How learning to flow helps us grow

In my happiness/Love Course class (my high school class) we were examining the research and implications of Mihalhi Csychemalyi’s research on flow, theory of optimal experience.

I was watching seniors and a smattering of juniors spend 32 minutes playing and working together to keep inflated balloons from touching the floor. First sitting on the floor, standing, then trying to keep a balloon away from me as I roamed through the classroom. The point was trying to increase the challenge and the skills needed to keep balloons soaring. At one point they were limited to only using their heads, knees, and feet.

What fun! Smiles. Laughter. Cheering. Compliments given for those peers who dislocated their hips to extend their leg to kick up a balloon (not really). Effortless action, yet concentrated, engaged. None of the teens felt a need to check smartphones. It wasn’t necessary to open a computer. All students had to do was be present in the moment. The 55 minute period seemed to fly. Flow states were reported to be experienced. Despite the fact that we were engaged in the activity for 32 minutes.

Students said the experience was fun. It was a great way to spend class time. Some students were sweating from exerting themselves, simply by keeping a balloon from touching the ground. Why did all of them choose to play? What was the purpose of this class activity? Did they get it?

Students reported a sense of collective accomplishment. They were able to successfully keep balloons in the air. They experienced intrinsic rewards—they were competing to prevent me from swatting the balloons to the ground Dikembe Mutombo style. They kept saying “sorry Mr. Banno but you’re not getting that balloon.”

They claimed they won when the timer expired. What did they win, really? No trophy. No accolades. No student of the term. What they won was invisible to the eye, yet powerful and meaningful.

I'm thinking if schooling can answer this question, then schools can move closer to a bona fide 21st century educational paradigm:

How might daily classroom experiences be transformed into flow classes? Csikszentmihalyi's theory of optimal experience reveals that if something is too challenging and we lack the appropriate skill it leads to anxiousness. If the task is too easy (not challenging) and we have more than enough skill, we become bored. The key is to find the right combination in a task that challenges and that we possess the right amount of skill to do it.

While in flow we are involved in what we do and in harmony with ourselves. It was probably easier to find flow when you were younger. If fact, you were probably in flow quite a bit. Think back to the hours spent engaged in imaginary play.

Flow states can encompass 21st century skills: effortless control, serenity, concentration, intrinsic motivation & rewards, agency, continuous metacognitive feedback, internal locus of control, grit.

This class activity led me to an existential educational question: Can schools be transformed into flow schools?

Places where young people are more actively involved in their education, themselves, and others rather than alienated from them.

Noted Harvard researcher Howard Gardner stresses that schools should strive to create flow-like learning opportunities for students. Not only would this enhance learning, but it would also strengthen one of Gardner’s intelligences, namely intra-intelligence, a good sense of one’s emotions, intellect, and intrinsic motivation.

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“It is essential to our well being and to our lives, that we play and enjoy life. Every single day, do something that makes your heart sing.”

-Marcia Wieder

We know from research that happiness is contagious.

And that play is good for everyone. Stuart Brown defines play as time spent without purpose.

Play is defined as a voluntary activity that can take us out of time or at least keep us from tracking it carefully. People play because it is fun. Play doesn’t even require us to achieve a goal.

Play is at the core of creativity and innovation.

Too often students report that schooling resembles Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. The play consists of two men, Estragon and Vladimir, who wait by a tree at dusk for someone named Godot. Godot never comes. As the two characters wait, they meet others and discuss different things including their lives.

As they continue to wait Vladimir and Estragon engage in a circular discussion about whether Godot will come and what they will do if he doesn’t show up. The play entices the audience to wait with Vladimir and Estragon for Godot.

Yale University psychologist and research Marc Brackett and colleagues investigated students’ feelings in a nationwide survey of 21,678 U.S. students in two samples. They asked students to respond to open ended questions and fill out ratings scales.

In their responses, 75% of student feelings reported were negative. The three most frequently mentioned negative feelings about school were:

•fatigue

•stress

•boredom

Negative feelings about school were similar across demographic groups. High school students did experience positive emotions but in smaller percentages. Plus, the positive emotions they experienced, were not linked to learning or achievement.

According to one study, by high school, as many as 40% to 60% of students are chronically disengaged from school. On average students across the United States are bored in school. The High School Survey of Student Engagement reported recently that 66% of high school students say they are bored every day. 82% of students reported that the material being taught wasn’t interesting or relevant to them.

Do our classrooms resemble places where students appear to be like Vladimir and Estragon? Do too many high school lessons symbolically resemble Godot-a meaningful and purposeful educational experience that never arrives?

A toxic school culture has been described as a place where “staffs are extremely fragmented, where the purpose of serving students has been lost to the goal of serving the adults, where negative values and hopelessness reign.”

A positive school culture is a place where efforts are translated into positive experiences for both staff and students. When a school has a positive culture, teachers are “excited to work because they see the bigger picture, and students are in a better position (mentally and emotionally) to learn.”

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What is flow?

Flow is a feeling of great pleasure and wellbeing that comes when one is engaged in mental and/or physical activity, hobby, etc. with great concentration and effectiveness leading to peak performance or outcome that is intrinsic in nature. During states of flow our minds are clear, free of mind wandering and negative thoughts.

One of the significant names in Positive Psychology is the researcher Mihalhi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “cheeks-sent-me-hi”). His original research focused on numerous interviews with various people as to why they engaged in tasks, activities, hobbies, etc. for hours on end without any external benefits. No one receives a trophy for playing the piano for hours alone. There is no applause from a small audience.

He wondered why people anyone would utilize their leisure time this way. Csikszentmihalyi found that people found an internal satisfaction in this state he called flow.

Csikszentmihalyi refers to flow as being autolelic, or an intrinsically rewarding experience. The reward is the activity!

Often individuals lose track of time, mental and physical discomfort as one’s brain quiets down. During this process one maintains control as you strike the right balance between being challenged, yet having the capacity/skills to perform favorably during this experience.

Flow can occur playing sports, or music, interacting with friends and family, while in conversation, writing curriculum, or playing with toys. Flow does not have to be solitary. Other people can help you to experience flow and greater joy.

Noted psychologist Chris Peterson distinguished flow from junk flow, or a way of being where we are seduced into a state of leisure but in actuality are simply vegetating. The activity were are engaged in, like binge watching television lacks the challenging element of flow. Emerging from junk flow might have engaged our attention but does not energize or satisfy us. Flow is about engagement with life rather than withdrawal from it.

A growing body of scientific evidence indicates that flow is highly correlated with happiness, both SWB (Subjective well- being) and PWB (Psychological well-being). People who experience a lot of flow in their daily lives also develop higher concentration, higher self-esteem, and greater satisfaction with their lives.

What does it feel like to be in flow?

Csiksentmihayli’s research reveals that people who are in a flow state are completely involved, focused, and concentrating. This is caused by an innate curiosity or as the result of training. People also report feeling the following:

•Sense of ecstasy

•Great inner clarity-having knowledge on how do something and how well it is going.

•You understand the activity is doable – you realize you have the adequate skills, and don’t experience either anxiousness or boredom while engaged with the whatever is causing flow.

•Sense of serenity – no worries about self (the ego is suppressed), and afterwards you feel as though you weren’t ruminating about oneself, both positively and negatively.

•Timeliness – you are focused on the present, unaware of time passing.

•Intrinsic motivated – whatever produces “flow” becomes the reward.


As Csiksentmihayli said about flow states, “Everyone said that it was like being carried by a current, spontaneous, effortless-like a flow. It feels effortless and yet it’s extremely dependent on concentration and skill. So it’s a paradoxical kind of condition…”

So the big conclusion or the wellbeing hack: One way to increase greater life satisfaction is to engage in more activities that puts you in a flow state and/or transform boring, mundane activities into challenging activities. As Csiksentmihayli described in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:

“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 be enjoyable if we 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 we make happen.”

Flow has helped me maintain a healthy work-life balance. I prioritize opportunities for flow. With my leisure time I plan opportunities that lead to flow states: tennis, pickle ball, writing, walk and talks with my wife, phone calls with friends, and playing guitar. They prove to be necessary antidotes to the stressors of our roadrunner work culture.

I would encourage you to ask yourself: What makes you flow?

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How might we make schools flow and glow?

As the Indigo Girls sang: “Sometimes the hardest to learn is the least complicated.” I found that many of the professional development workshops I attended overly complicate what Maslow and Rogers introduced in humanistic psychology. Professional development techniques change. The developmental needs of children do not.

How do flow and glow, step 1: Good ole’ application of humanistic psychology. Kids can’t learn if they don’t feel safe, seen, valued, connected to themselves, to others, and to what they are learning.

Why are adolescents disengaged from learning? Carl Rogers believed that all humans need to be regarded positively by others. We need to feel valued, respected, treated with affection and loved. To flourish, we need an environment that provides us with openness, acceptance (unconditional positive regard) and empathy (being listened to and understood). Simply, celebrate the young people in your classroom for who they are, rather than what they are not based on myopic notions of standardization.

We hear this today as differentiation, cultural competency, social and emotional learning and classroom community building. Different terminology, same goal.

How do flow and glow, step 2: Reshape your content into answers, allow students to ask the questions based on the answers. Give students the agency to determine how to understand their questions. This is metacognition. Encouraging students to think about their own thinking as they are thinking. Differentiate assessments and expectations. Differentiate the challenge of applying knowledge to better understand themselves and the world around them. Provide opportunities for students to see themselves reflected in the curriculum. Teach them the skills needed to answer their questions. The best antidote to disinformation and media awareness is CRITICAL THINKING. Ask kids to think for themselves. I find if you ask students an open-ended question, they are apt to use their phone or computer to determine what to say. They parrot what smart people say as opposed to thinking for themselves. Ask teens to think better and develop their own mental models.

We hear this today as integrating 21st century skills into the classroom.

The complexity of doing this is in its simplicity. It doesn’t require we work harder in our classrooms, just smarter.