Motivating students by getting them into Flow

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.

Parental Participation in Schooling

The following guest post was written by Christine Howell who frequently writes about Online Education Degrees and college related topics for Online College Guru, an online college directory and comparison website.

Parental participation in their child’s schooling can dramatically improve student performance and reinforce the positive relationship bonds between a parent and their child. Doing homework together is probably the single most effective technique for improving a student’s performance, but it can be difficult. It is very easy to ask your child if they have done their homework. It is much harder to plan frequent time to do homework together with them, but that is in fact the best way to obtain good results.

Be the Rabbit for your Runner

Runners and other athletes often employ others to accompany them in training and competition because this accompaniment acts as a motivational device. When one is a student, it can be very difficult to maintain a high level of academic motivation. Life is quite complicated and young people are often so busy learning about themselves and other people in their world that there is little space left for interest in academic subjects. Lacking the benefit of years of experience, they may easily consider many of their school subjects boring and irrelevant to their own active lives.

A parent who participates frequently in doing homework with their child essentially adds enthusiasm to an otherwise bleak situation, and this rabbit effect slowly increases a student’s own enthusiasm. Instead of confronting homework alone and disinterested, a student with a participating parent finds homework slightly less boring, or re-phrased, slightly more interesting. This slight increase can have enormous effects, perhaps not immediately, but certainly over the long run.

Be a Friend, not a Supervisor

Most parents are familiar with the duality of being both a supervisor and a friend to their child. In some cases being a supervisor is obviously required, but in academic matters, aside from insisting upon certain basic behavior, being a supervisor is generally of little use in improving the academic performance of a child. A child already has many supervisors in their life, but they have very few close friends who will share the annoying task of understanding school subjects and doing homework with them. A parent who enters the homework-doing assignment as a friend who will share both the drudgery and the occasional interest is a valuable friend indeed.

Interest is Infectious

Showing intellectual interest in the specific subjects at hand can be one of the most effective devices when encouraging a student. Interest is highly infectious, and when a parent is willing to discuss an academic subject as an equal with their child, not teaching, but learning together with them, the transfer of interest is fairly easy. Most parents will also be surprised to find out how interesting their child’s homework can actually be. Re-visiting lessons learned only partially in one’s own youth is easily as interesting as doing the crossword puzzle in the Sunday paper. Lessons learned and subjects studied together with another person are more likely to stimulate intellectual curiosity in a child and the experience also has the added benefit of reinforcing the friendship between the study-mates.

No evidence that boys and girls brains are that different.

I’ve decided to take a different approach to writing my blog entries mainly for practical reasons. I’ve been writing my blog for more than three years now and really enjoy it, especially sharing ideas with readers. I learn so much. But, since I started working on my MEd, I just don’t have as much time to devote to my blog but I still want to continue it so I’m scaling way way back- not quite to the point of the 140 characters of Twitter. (I’ve almost given up on Twitter) You get the idea. When I get more time, I’ll go back to writing more in depth articles.

Here’s my first attempt at being brief.

There’s been lots of discussion about boys’ learning styles and girls’ learning styles and how they differ and now there’s some controversy. Dr. Spence in his 2008 book, The Joys of Teaching Boys , makes the case that boys learn differently from girls and have suffered under a “unisex model for child rearing and teaching.” He notes boys’ disengagement at school not only leads to poor grades and unproductive lives, but also can lead to the kind of violence Toronto schools have struggled to control in recent years. For these reasons, the Toronto School Board is going to fund an all boy elementary school, a first for the Board. There are of course lots of privately funded all boy schools, but this will be the first one in a public school system in the province of Ontario.

Lise Eliot doesn’t agree with the idea the girls and boys have different brains just because of their sex. She’s a neurobiologist who conducted a meta-analysis of the literature trying to chart how the brains of boys and girls differ. To her surprise she found that there’s little evidence to support this. She found that kids brains are shaped by how kids spend their time playing. She expands on this in her recent book Pink Brain, Blue
Brain.

I haven’t had a chance to read either book yet, but I’ve noticed that boys and girls act differently in the classroom. I always thought it was because of socialization. (On the nature vs nurture debate, I tend to side with nurture to explain this difference). Just look at the toy aisles and you’ll see what I mean. Of course I’m making a sweeping generalization here. Still….

What does your experience lead you to believe?

References
News articles
Why boys need Barbies and girls need footballs
Anne McIIroy

Toronto Board pushes for boy-friendly schools Josh Wingrove and Anthony Reinhart

I am going to finish strong

You know what it’s like.  Every so often in life we get too busy and wonder how we are going to manage.  My life is a bit like that right now. Everything seems to suffer a bit.  My blogging and twittering has been suffering. I can’t get everything done I think I need to do let alone want to do.  I think it’s about time again to listen to Nick’s message.  I thought I’d share it with you in case you need a bit of a boost too.

The buddy system is working well in my math class.

I love using the buddy system in my math classes because it’s such an efficient way to help kids get answers to any questions they have about the day’s lesson and makes monitoring their progress much easier. The students like the math buddy system because it enables them to meet needs in the classroom more easily.

At the beginning of the semester, I asked my students in my math classes to  pair up with another student. I call these pairs math buddies.  Sometimes three kids end up working together,  but that’s OK too.  Sometimes I “help” form the buddy groupings.  Usually it all works out. As I’m typing this,  it strikes me that the term math buddy might be a bit old fashioned.  I guess it is in a way. I first heard about math buddies  about 23 years ago. If anyone knows about a more up to date term for math buddies, I’d love to hear it.

Once the students form into buddies, I tell them that they are to work together helping each other by answering any questions they may have.   I will only answer group questions, that is questions that their buddies can’t answer. If  they have a question about anything they need to ask their math buddies first and if their math buddies don’t know the answer then it’s a group question and they can ask me.  This cuts down on lots of questions like what page  is the work on or what’s today’s date.  I do have this information on the board, but it seems that some kids prefer to have someone tell them this informationn instead of reading it. I think that’s a huge waste of my time and it drive me crazy.

The buddy system with it’s group questions helps me be more effective. It seems to cut the class size in half.  Without the buddy system I might have 22 kids in my class, 22 individual units if you will. That works out to a little over three minutes of time for  each student.  With the buddy system, I have only 11 units. That gives me twice a much time to help each pair of students and not all the pairs need help all the time.  I think it’s a wonderful way to use the resources I have available- the student themselves. Since I have more time  because the students are helping one another, I can give more in depth help to those students who need it or to those students who quietly sit there and do little.

My students like working together as buddies. There’s a nice vibe in the air while they work away on the day’s assignment. There’s joy and laughter in the class, and the work gets done. I can’t ask for more than that.  After I’ve taught the lesson, someone always asks do we get into our math buddies now.  I’ve yet to hear a groan.  It’s rewarding to look down and see my “at-risk” students working so well and enjoying school, if only for a few moments.

I like the math buddy system because it frees me up to help  those kid who might not normally get the help they need.  You know those students who sit quietly and hope you don’t notice that they aren’t working. Sometimes they don’t want to ask the teacher for help or sometimes they lack motivation.  I can go around to each team and monitor students progress and give them feedback  quite easily.  If a student it just sitting there, I’m more likely to notice and find out what the problem is.  Students can’t “disappear” so easily.

All in all, I love the math buddy system. I’d say it’s right up there with the class blog for motivating my students.  I think  the math buddy system helps  meet the needs of my students in many other ways,  not just the obvious one of helping get the work done.  The buddy system allows for completion between the buddies. Some students like that.  Other students like to help. They certainly can do that. Some students like to work in groups.  They can certainly do that.  Even those students who like to work alone don’t seem to mind working with just one student.  Given all this about the math buddy system,  what’s not to love.

Oh yes, it helps keep me sane. I’m not running around like crazy trying to meet the needs of my students and wondering if I’ve missed helping someone.