Vol9no2

Vol. 9 No. 2 September 1988
Accelerating the Learning Process with Hypnotherapy
E. John Wade Educationalist

Since 1985 at Canberra's Woden TAFE College, a part-time Accelerated Learning course has taken migrant students up to a high level of English language fluency in three terms. Students in the same college in traditional classes have been taking nine terms to reach similar levels.

Accelerative Learning (AL) is an umbrella term, which incorporates many techniques designed to increase the efficiency of the educational process. A number of these have been developed recently and are being applied in Australia for the very first time. Other techniques have been known for a long time and are simply being resurrected for the modern classroom.

One principal method in the AL approach is Suggestopedia, which has recently been adapted and termed Superlearning by the USA authors Ostrander and Schroeder. It is based on the work of Bulgarian physician, psychiatrist and educator Georgi Lozanov. Over a long period he developed a teaching formula, which helped students to understand and memorise material faster than control groups. These results have now been reproduced in many places around the world, including the Woden TAFE College in Canberra.

Lozanov's method draws heavily from hypnotic relaxation techniques, from suggestive facets of hypnosis and from client self-esteem building exercises of clinical hypnotherapy. Some of the parallels between clinical hypnotherapy and AL are listed below.

I.ENVIRONMENT

When a client enters a hypnotherapist's consulting room she is aware of the professional appearance of the room. There are qualifications on the wall. The therapist is well dressed. The room is tidy and comfortably appointed. She knows exactly where to sit.

In AL the room is made as pleasant as possible. There are flowers on a table. The students are in a semi-circle with the teacher's chair at the focus. The only desk in the room is for holding teaching materials and is at the front of the class. The semi-circular configuration means that all students are an equal distance from the teacher - no student is behind or in front of another. The classroom has colourful posters and charts around the walls. They display work recently produced by the students and work, which is yet to be taught. As around two hundred items of information are learned each lesson by the class, the wall display is constantly changing. The teacher is neatly dressed and has an air of centeredness.

II.AUTHORITY

The client comes to the therapist in a state of child-like expectation. The therapist knows how to help her, she believes, and so she is open to any therapeutic suggestion. The therapist is confident that the client will be better off in some way because of the consultation. If hypnotic regression is used, the client is guided back to childhood, trusting the therapist to be her adult guardian while she relives emotional events of early years.

The student adopts a child-like presence in the classroom. She soon builds trust in the teacher who is aware that she will learn a great amount in class. The teacher will enhance this by special games and exercises that regenerate the child-like joy of learning, which the student possesses but may have not utilized since child-hood. In Suggestopedia this is called Infantilisation, and the students are enabled to experience once again the fun of relatively uninhibited learning. They know it is safe to do this because the teacher is always in control of the class.

III.RELAXATION

In order to heighten the effect of hypnotic suggestions, the therapist induces physical relaxation in the client by any one of a large range of methods. Formal relaxation may only be done in the therapy chair.

The students sit in the semi-circle of chairs at the start of the lesson. The teacher then guides them through a brief physical relaxation exercise to the sounds of pleasant soothing music. Whenever it is time for a relaxation or similar activity the students resume the semi-circular seating pattern. The chairs may be stacked against the wall unused in much of the remainder of the lesson.

IV.IMAGERY

After the physical relaxation, the therapist may use visualization to increase the depth of trance. Imagery work in this stage of the AL lesson is called Mind calming. The student is guided through a pleasant scene such as a walk in the park. The teacher specifically develops multi-sensory imagery in the Mind calming. Asking the student what she can see/hear/touch/taste/smell on her imaginary walk. This ability is essential if the student wants to develop super-memory in the Concert Session described later.

V.ESTEEM BUILDING

While the client is relaxed, the therapist gives her general esteem boosting exercises as a matter of course before her desired behavioural change is tackled through suggestion. The therapist may use metaphor to induce change.

While the student is relaxed the teacher follows up Mind calming with suggestions that the student is learning quickly, thoroughly and efficiency, and she has the potential to continually enhance her ability to do this. Negative thoughts held by a class as a whole (eg "we are learning too quickly") can be reframed and fed back in a metaphor to the class at this time.

VI.TREATMENT

When the client is very relaxed, the therapist will give her specific suggestions relating to the behaviour she wishes to change.

After the Mind calming and while still relaxed, the students are played an audiocassette of the material they are going to learn in the following lesson. When this is finished they are instructed to open their eyes and stretch and breath deeply before starting the next learning segment.

VII.ANCHORING

A therapist may use anchoring to access various resource states the client owns in order to use them to conquer the unwanted behaviour.

The AL teacher instructs the class in self-anchoring during a relaxation period. The students access a real or imagined state from their childhood where learning was easy, thrilling and fun. This is anchored and can then be used in any learning situation where stress used to arise. A simple relaxation state is also anchored for the student to use when a performance in a subject area is required (eg. an examination, or a migrant having to speak English a in an emergency).

VIII.TARGETING.

A therapist guides the client into being able to visualize what it would be like to be healed.

The AL teacher guides the student into visualization how it would feel to have learned enough of the subject (eg. for a migrant, visualization her use of English with ease and fluency in a variety of situations).

IX.MODELLING

A therapist may suggest that the client model someone who already has the skills, which the client wants to master.

The AL teacher encourages each student to model a person who already knows the subject being taught. As far as imagination will allow, the students become the experts they are modelling, wear the expert's name tag and have knowledge of the expert's biography. Thus a student in a physics class may become Benjamin Franklin, or in a physiology class, Theodore Schwann. When the lesson ends, the nametag is left with the teacher.

X.EMBODIMENT

A therapist may ask a client to focus on sensations within her body as a way triggering repressed memories associated with a significant life event.

The AL teacher devises ways in which the student can experience through her body the material, which is to be learned. Instead of clinically learning from a textbook the different methods of seed dispersal in botany, the student becomes a seed and imitates the various methods of dispersal. In AL classes there is a great deal of body movement. For this reason the room has no student desks and students may be asked to leave their bags and footwear at the door as they come in. The AL teacher uses the students' bodies to embody the material to be learned.

XI.EMOTION

A therapist mostly deals with the client's emotions and looks for a way to help her overcome unwanted emotional states.

An AL teacher teaches students to turn on and off a large range of emotions with as much ease as flicking a switch. The student is also taught how to identify different emotions generated by her own body position, gestures, or facial expressions. The teacher frequently asks "How does it feel to be what you are now?" - eg. A seed being blown by the wind, electricity flowing through a transformer, an AIDS virus invading a T-cell, etc. Attaching an emotion to the content to be learned ensures deeper understanding and longer memory retention.

XII.THE UNCONSCIOUS

It is not necessity and perhaps even a handicap for the client to try to work out her problem rationally and logically. In a deep trance state the client may choose not to bring information into the conscious and yet have the therapist work for a healing at the unconscious level.

Unconscious or subliminal learning occurs in the AL class in two ways. First is the full use of attractive wall-charts, which may never be directly referred to by the teacher. The students already know charts with relevant material by the time the lesson is held. Learning is achieved subliminally through the students' peripheral vision, as well as through the odd occasion when student's eyes drift around the room during the lesson. The second form of unconscious learning occurs when the students are asked to put all of their concentration on a physical task. While they are doing this, the teacher is simultaneously telling them the theory. The result is that they may be unaware that they have heard the theory and yet by repeating the physical task or doing a similar one, they will be able to explain the theory behind it - often to their own astonishment!

XIII.MUSIC

The AL teacher use music extensively in the lesson. Different types of music can be used for relaxation, visualisation, energy raising if the students are losing energy, fantasy exercises, and in the Concert Session. This takes place in the final ten percent of the lesson time and is a musical revision of all the content that has been taught that session.

The music used is slow classical baroque. The students simply sit with their eyes closed while the teacher reads out the material. As the students already know the meaning of the material they relax, listen to the music and the teachers' voice as though they were listening to a concert and allow any multi-sensory imagery from the lesson to float through their minds. The process is extremely potent for long-term memory acquisition and as a bonus the student comes out of the three or four hour intensive lesson feeling more alive and refreshed than when the lesson started.

The notes above are samples of the comparative work of the Hypnotherapist and the teacher. A Hypnotherapist who uses Kinesiology, Alexander, Silva, NLP, Yoga, Orff, Bioenergetics, Psychosynthesis, etc., would be able to identify many other dynamics of the Accelerated Learning class which overlap with the domain of the Hypnotherapist.

This is an exciting era we live in. Knowledge of the world around us leaps forwards in ever-increasing outward spirals. Children and other learners (does not that include all of humanity?) need to have state-of-the-art learning methodology shown to them if they are to gain sufficient information during their time spent in formal education. Current hyper-learning strategies have more to do with hypnotherapy than any other field. The classroom as it is now known is long overdue for reformation. The hypnotherapist, artisan of the mind, has much to offer the traditional learning professions.