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Motivating students by getting them into Flow
Filed Under The way I see it, motivating students, positive climate, underachieving students
There has been a lot written about how to motivate students. An entire professional development industry has sprung up around the issue. Thinking that the teacher is the key and believing that teachers are life long learners too, I sought out courses and workshops that promised me that if I just did what they suggested, all my students would be motivated to complete all their assignments to the best of their ability. I was determined to meet my students’ needs. I wanted them to experience what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the Flow, although at the time he had not coined the term. Flow according to Csikszentmihalyi is
a state of altered consciousness in which our ability to concentrate and perform is enormously enhanced. People who achieve this state also report a tremendous increase in their sense of achievement and satisfaction. (Armour, Philip, p19)
Flow occurs when students’ abilities and the demands of the task the teacher give them are in sync. This part of Flow theory reminds me of the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks, as you remember, wanted everything to be just right for her: the chair had to be not too tall or not too short, the bowl of porridge had to be not too hot or not too cold and the bed had to be not too soft or not too hard. Everything had to be just right for her.
In Goldilocks’ search for Flow, she would be looking for assignments and routines that were just right for her. They would not be too easy so that she would not be bored and not do the work or not too hard so that she would be frozen with anxiety and could not do the work. Goldilocks would be looking for what Csikszentmihalyi calls the Competency Zone, that spot that it is just right for her to enable her to become more competent and successful at completing the task at hand. The competency zone is a moving target. That is important to realize because as Goldilocks masters skills and content in one area, she will eventually going to get bored with it all and stop learning. She is going to step out of the Competency Zone. It is her teacher’s challenge once again to find the conditions that are just right for her so she can step back into that zone and continue to do her best.
Csikszentmihalyi would encourage Goldilocks’ teacher to monitor her to ensure that she does not get trapped in what he calls The Comfort Zone (Armour, p.20), a low energy spot at the low of the Competency Zone where life is easy but not much learning goes on. He would encourage Goldilocks’ teacher to structure things so that when Goldilocks has mastered the task at hand and is just starting to be too comfortable, she would be challenged to operate just slightly outside the top end of the Competency Zone in The Learning Edge (Armour, p. 21). In The Learning Edge, Goldilocks would be asked to push herself ever so slightly beyond her competencies. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that staying in the Learning Edge (Armour, p. 22) is crucial for optimum learning or Accelerated learning to take place. Here, Goldilocks would learn the most in the least amount of time. The trick of course is to get Goldilocks into that spot that is not too challenging for her or not too easy for her. The tension has to be just right.
I.’d like to share this TED video with you so you can hear Csikszentmihalyi speak about Flow.
Armour, Philip. (2006, June) The Learning Edge. Communication of the ACM
Vol. 49 No. 6 pp. 20-23.
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Elona
Clearly, you have to be a brain surgeon to work in schools these days !! It must be a nightmare for teachers and educators. This business of ‘flow’ I really get but somehow the focus has to go back onto the student and away from the teacher. To me, things are back to front in the modern world.
Too often I see teachers that ‘want the results for their students MORE then the student themselves’. That must be mad !!!
Fortunately, there are some solutions…
My business http://www.thebigpicture.eu.com does exactly what many teachers crave their students to be…. focused and interested in school.
As you know, students don’t really want education, they just want the results it gets… Grown up’s frequently don’t even want a job, they just want the results (the money) it gets them….
The Big Picture focuses NOT on school BUT life… we now have over 1200 facebook fans who sign up to our group… ‘The Big Picture Keith Warren’…. AND, it works, it’s life changing stuff.
Keith Warren´s last blog ..What motivates the motivator?