Chaos And Order In Teaching

© Richard Bolstad

Teaching is Chaos (As Teachers Know!)

This is an article about creating order in teaching. There are many theories about teaching. And new teachers often hope that if they find the right theory, it will all suddenly make sense. This is comparable to the hope that weather forecasters had earlier this century. They thought that if they had good enough satellites and monitors, they could one day predict the weather perfectly. The work of Edward Lorenz, in 1961 (Gleick, 1987, p 11 to 31) finally proved that this dream would never be fulfilled. The weather is so complex, that to monitor it well enough would require us to monitor every square inch of air every second of the day, not to mention knowing what every person on the planet was about to do! Just measuring it could change the whole pattern. Weather forecasters are up the creek without a paddle! The weather, it turns out, is a “chaotic” system. That doesn’t mean it’s got no order; it just means that the order is so complex its result cannot, in the real world, be predicted. And teaching is exactly the same. This article is about how to take advantage of that.

The new science of Chaos can be very simply understood if we use the example of a snowflake. Every snowflake is unique. Every single one. The process of making a snowflake, then, is not “ordered” in the way we normally use that word. It is Chaotic. And yet, there are similarities between snowflakes. Let me show you a simple way to make one of the millions of possible snowflake patterns (Gleick, 1987, p 99). You take a simple triangle (A below). Then, you add other simple triangles to the middle of each edge of the first one (B). Then you do that again, adding other triangles to the middle of the edge of those ones (C). Then you simply keep doing it again (D). By this time, your picture looks recognisably like those snowflake diagrams you’ve seen in books.

The real snowflake does this itself. As a liquid crystallises, it forms growing tips (like the points of a triangle). The boundaries of these tips become weakened by the process and send tips off them (the next set of triangle points). This happens again and again, so that the result doesn’t even look like a simple “orderly” set of growing tips. It looks chaotic. If you magnify one of these natural shapes, you find that small areas of it look similar to larger areas (in our example case, triangles with triangles on the sides). This kind of shape which is similar at different magnifications is called fractal, and it looks more “natural” somehow. Why? Because nature has very few orderly geometric shapes, and lots of fractals. Think of trees, fern leaves, or even the little blood capillaries in your body. They are all fractals. A small part of a fern leaf has the same shape as the whole fern leaf.

All snowflakes are different, but all of them have some similarities. For example, all of them have a “six-sided-ness” about them. Six-sided-ness is what is called an attractor for snowflakes. The shapes vary, but they never vary beyond the basic attractor. In the same way, every oak tree is unique, but if you learn what the attractor is like (the “essence” of an oak tree) you can recognise that they are all oaks. Another example is that, in terms of the earth’s climate, there are two known attractors. One is what we have now; a balance that supports life, even when we pour greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere for a century. The other is where the seas freeze, and the land is covered in ice. That too would be a stable attractor. Scientists do not know why the current climatic attractor is holding out; the other state, called the White Earth Equilibrium, is mathematically just as likely (Gleick, 1987, p 170).

The notion of attractors explains why all snowflakes are similar. So what makes a snowflake unique? The answer is in very minute differences in the air conditions at the time the snowflake begins to form. The same is true for the oak tree, and for all other natural, chaotic forms. The sensitivity is so dramatic, that Chaos theorists like to use the analogy that if a butterfly shifted in the air in Beijing, it might alter storm patterns in New York weather next month (called “the butterfly effect”; see Gleick, 1987, p8). Finally, if conditions change too much, the snowflake can break away from its attractor and be “caught” by another attractor. It can become a raindrop.

Letting Go Of Order In Teaching

As a trainer of teachers, and a writer of articles about teaching, the fact that teaching is a chaotic system is both a challenge and a blessing. It is a blessing because it makes teaching an adventure that is constantly new and interesting. It is a challenge because teachers often seek grand unified theories to reassure them that if they act in a certain way, they will get a certain result. And in a chaotic system the only result that is predictable is unpredictability.

The old idea of “order” in teaching included a belief that there will be one “correct” way to teach. In studying the application of chaos theory to business, John Legge (1990, p33-45) points out that salespeople often want to know what is the “correct” sales pitch for a particular market. In reality, the most successful sales pitch for a market often appeals to only 20% of customers (but 20% is better than 19%). This is because the market, like a seminar group or a school class, is a chaotic system. It is not tidily organised into a triangle with three key points to learn. It is more like a unique, complex snowflake. The point for salespeople is that if you are wanting to enter that market, copying the most successful current salesperson may be wasting your energy. It may be easier to find another sizeable group of customers (say 16%) who respond to a totally different pitch. By accepting that the market is more complex; that there is no “one right way”, you open up more possibilities for success. In this article, our aim is to do the same with teaching.

First Moves

Legge uses another analogy (1990, p 110-111). He says that interacting in an old style “ordered” system would be like playing a game of poker. Poker is a game of power. You can have a “weak” hand, a “strong” hand, or even an “invincible” hand. In any case, you win in one powerful move, by keeping your position secret, and pushing the other person until they cannot afford to respond. This is the way that many of the teachers you had at school tried to play teaching. By contrast, interacting in a chaotic system is like playing the Japanese game of Go. In Go, each player places a stone at a time on a board. By encircling areas of the board with stones, each player can co-opt the other’s areas. No one stone placement can “overwhelm” the other player, and in fact, the game usually ends at an arbitrary time, when players agree to stop and check who has the most of the board encircled by their stones. Each play is open and obvious. Successful play involves precise (though apparently random) early placements of stones, which shape the entire game in almost mysterious ways. Both Go and poker are competitive games, at least to some extent. But something of Legge’s analogy applies to the chaotic world of teaching. Success in teaching involves great skill at initial moves; skill at creating the butterfly effect.

The ultimate successes of teaching are carefully built on very small steps. In teaching an NLP Practitioner course, for example, we have people very early on perform a small and apparently simple visualisation exercise. An example might be asking them to think of a lemon, see the shiny yellow skin, and see the juice squirting in a fine spray into the air as they cut a thick slice off it. Smelling the sharp scent, we have them pick up the slightly wet slice and place it in their mouth just on top of their tongue. As they bite… we have them notice that their mouth is now actually salivating (in the real world). And yet there is no lemon,. We have triggered a hormonal response simply by imagination.

This tiny exercise begins a butterfly effect. Step by step we build on it until the participants are breaking solid pine boards with their hand, producing arm catalepsy and other hypnotic effects, and actually changing major life issues using NLP processes. We do not allow people to start the Practitioner course on day two, though. We have found from experience that the later “storm” of transformation depends on the “butterfly” of the first visualisations. The participants do not usually believe this. They assume that the later processes worked because they are intrinsically powerful. In fact, the later processes have power because they seem expected based on the initial ones. Successfully delivering the lemon visualisation is more central to the art of our teaching than actually teaching fancy anchoring or submodality processes.

The design of our courses is based on each step seeming plausible based on what people inevitably got from the last step. This means that the steps must be small enough so that success is almost guaranteed. We pay a great deal of attention to someone who cannot yet do the lemon visualisation. We risk nothing by doing this. After all, we hardly lose face if they “fail” such an obviously unimportant test; there’s no problem in discussing it openly. But we do so knowing that many other “moves” in the game ride on their success with this small step.

Demonstrations: The Set-up

In the same way, as we teach each step, we have a design which supports success and belief. To use Chaos theory, our training design is fractal. The design at each level utilises Bernice McCarthy’s 4MAT system described by us elsewhere (Bolstad, 1997). The 4MAT suggests that effective teaching moves through a cycle of four stages represented by different learner questions: Why?, What?, How?, and What if? McCarthy says that it’s useful first to answer the question “Why are we learning this?” Many students will not be able to engage with the learning process until they feel they have a reason, or a motive for learning. Once this question is answered, the next step is to give the information about the topic; answering questions about “What?”. Only then, when the core information has been imparted, can participants usefully move on to experiment with the subject, observing a demonstration and doing an exercise. Such interaction answers the question “How [do we use this]?” Once they have a practical experience, then participants can successfully explore questions which consider “What would happen if?” –for example “What would happen if this didn’t go the way we expected?”, “What would happen if I use this in a different setting?”

I frequently answer the “Why?” question with a metaphor (like the snowflake story above). This may include telling the story of my previous successful use of the process I am teaching. I then explain the process, answering the “What” question. At this stage, some participants will expect (at least unconsciously) that the process is generally useful but may not work for them. Sending them into a practical exercise at this point is not the most successful move. Instead, I use a demonstration, by the trainer, in front of the group.

The demonstration of the process becomes the prototype of the exercise as done by the participants. To restate this; the way the demonstration goes shapes the way all the other exercises go. It is itself a fractal of the exercises. Or, mixing our chaotic analogies turbulently; the metaphor I tell at the “Why?” stage is the butterfly flapping its wings, the explanation of the process at the “What?” stage is the swirl building in the air, the demonstration is the wind current, and the whole group exercise is the resulting storm.

The Fractal Nature of Exercises

After the exercise, the group discusses the “What if?” issues which extend their understanding of the process being taught. These final learnings are the beginning points (the “Why?”) of other potential exercises. In this way, every exercise has several goals. It has the overt goal of learning the process being taught, and less obvious goals for pre-learning other content and creating group-based results. For example, in our NLP Practitioner course, we teach the NLP concept of sensory acuity (noticing minute changes in a person). At the “Why?” stage I may tell a story about the incredible advantage of having Milton Erickson’s sensory acuity. In the “What?” stage I may explain the different types of sensory acuity (say visual, auditory and kinesthetic), the process of calibrating, and the specific cues we attend to. At the “How?” stage, I may then demonstrate and do as exercises a collection of sensory acuity-based processes. Finally, in the “What if?” stage we discuss what people learned and what questions they have. The issues that come up generate possibilities for the next learnings. They may include:

• Why are some people are better at visual acuity, some at auditory acuity, some at kinesthetic? (leads into learning about sensory systems)
• What do you do when you find that the person you watch has a way of behaving that is very different to your own? (leads into rapport skills)

Other learnings which will be shared at this time arise from the fact that in doing the sensory acuity exercises, participants actually meet each other more fully. This is also an intended extension of the overt goal.

Understandably, then, a teacher will think carefully about the many “covert” (in the sense of fractal, rather than in the sense of purposefully hidden) goals for each exercise. Exercises are not separate chunks. They build into a vast system.

Stabilising the Group Attractor

So far, I have talked about designing small shifts which generate massive changes (butterfly effects). The other side of working in a chaotic system, though, is that other small shifts are constantly occurring. A group participant may come with strongly held beliefs which oppose the trainer’s model. Others may then start to consider this other belief system as just as plausible. Or a participant may have a traumatic memory accidentally evoked in the middle of a process, and others may begin to get frightened about this possibility. The change, again, builds up from such small beginnings that the group members will be convinced that “this is the way it had to be”. Such small changes are bound to occur. How do we stop them having disastrous effects?

The answer lies in understanding the notion of attractors. Attractors, remember, are the “limits” that a system keeps itself within. A clock pendulum, when swinging, can be in several different states, but they always fit within a set of points. Even if the pendulum is bumped, it tends to settle back into that tidy set of points. This set of points is a periodic attractor. Your heartbeat, on the other hand, does not swing so regularly at all. And yet it stays within certain limits. Being chaotic, it’s attractor has more apparent randomness; it is called a “strange attractor”.  Actually, if someone’s heart does become unchaotic and periodically “ordered” they are in danger! “What appears to be chaotic behaviour within the heart or brain is characteristic of health, whereas simple, regular heartbeats, for example, presage a heart attack.” (Peat, 1991, p. 105).

Ernest Rossi (1996, p 68-69) suggests that mental life too is intrinsically chaotic, and the conscious mind is a “bubble” of order in the chaotic dynamic of the unconscious. The conscious mind’s job is to give you the illusion of order in the midst of what must remain basically an incomprehensible turbulence. The unconscious mind does not have order (check out your dreams if you don’t believe me yet), but it does follow a strange attractor (sanity). Overcontrol by the conscious mind can disrupt this attractor, just as overcontrol by an electrical pulse can disrupt the heart’s attractor, and overcontrol by human culture can disrupt the attractor of the Earth’s weather.

Creating Group Attractors

I believe the most useful strange attractor for a group is what we call, in NLP, Rapport. What sanity is for the individual, rapport is for a group. When rapport has been successfully established in a group, the chaotic deviations from the expected pattern are “balanced out” by peoples’ trust in and caring for the trainer and the group. As the cliché goes, people don’t care how much you know unless they know how much you care. Like all results in chaotic systems, the creation of rapport begins with certain tiny events in the first moments of the training. This is more fully discussed in a previous article “The First Hour” (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998), where we describe setting the attractor of rapport as a process of group “warmup”. Warming up to the group process answers two questions that participants have when they come to your class. “Who is here?” is answered by processes which enable students to introduce themselves to each other. “How will we act?” is answered by the explicit negotiation of a set of guidelines for behaviour in the group. The Win-Win approach to conflict resolution provides the skills to maintain this attractor (see Transforming Communication, by Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998).

In terms of the content of the training, presuppositions are examples of linguistic “attractors”. When I say “Is breathing in time with someone a more powerful way of achieving rapport, or is adjusting voice tonality and body position?”, the presuppositions in the sentence include the notion that “matching breathing, voice tonality and body position are powerful ways to create rapport.” This presupposition acts as an attractor for our subsequent conversation. The creation of such linguistic attractors is more fully discussed in my previous article on Preframing in Teaching (Bolstad, 1996). When you are teaching, it can be useful to go through each of the key concepts or skills you want to teach and ask yourself, “What presuppositions are needed to support someone using that information or those skills?”. You can then design a statement that simply presents this preframe, or a statement which itself presupposes the desired preframe. Another way to preframe is to present an experience which gets the person to access the set of internal representations that create the preframe. The metaphor of the snowflake preframes this article in that fashion.

Summary: Teaching In A Chaotic World

There are an infinite number of ways to summarise what this article has been about. Here is one possible fractal design for this article:

According to this design, I began by considering the nature of “chaotic systems” using the examples of the weather and the formation of a snowflake (the one being a fractal of the other, of course). I identified that chaotic systems are fractal (parts have similar structure to the whole), are held within certain limits by strange attractors, and are sensitive to the butterfly effect. I then applied these notions in teaching.

I said that my design of a course utilises the butterfly effect by taking great care of the beginnings of learning processes. My teaching sessions often begin with metaphors (answering the “Why?” question) which expand into explanations (“What?”), which expand into demonstrations, which expand into exercises (“How?”). Demonstrations are potentially vulnerable to butterfly effects, and yet are also able to form powerful positive butterfly effects of their own. I noted that course design can be thought of as fractal, so that each section contains (within its “What if?” stage) the seed of the next sections. While no “right way” of teaching can ensure predictability, a teacher can set the attractor within which variability occurs. Rapport is a useful group attractor. Linguistic attractors are known as presuppositions.

All of Accelerated learning can be re-written using the frame of chaos theory, just as Ernest Rossi has attempted to reframe Hypnosis with chaos theory (Rossi, 1996). This article, for example, contains several other fractal implications, which could start you thinking already about new and useful applications. One thing is for sure. There’s no conclusion to the exploration of chaos. (or is there?).

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Richard Bolstad is an NLP Trainer and author of four NLP texts, including Transforming Communication. Transforming Communication serves as the basis for a course on creating Co-operative relationships in training and teaching. He can be reached at E-mail   learn@transformations.org.nz

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• Bolstad, R. “Teaching NLP: How To Be Consciously Unconsciously Skilled” in Anchor Point, July 1997, p 3-9 and August 1997, p 3-12
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