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Questions - 8 - More NLP Meta Modelling
Posted by Aphra Behn on February 11, 2007
This considers how to use the NLP Meta Model to give structure and direction to your questions. If you have not come across the Meta Model before, you can find out about it in Questions - 7.
Got that?
Good.
Before we consider the Meta Model in more detail, here is a simple scope warning:
The Meta Model is not the best tool for investigation and analysis. It is easy to get seduced by it because it is so comprehensive and so well documented. Many NLPers seem to assume that it is applicable to all circumstances and that is the only way to work out what questions to use. Bandler and Grinder developed it when observing therapists at work, and they used it to explore people’s own models of the world. But Hookins tried to use it in the analysis and design of computing systems and he found that the Meta Model is not interactive enough to use in a questionnaire and that it is too personal to work in a group setting.
The Meta Model, however, is great for those situations where someone is stuck in a mental loop and simply will not consider any viewpoint other than their own. It’s useful for discussing things with teenagers if you can get them to stop sulking long enough to answer any questions at all. It is of course important to be able to use it gently and conversationally, and not to let it turn you into an inquisitor.
Ok, on to considering it in practice.
Many statements fall into several Meta Model categories, and it is up to the questioner to decide what direction they want to take the conversation, and to choose a question accordingly. For example:
“It is up to you to choose what question to ask”
Revealing the lost peformative:
Who says it is up to me?
Revealing some of the presuppositions:
Do I have the right and the opportunity to ask a question?
Do I have the skill to choose what question to ask?
Is now an appropriate time to ask a question?
Will my question be answered?
Revealing the universal quantifier:
Is it always up to me to choose?
Exploring the nominalization:
So I’m the one with a choice to make, am I?
So the questioning isn’t automatic, then?
Exploring the unspecified verb:
How, specifically, do I choose the question?
Uncovering the referential index:
Whom do I ask?
As you can see, you can go charging off in a vast number of different directions, some of them inward, some of them outward. The Meta-Model helps you to understand what’s missing from a description of the world, but it is up to you to understand what those directions are, and where they might lead you.
It is fun to take a simple statement - any simple statement - and do what I have just done, to look for the Meta Model deletions in it, and to challenge it accordingly. This sort of practice makes it much easier to recognise the questions you can choose in the real-time of real life.
The Meta Model is taught over days or even weeks of NLP training, and I feel rather mean giving you the whole thing in such a huge and indigestible lump.
If you want to explore the Meta Model in more detail, I’d recommend printing out Larsen’s table or the one I put together in Questions - 7 and watch the News with it on your lap. You will soon get a reputation for devastatingly clever insight and cynicism. Play with it like that for a while, and then find yourself a book about NLP which doesn’t aggravate you. (If you thought “ooh look a presupposition about NLP books” then very well done.)
Playing with the Meta Model is such a good starting point for considering the power of questions that I think I am going to leave you with it.
Have fun.
February 12, 2007 at 7:43 am
I’ve been hanging on - whilst avidly reading - for the end of this excellent series before I comment.
I was going to tell you about how we use questions in my business (the excitement will probably kill you) but I want to see which area you’ve discussed seems most applicable. And have a nice satisfying think again about some of the very interesting, er, questions you’ve raised.
Incidently, you are the only NLPer I’ve ever met who doesn’t come across a bit like a raving new age brainwashed looney. I think it’s the blinkered nature of their beliefs you mention above which rather turns me off. I do hate it when people say there’s only one way to do something.
I may have to reconsider the whole thing.
February 12, 2007 at 8:00 am
I would be fascinated by how you use questions in your business. To my shame I’ve never thoguht of it as a questioning profession, but of course it must be. Doctors use questions in the opposite way to the way sales people do, keeping them as undirective as possible.
It’s possible that you have met other un-brainwashed NLPers but they simply haven’t told you that they are NLPers. Feeling slightly uncomfortable and embarrassed about the brainwashed ones is a symptom of still driving one’s own bus, I think.
The problem is that NLP is so cool and so powerful that people tend to get over-excited and not to notice its limitations. NLP deals with how people think rather than what they think, and I am interested in both. It actually informed the whole of this series, but I had a bit of an epiphany myself when I read what Hookin said about its limitations for analysis of IT systems.
Please do respond at more length, Sol. I haven’t stopped being interested in questions now that I’ve blarted all this lot out onto the internet. Au contraire.
Aphra.
February 13, 2007 at 7:36 am
Well, you might be right about the closet NLPers.
I’ll hit you with Solnushka’s guide to how to teach in a bit. Give her an inch…
February 13, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Here, darling, have a meter. Have a mile. Have a Swedish Mile!
*hugs*
Aphra.
February 15, 2007 at 7:40 am
Here you go:
Actually, the catchphrase we try to drum into people is: never explain (grammar/ lexis) always give contextualised examples and ask questions about them. You have to remember we teach in English, so no translation.
For example, we do NOT start ‘Right, today we are going to look at ‘used to’. It’s used to describe habitual actions and permanent states in the past – they took place in a finished time period, or are no longer the same now.’
Instead you tell a little story about Tom [my stories are always about Tom] who is rich, drives fast cars, drinks champagne for breakfast every day, wears Armani suits and lives in a mansion. But then gets done for tax fraud and goes to prison where he no longer drinks champagne for breakfast (and so on).
This allows you to prompt (‘Give me a sentence about champagne in the past’) to elicit from students sentences like ‘He used to drink champagne’.
Likewise, the way to teach ‘mug someone’ would be to show a picture of someone getting mugged and ask ‘What’s this man [point at mugger] doing?’
The reason for this is that the context helps illustrate the meaning whereas an explanation is dry, abstract and meaningless if students cant follow it, which mostly they can’t.
The reason using a question prompt to get the students to tell you the eg sentence/ word (if they can) is to see how much they know, to assess whether they’ve followed the context (in our mugger eg you’d be quite happy if students were saying things like ‘rob’, ‘steal’, ‘thief’, ‘crime’, but realise you need to clarify if they say ‘dance’ or ‘teach’), and to make them bloody well think about it.
I think you pointed out that it’s amazing how you get a response when people ask a question…
The phrasing of the prompt is quite important. ‘Give me a sentence’ or ‘What’s the word?’ is too wide – you’ve got to focus the question properly.
Anyway. When you’ve got your egs, you then go on and analyse the meaning. By asking questions about it. We call them Concept Checking Questions (CCQs), surprisingly enough.
Again, you are partly trying to see if the students have understood, partly reassuring them they’ve understood, and mostly trying to get them to think about it themselves rather than drooling and staring out the window.
CCQs for ‘used to’:
Is this about the past, present or future? Past
Does he drink champagne now? No
Did he before? Yes
Once or many times? Many times
CCQs for ‘mug’:
Where does this happen usually? On the street
Did he [point at mugee] want to give the other man [point at mugger] (his money)? No
Did he know the other man took it? Yes
Did he think the other man might hurt him? Yes
Why? Man had a knife/ said so/ any sensible answer
The questions must be:
• Focused on the central meaning of whatever you are teaching – so no questions about Tom or the mugger’s motivations or what they had for breakfast.
• Not too bizarre (‘swimming pool’ If I jump into a swimming pool, do I turn into coffee? I kind you not).
• Phrased simply (so students can understand).
• Closed, with short, simple and unambiguous answers (so students can articulate them and you aren’t there until next Tuesday) although it doesn’t have to be ‘Yes/No’.
• Logically ordered.
• Limited in number. One is ok if it’s the right one (‘Cat’: ‘What sound does a cat make?’ not ‘How many legs does a cat have?’), but that depends on the concept.
• Not using the language you are teaching: not ‘Did he use to drink champagne?’ or ‘Is the man mugging the other man?’ – if I have to explain that one again this week, I _will_ cry.
The thing about trying to focus students on the meaning is that you are really trying to pinpoint how this language is different from similar structures or words.
I chose the mugging thing because you have to define ‘mugging’ against all the other types of theft, especially ‘pick pocketing’ – ten points if you can spot how the questions do that.
I really liked your investigative questions in this respect, especially the Lewis Carrol ones. I think I need to give some thought to that.
Anyway, we also ask questions to elicit information about hot to use the structures in a sentence – what form of the verb is used after ‘used to’ and so on. Again it’s a making the students notice/ checking they are following thing. And to check students have followed our instructions (‘Instruction Checking Questions’. Oh, the imagination).
But, you’ll notice, we never ask a question to which we don’t know the answer. It gets a bit ingrained eventually too. This can be quite irritating for everyone else.
February 15, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Very interesting Sol. I admit I got a bit lost in the NLP posts (will read them again when I’ve had more that two hours of sleep), but I understand what you have said here about using questions to teach.
I never had any training in teaching but frequently used this method when I spent that couple of years as an IT trainer. Although I wasn’t teaching a language in the same sense as you were I was teaching about IT systems and how to program and configure them so had a huge bank of examples (contexts) I’d use with the students. These were adapted depending on the nationality of the class and tried to be as amusing/engaging as humanly possible to prevent the drooling/looking out the window.
So if I was teaching about databases I’d say I wanted to record information about my car, what sort of things might I need to store? And follow through their volunteered examples.
Lots of it built upon earlier lessons so there was also a great deal of ‘Can anyone remember where we tried to do something similar?’ or ‘How did we solve the problem with the ferrari yesterday - is that the same as or different from the problem we have today?’ ‘How is it different?’. The aim was always to give some information but ask them enough leading questions so that it would seem as though they had worked it out by themselves. Sometimes you had to find several ways of asking the same question to get the answer out of them but usually got there in the end.
The worst classes were the ones where there was such a language barrier that they could not understand much of what I was saying, but could read the slides/notes fairly well.
I promise I’ll come back and re-read all this in a few months…
February 15, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Oh, I meant to say that this was useful if they asked something you didn’t know the answer to as well, ‘How can we find that out?’ ‘Where would we look for information?’ ‘What happens when you try it? etc…
February 16, 2007 at 7:19 am
*Grins at Kelli* I spend a lot of time asking questions where the communicative function is: That hand out we gave you that we told you to look at while doing this kind of thing - look at it next time.
Actually I realised that my experience of questions is mostly about comprehension and checking understanding. That goes for the History training too. So I’m great at using questions to check my own understanding of something someone has told me, or that I’ve read, for example.
But the reason I have great difficulty in navigating my way though the Brisith banking system is because I’m pants at using questions to find out something new - all the big gaps in what they’ve told me.
A typical conversation goes like this:
How long does a cheque take to clear?
3 days.
3 working days?
Yes.
So if I put it in on Monday it will be ready on…?
Thursday.
Ok. Thanks.
It then transpires that only one type of cheque - the type your ordinary man on the street such as, oh yeah, me will be using - takes five days. But I didn’t think to ask ‘Is there any other possible time limit you aren’t telling me about?’ so…
It doesn’t help that most of the people I work with are very skilled at giving out precisely the information that’s needed, without devation of confusion.
I obviously need to develop my investigative side. That was very helpful, actually, Aphra. I don’t think I’d have noticed that on my own.
February 16, 2007 at 7:21 am
Sorry: ‘deviation or confusion’. Although I quite like ‘devation of confusion’.
February 16, 2007 at 8:09 am
Oh and I meant that only one type of cheque takes three days, the others taks five.
Proof reading is another one of the skills I don’t possess. Sorry.
February 16, 2007 at 10:22 am
This is really interesting, kelli and Sol.
Given the amount of time I am spending at the moment “engaging our stakeholders” and then “evangelising” until the new behaviours are “embedded”, it is shocking that I don’t know how to use questions to teach. Especially since no teaching system on earth follows those particular steps. “Are you ok with that?” and “Any questions about that?” really don’t cut it as questions though, do they?
I think I am inhibited about asking context checking questions and comprehension checking questions in case I come across as being patronising. I guess this is because I am engaging / evangelising / embedding - oh, or “briefing” - rather than actually training or - egos forbid - teaching.
I’ve got a couple of - ahem - briefing sessions next week, I’ll make myself a list of questions based on what I’m teaching and use them during the session. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Teaching technical stuff in English to peeps who didn’t have conversational English. Blimey, you did have it rough kelli.
Aphra.
February 17, 2007 at 8:21 am
I was already thinking you’d have to tread carefully, at least with Instruction Check Questions, not to sound patronising to a bunch of business people. Enough of the trainees think it’s a bit OTT. I mean, they’re utilitarian but not pretty.
A trick you could use there, perhaps, in not to use them just to recycle the instructions but to set up the task from the outset.
Questions about the topic should be OK, especially if you use them to explore rather than recycle again. I will be interested to hear how you get on, actually!
February 21, 2007 at 8:03 am
Well, I didn’t have (didn’t make?) the time to prep questions for the “briefing” session and sat there opening and shutting my mouth like a fish and ended up saying “are you ok with that then?”
Which only makes me more determined to get it right.
I’m on the receiving end of some skills training in a couple of months, I’ll try to notice what questions they use to check our understanding.
Aphra.
February 22, 2007 at 7:47 am
Well, I hope they aren’t doing what I seem to be unable to stop myself doing this week, which is use questions like weapons designed to display two of my trainees utter cluelessness.
It’s getting to the point where just on the edge of hearing I can hear somebody else snigger. This is _very_ bad.
Shut up Sol, don’t ask a question you know they can’t answer, and give a straight answser to their questions rather than publically humiliating them by laying bare what a truly inane query it was by trying to drag the exceptionally obvious answer out of them.
Told you it was ingraned and I am particularly prone to autopilot when doped up to the eyeballs on paracetamol.
Well, that was a long whinge. Sorry. Have a cough drop.
I’m quite keen to find out what your instructors do too.
February 22, 2007 at 7:51 am
Actually it’s because I keep asking the person who just says the first thing that comes into his head (What colour is an orange? a bus) that I’m particularly hating myself. It’s just cruel. Except I think in his universe he thinks that is the right answer and I’m just utterly fascinated.
February 22, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Thanks for the coughdrop.
September 30, 2007 at 5:22 pm
which is the best tool then ?
September 30, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Define “best”! Best for what? It also depends on what you mean by “tool”, too, I guess.
If you read all the posts I put together on questions (they start here: http://aphrabehn.wordpress.com/2007/02/03/questions-i/ ) you’ll discover that there are many tools (ie kinds of questions) and which ones are “best” depend on the circumstances. Just like life really.
The best tool? Your own brain.
Thanks for dropping by.
Aphra.