situations in which they are involved that open new understandings. The use of clean language in a learning setting is a very useful way to get through to better learning styles for individuals who are having a hard time.
I’ll give some more detail of Clean Language in future posts, but if you have experience of it from any angle, do tell us about it.
It might be, for example, that I have spent many years of my early life in a very competitive setting and generally ‘failed’ because I was competing at things that neither interested me nor at which I was naturally adept. Of course, living a life like this would tend to influence how I thought of competition and the competitive spirit later on in years. If as a learner those who taught me did not understand this, they might assume that competitive quizzes and tests would encourage greater effort from me, when it almost certainly wouldn’t.
One of the reasons that people don’t open up seems to be that when we talk to others in what we might call the counselling role, they are all too obviously ‘there’ in the conversation. What someone with a problem needs is to be able to talk to themselves through the medium or with the help of someone else, but without that other person intruding into the conversation.
A psychologist called David Grove developed a technique to reduce the way in which counsellors tend to subtly steer interviews by rewarding things that fit with their model of the world. This technique goes by the name Clean Language because it is clean of the influence of the questioner.
Using this technique we can often encourage people to be very open with themselves and to develop models and metaphors for situations in which they are involved that open new understandings. The use of clean language in a learning setting is a very useful way to get through to better learning styles for individuals who are having a hard time.
I’ll give some more detail of Clean Language in future posts, but if you have experience of it from any angle, do tell us about it.
posted by Derek Shields at
6:07 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home