From Apathy To Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow
Are your gifted learners bored?
Feeling frustrated with their apathy?
Perhaps your students are over-excited, experiencing anxiety and worry.
Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on “flow” (in the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience) attributes these feelings to a mismatch of challenge and skill levels.
Students with a low skill-level working with a low level of challenge are destined to be apathetic.
Pump up the challenge without increasing skill and your students become worried and anxious.
Correctly matching a student’s level of skill with an appropriate challenge leads to flow – more commonly known in sports as “being in the zone.”
And if you’ve ever seen a student working “in the zone,” it is a beautiful thing. How can we get them there?
Ways To Move Students Towards Flow
- Adjust Bloom’s Taxonomy appropriately.
- Increase depth or complexity.
- Move towards authentic problems.
- Offer novel choices.
- Utilize a different model of instruction.
- Connect subject matter across the disciplines.
It’s Our Job
It’s our job to draw out the excited learner inside our gifted students. Finding the right connection of skill and challenge is one way to accomplish this.
Interesting. There are certainly other reasons for feeling a particular way. One example is that high skill, low challenge can result in anxiety and worry. I've run across that in print recently, perhaps in Karen Roger's book (Re-forming Gifted Education) and seen it in my kids and myself. This can happen as the child spends their extra time wondering why they are being given low-level work and tries to figure out how to fit in and get along with their classmates.
It *is* wonderful to feel in the zone and to see others in that state.
Interesting. There are certainly other reasons for feeling a particular way. One example is that high skill, low challenge can result in anxiety and worry. I've run across that in print recently, perhaps in Karen Roger's book (Re-forming Gifted Education) and seen it in my kids and myself. This can happen as the child spends their extra time wondering why they are being given low-level work and tries to figure out how to fit in and get along with their classmates.
It *is* wonderful to feel in the zone and to see others in that state.