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I’ve always felt it was not up to anyone else to make me give my best.( Akeem Olajuwon)I’ve always wanted my students to have the intrinsic motivation to learn and do better at school. I want them to have curious minds. I want them to love learning. But, mostly they don’t. So I spend my days and nights (You’d think I didn’t have a life.) thinking of ways to make them want to do and be these things. For me, it’s important that they want and are not made to do and be. Don’t ask me why I want that intrinsic motivation. I’m not exactly sure. I just do. So, I spend my time thinking of ways to get my students to want to do the work I assign.
What’s the best way to get students to want to do their school work? I’ve heard it said that the teacher is the key. Well, maybe. But, I think there’s more to it. I’m intrigued by the notion of the flow experience (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi via Doug Belshaw) What is the flow experience?
The flow experience is when a person is completely involved in what he or she is doing, when the concentration is very high, when the person knows moment by moment what the next steps should be, like if you are playing tennis, you know where you want the ball to go, if you are playing a musical instrument you know what notes you want to play, every millisecond, almost. And you get feedback to what you’re doing. That is, if you’re playing music, you can hear whether what you are trying to do is coming out right or in tennis you see where the ball goes and so on. So there’s concentration, clear goals, feedback, there is the feeling that what you can do is more or less in balance with what needs to be done, that is, challenges and skills are pretty much in balance. When these characteristics are present a person wants to do whatever made him or her feel like this, it becomes almost addictive and you’re trying to repeat that feeling and that seems to explain why people are willing to do things for no good reason — there is no money, no recognition — just because this experience is so rewarding and that’s the flow experience.
That’s what I want for my students. The flow experience. Come to think of it, my students are often in the flow, but I didn’t recognize it- I thought they were just having fun. They’re in the flow when they’re playing basketball, football, skateboarding, etc. They’re also in the flow when they work on projects that allow them to use their strengths or multiple intelligences to demonstrate learning. I find that the very students who are loath to pick up a pen or pencil and put it to paper to write a test , a paragraph or an essay will gladly spend extended periods of time using pencil crayons or markers to create projects. It’s amazing to see some of these big, I mean really big guys sitting in class colouring and loving it. I’m thinking that if a student works in his multiple intelligence, he’s in the flow. So, I guess it would be useful to have the kids determine their multiple intelligences and their learning styles and then have them demonstrate their learning using these intelligences.
My classroom walls are covered with colourful graphic organizers (Beyond Monet), multi-coloured posters and collages etc. My at risk kids love doing them. Kids can’t draw? No problem. I get them to use the computer to find clip art and then to use markers or pencil crayons to outline the pictures in whatever colour they think appropriate and paste the pictures on the project. It’s amazing how good the projects turn out. I use rubrics to help the kids know what to aim for. Some kids have even written poems and rap songs to demonstrate their learning. I want to freak out the kids by having them use Bubbleshare to demonstrate their learning. I haven’t learned how to use Bubbleshare yet, but we’ll learn together. I like to do the unexpected in my classroom so that there lot’s of laughter. When kids laugh, they relax and are more open to learning.
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[...] Are you a teacher? Elona is doing good things by motivating her students to go with the flow experience. [...]
Thank you for making this post. I teach at an alternative school and I can identify with everything you have articulated here, especially the part about how you spend your days and nights “thinking of ways to make them want to do and be” a self-motivated learner. This is also my life. Sometimes it is overwhelming knowing the repercussions my students face in their lives if they “don’t get it now.” I love your idea of the flow experience because to get to a positive future, they must be present and awake in this moment.