Flow

One of the blogs I follow is entitled “Flow” by Wendy James. I’m not sure when she created the blog but the name intrigues me as I had read about the concept in a book by Daniel Pink called “Drive”. According to Wikipedia, “Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields."

"According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.”

This graphic illustrates that flow occurs when the challenge of a task and skill level are both high. In his book, Pink describes a phenomena called “Goldilocks tasks”, where the task at hand is just challenging enough to test the skills of the learner, not too hard and not too easy. Flow can occur when teachers and students face tasks that are appropriate for their skill (and interest) level.

This relates well to the SPSD objectives of student engagement, in particular, competency. Briefly, the components of student engagement are:

1. Competency- students need to feel like they can master the material

2. Potency- students need to have power in their learning

3. Belonging- students need to belong to a group with some common beliefs or goals

4. Relevance- students need to think the subject matter has something to do with them

There is also a video game invented by Jenova Chen which utilizes Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Goldilocks tasks and flow called Flow. “Flow is part of Chen's thesis research at the University of Southern California's Interactive Media Division and includes an embedded design of dynamic game difficulty balancing which allows players with different skill levels to intuitively customize their experiences and enjoy the game at their own desired pace.” (Wikipedia)

In terms of change management, people within an organization will be capable of change depending on the skills they have and the challenge the change poses to them. Change leaders need to help set the stage for change and enable stakeholders to be a part of the change at their level. This does not mean that everyone will be comfortable with the change. In every school I have been in, some teachers say that they are afraid of computers and technology. One of the challenges that change leaders face is to help staff find the “Goldilocks level” for them, so that they can be part of the “flow”.

Perhaps most importantly, staff will need to own the change (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement), yet will need on-going professional development and guidance over a long term. What a nice thought, 21st century schools, with flow!

Intrinsic Motivation: the only way to go for schools

Have you ever said to your students, “Missing this assignment will affect your report card!”? Have you ever given out pizza coupons for reading books? Pencils for returning an important newsletter? How do you feel about honour roll for students above an 80% average? Have you ever bribed kids with marks to read or do homework? Pay children to complete tasks? Pay children for marks on a report card?


How effective are these methods? Do you do persist in using rewards even though you don’t believe they work? What is the alternative?


Daniel Pink talks about intrinsic motivation in his book “Drive”. He makes a strong case that extrinsic motivation does not work. He cites a study that only 50% of the U.S. work force is engaged at work. The rest are unengaged and unmotivated. In a study in Sweden, blood donors were paid to give blood. The number of donors actually went down. Pizza coupons given out for reading in elementary school has little or a negative effect. Offering increased pay for increased engagement and productivity is not effective.


He argues that extrinsic motivation can:

1. extinguish intrinsic motivation


2. decrease performance


3. foster short term thinking


4. crush creativity


5. encourage cheating


6. become addictive

Intrinsic motivation increases engagement, performance, creativity, satisfaction, long term thinking and, one might argue, becomes addictive. He describes heuristic activities as enjoyable in the process of the “doing”, with no set path towards success, no one right way to the end product. It is often in these activities that “flow” can be achieved. The motivation for the task lays in the task itself, not the product and certainly not the reward.

The opposite of heuristic are algorithmic tasks, where there is one set, correct path to one correct outcome. I think some people can be fully engaged and intrinsically motivated in algorithmic tasks, depending on their personality and learning style.

People want to be intrinsically motivated as suggested by the things like the rising demand for “vocation vacations”, where tourists travel to volunteer in another country. He talks a lot about companies like Google and 3M who give their employees 20% of work time (Fedex. Days) to create projects of their own. In fact, Google employees created products such as google translate, orkut, talk and sky during their Fedex. time. His main argument is that intrinsic motivation emerges when people have autonomy over their:

1. Task- having some choice as to what they work on

2. Time- having some choice as to when they do the work

3. Technique- having some choice as to how they choose to complete the task

4. Team- having some choice as to who they work with on the task

He includes a chapter on education. He makes several recommendations for teachers and parents. They are:

1. Change from assigning “home work” to “home learning”. Tasks to be completed at home should increase intrinsic motivation by being interesting and involve real thinking, creating and problem solving.

2. Consider having Fed. Ex. time in your classroom for the students to create and learn about something of their own choosing. They will still need to be held accountable for their time and a framework will need to be provided for them to succeed in this new way of learning.

3. Teachers need to become facilitators of learning and assessment for learning. Students should be given the responsibility for assessing their own work. Consider “Do It Yourself” (DIY) Report Cards.

4. Do not give out rewards for tasks. One might argue that marks in school are irrelevant. (Joe Bower)

5. Praise effort and hard work, not intelligence.

6. Make sure the curriculum is relevant to them in some way, often this is accomplished through giving some choices as to what to learn, how to learn it and how to communicate that learning (Kohn).

7. Make kids teachers. Let them make decisions, develop rubrics, teach one another, collaborate, assess.

I would recommend this book for anyone in business or education. What does this mean for your classroom and school?