Personalization and Flow (Revisiting the Beginning)
Personalization and Flow
Traversing is coming up on its one year anniversary and in honor of that event, I am going to be reposting some of the first issues, as we have a lot of new readers who were not with us in the beginning. These first posts outline the foundation of the blog and the educational philosophies that guide my work and the work of City of Bridges High School.
This week I will continue with my plan to spend the first weeks of publication building off of the six components of Progressive Education outlined by Tom Little and Katherine Ellison, in their book Loving Learning: How Progressive Education can Save America’s Schools. Here is the list again with the focus of this week in bold:
1. Attention to children’s emotions as well as their intellects.
2. Reliance on student’s interests to guide their learning.
3. Curtailment or outright bans on testing, grading and ranking.
4. Involvement of students in real world endeavors.
5. The study of topics in an integrated way, from a variety of different disciplines
6. Support for children to develop a sense of social justice and become active participants in American Democracy.
If you are new to Traversing and want to read my initial thoughts on why this list matters to me you can find the first issue here. If you want to hear about Martin Buber and Attention to Children’s Emotions, you can check out last week’s issue, here.
Plenty of the knowing, understanding and doing (KUD) that we experience in school, Kindergarten through Ph.D. we will use throughout our lives. There is also plenty that we don’t use beyond the test or other assessment that we are given to prove that we have learned something. (I’ll write about assessment in another issue) There is a core set of KUD that is essential regardless of the path that someone chooses to follow. If you are able to read well, write well, manipulate numbers, critically think, problem solve and collaborate with others, you have the foundational elements that are necessary for any direction that you choose to follow. Beyond that we are all different individuals with unique interests, talents and aspirations.
The purpose of this week’s newsletter is not to dispute the value of a foundation of knowledge, but instead to share some thoughts about building learning experiences focused on student interests as a vehicle for enhancing learning opportunities. In order to do so, I want to share a frame work that I found to be very revealing when I was first made aware of it nearly 20 years ago.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a psychologist and is currently a faculty member at Claremont Graduate University and is generally most well-known for writing a book entitled Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Although rather dense, the book is absolutely worth a read in its entirety. That being said, much like I and Thou, that I discussed last week, sometimes a dense book has a specific idea which can captivate you and reframe the way that you look at the world. In the case of Flow it is a single chart, which I have recreated below:
There are a couple of key places on this chart that help me to understand learning experiences for people.
1. If your ability to Know, Understand and Do (KUD) exceeds the challenge of any given learning experience the typical response is boredom and apathy and unsurprisingly learning does not take place.
2. If your ability to Know, Understand and Do (KUD) is exceeded by the challenge of any given learning experience, the typical response is anxiety and frustration and again, unsurprisingly, learning does not take place.
3. If your ability to Know, Understand and Do (KUD) is in alignment with the challenge of any given learning experience then a possible response is entering into a flow state, where not only does learning take place, but as the challenge and the KUD can grow together it can be a state of ongoing learning and engagement.
This idea can further be connected to something that is taught and discussed in teacher training programs, schools and learning organizations, namely Lev Vygotsky’s idea of the Zone of Proximal Development, which is again best illustrated with a diagram:
I can appreciate parallel structures so:
1. In the center are learning tasks that the learner can already possesses the KUD to accomplish. These activities can reinforce learning, but can also lead to boredom and apathy.
2. The outside circle represents learning tasks that the learner does not yet possess the KUD to accomplish. This is where frustration and anxiety lives.
3. The middle circle represents learning tasks where the learner nearly has the KUD that they need and with guidance and support they can accomplish the task, therefore building their KUD along the way. This space is analogous to the proper alignment of Skills and Challenge in the Flow diagram.
Ok, so we have talked about ways to frame the idea that different people learn in different ways and at different rates, but as you may recall the initial statement that was the focus of this issue is, Reliance on student’s interests to guide their learning, and again we can turn to our inspiration for this issue, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” he describes the flow state as follows:
Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them.
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.
The essential line in this description is “Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen”. It is here that the connection can be made to students interests. Finding yourself in a that optimal experience for things that don’t interest you or have purpose or meaning is a real challenge. The curiosities and passions that people have are motivators to learn, they give purpose to build new KUD so that the Challenge and the Skills can line up.
Hopefully the feeling of finding the balance of challenge and skills because you want to learn new knowledge and skills is something that that all of you experience on a regular basis. I am currently building a cob bread and pizza over in my back yard and I am at that balance. I am also learning to play thumb-lead banjo and although the challenge is higher and my skill is lower, I am still making progress because it is in that Zone of Proximal Development.
I recognize that my issues are long and I told myself this week that I was going to cut down…..but that may be a work in progress. I do want to end briefly with some practical applications.
1. Personal Learning Plans: Providing students with the opportunity to develop projects, explorations and learning experiences based on their interests with guidance and support from mentors and educators supports ensuring that following interests also builds KUD.
2. Delivery Agnostic Learning: The assumption that spending time in a seat is the only way to learn or prove that learning takes places is outdated and has been demonstrated to be false by research and common sense. If learning becomes an activity that can take many forms and happen in many places it allows for student interests to flourish and for meaningful learning to take place.
3. Project and Problem Based Learning: We will explore this topic at length in issues to come. Project and Problem Based Learning, when done well, is constructed around a problem or a project that the student is interested in and has a tangible impact in the world.
People, Places and Things
In this section of the newsletter I share people, places and things that have inspired and taught me valuable lessons about rethinking learning.
This week instead of talking about a school, I wanted to share an organization whose work and philosophy have had a significant impact on my teaching and learning over the past decades. I do want to say that I am not attempting to pitch or sell their materials or workshops, just that I have been using the methods and resources that they have developed for a long time.
The Center for Responsive Schools, began as the Greenfield Center School and the Northeast Foundation for Children in 1981. The school and foundation developed a philosophy and a set of practices in collaboration with some of the other school reform organizations in New England, including the Coalition of Essential Schools, which I’ll talk more about in another issue. The school developed a set of practices and in the early 2000s the Northeast Foundation for Children became its own organization and was eventually renamed the Center for Responsive Schools.
The most well-known set of practices developed during this time is The Responsive Classroom. Please take a few moments to look at their Core Beliefs, Guiding Principles and Practices, you will likely find that there is some alignment between their beliefs and the elements of progressive schools that are the foundation of the first issues of this newsletter. I personally use many of their practices every day at City of Bridges High School and in my university teaching.