PGCE PROCESS WORK MODULE 1 UNIT 3 TASK 6 B ‘FLOW’
FLOW
'The idea of flow seems to harmonise well with teachers' visions of ideal classroom practice' (Kristjansson, 2012: 98).
Cziksentmihalyi defines flow as:
“a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” (Cskikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.4 cited in Pursuit of happiness.org )
I remember a case when I was at school where a particularly young, enthusiastic teacher was so charismatic in his delivery that half the girls in the class developed a crush on the teacher. They were fully engrossed in the lessons, but for the wrong reasons!
“Flow” however, is not just about getting carried away with a pleasurable experience. Cziksentmihalyi identifies a number of different elements involved in the process:
• There are clear goals every step of the way.
• There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.
• There is a balance between challenges and skills.
• Action and awareness are merged.
• Distractions are excluded from consciousness.
• There is no worry of failure.
• Self-consciousness disappears.
• The sense of time becomes distorted.
• The activity becomes an end in itself. (Desan et al, online)
Looking at the above criteria, there are a lot of things that need to synergise in order to create ‘flow’. Is it realistic to expect all of these elements to occur in a lesson?
Schweinle and Bjornestad (2009, online) state that:
“Teachers encourage flow and intrinsic motivation by creating an environment that fosters enjoyable learning experiences. Ideally, to encourage optimal experiences, teachers must provide optimal challenge and support for competence (or skill).”
I think that all teachers, except those who are being forced to teach subject matter that they disagree with, would want their students to be motivated to learn and show some degree of interest in the lesson they are giving. I would also say that they would hope to challenge them in order for their students to progress. Whether you can, or should ever have an expectation of trying to make ‘flow’ a feature of your classroom is, I feel, open to debate.
I believe it poses many questions:
How would the teacher attempt to do this?
Would the teacher explain this aim and the theory of ‘flow’ to the class or would it be a private goal for the teacher alone?
Whose perspective are we considering- the pupil’s, the teacher’s, both, or the class as a unit?
How would the teacher actually know that the aim was being achieved?
Cziksentmihalyi did devise a method for trying to measure ‘flow’ called the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) (Schweinle and Bjornestad, 2009). It involved interrupting people during various stages of an activity and asking them questions about how they felt at specific times. I would argue that, if people are truly engrossed in the activity, they are probably oblivious to how they are feeling at the time; consequently, I believe that any answers given would not be an accurate measure of the state of ‘flow’ they had achieved prior to that ‘flow’ being interrupted.
Looking at the above criteria for the creation of ‘flow’, I think that, if a teacher were to try to make ‘flow’ a feature of the classroom then, if this were not achieved, it could result in the teacher, or the pupils who do not reach this state, feeling a sense of failure. It may be possible for an individual to experience flow during a lesson, but it is unrealistic to expect the entire class to have the same response.
According to Cziksentmihalyi, for ‘flow’ to occur there needs to be a balance between the degree of difficulty present in a task and the skill level needed to overcome it- in other words there should be sufficient scope to challenge but not to make that challenge seem unsurmountable. I agree that teaching constantly challenges the students but the degree with which it challenges can’t be predetermined. Even in a class that is equally matched in ability and has a shared love of a subject, such as those in a ballet class at a vocational ballet school for example, there will be different strengths and weaknesses and the students will all have individual responses to the same lesson. In a class of mixed abilities, with multicultural beliefs, to aim for anyone in the class to experience ‘flow’ is, in my opinion, placing too great a challenge on the teacher.
My aim for my ideal classroom would be for my pupils to find something, at some point during the lesson, that was interesting to them and that might inspire them to want to learn more about it. I would hope that, during a lesson, a pupil might experience some of the elements listed as criteria for ‘flow’, but I would not expect them to experience them all. If that did occur, and a person did achieve ‘flow’ during one of my lessons then that would not be because I had deliberately set out to promote it as an aim within the class.
Bibliography
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2010) Flow [video online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/embed/JjliwSJGDiU (accessed 24th October 2016).
Desan, P. , Goldfinch, S. , Park, D. and Tomasulo D. The Pursuit of Happiness, Mihaly Csiksgentmihalyi, (online). Available at: http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi/\
Kristjansson, K. (2012) Positive Psychology and Positive education: Old Wine in New Bottles? Educational Psychologist 47(2): 86-105.
Schweinle, A. and Bjornestad, A. (updated 2009) Flow Theory, (online). Available at: http://www.education.com/reference/article/flow-theory/
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