Personal Resilience

Hello. My name is Diana Brecher. I’m a clinical psychologist at Ryerson University and I’m here to talk with you about what would it mean to be finding flow in the classroom. And so I want to start by defining what flow is. It’s based on the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who was a psychologist in the US, who has spent maybe 40 years studying flow. And he identifies it as the midpoint between boredom and anxiety. It’s the state where your skills are just adequate to the challenge and it becomes your optimal performance. And so these are the kind of qualities that when this happens, we are so excited and invested in what we’re doing, the time seems to change for us, it either feels like it stands still or that it moves so fast that we are completely unaware that time has passed.

Another way to think about this is the relationship between our challenges and our skills.

[A slide comes up and shows a diagram illustrating the relationship between challenges and skills.]

We’ve got anxiety at one end and boredom at the other. But what’s interesting is that the state of flow occurs between anxiety and the comfort zone. And so oftentimes what happens is that there’s a kind of a seesaw. We go between feeling anxious because we don’t have the necessary skills in order to really perform well to then moving into flow where we have just enough skills to meet the challenge. And then, we acclimate and develop expertise and then we get comfortable. And then if time goes on, if there’s no new challenge, we end up bored.

So one of the ways to stay in that kind of growth or risk zone is to always be recalibrating between skills and challenges. If you find yourself getting a bit bored, add on a new challenge. If you find yourself anxious, acquire more skill, and then it’s this kind of moving back and forth between having just enough skill to meet that challenge.

And in fact, I invite you to think back on your own experience, either in your career or in your kind of active leisure activities, have you been in that state of flow? And what does it feel like when everything is just working perfectly? Athletes often refer to it as being in the zone where they somehow exceed all expectations and the time happens differently and that they are really doing far better than they ever thought they could.

So Csikszentmihalyi says, “The best way to achieve flow is if the challenges are too low, one gets back to flow by increasing them. If challenges are too great, one can return to the flow state by learning new skills.” So here are some examples of the kinds of experiences or activities that lend themselves to the state of flow. And you’ll notice that it’s almost in anything and everything we do that involves an initial investment of focus, attention and energy. So it could be studying at university, any creative activity, all the team sports, games of skill, like chess, poker, bridge with a strategy, you have to remember things, you have to think several moves ahead, when we are challenged by our work. Playing any kind of musical instruments, gardening, cooking, painting, carpentry, long-distance running, mountain climbing, any kind of physical challenge. So, based on the research of Csikszentmihalyi, he did something called the Experience Sampling Method, where he asked people when they were doing different things, how they were feeling, how engaged they were. What he found was that passive leisure did not lend itself to flow. So imagine watching television or any streaming service. You may be entertained but you’re not engaged at the same level you would be in any of the activities that I’ve just described. So active leisure work or school are all places where we are more likely to experience the state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi says flow at work, “Work can be the prime time for flow because, unlike leisure, it builds many of the conditions of flow into itself. These are usually clear goals and rules of performance. There is frequent feedback about how well or poorly we are doing. Work usually encourages concentration and minimizes distraction, and in many cases, it matches the difficulties to your talents and even your strengths. As a result, people often feel more engaged at work than they do at home.” And I will venture to say that if we substituted the word “work” for “school” or “university”, this would apply very well. A course outline gives clear goals and rules for performance.

We, as educators, give feedback about how students are doing. The work does encourage concentration and minimizes distraction. And hopefully, with scaffolding year by year, it will match the difficulty before the students to their talents. And so we are actually through the university context, inviting students into a state of flow, or at least ideally doing that in the way in which we teach them in our classrooms.

What are the external conditions for flow? Clear and attainable goals. They have to be explicit. Skills have to meet the challenge. And that there are constraints involved in the activity, like rules or guidelines or deadlines, that allow people to know they have to do it in this way and in this timeframe. And feedback will keep you on track.

And it’s really helpful if there’s a kind of personal control over the situation in the outcome, rather than doing, you know, the equivalent of factory work, where it’s a very small piece of a large assembly line or whatever. Having a sense of a full arc of a project can encourage flow. What’s the impact of flow?

Well, it increases our concentration. It diminishes a sense of self-consciousness. We stopped being all that aware of what we physically need. And our sense of time will change, will become distorted in some way. I referenced this earlier either, it feels like time speeds up and you don’t know where the hours went or it feels like time stands still.

And the key piece is that we’re fulfilled because we’re doing something for its own sake. And it’s often our personal best.

So, if we were to summarize what I’ve just described as flow is being defined as when your skills meet a challenge. Let’s translate this into a practical application in the classroom.

So one way to think about it is from the perspective of scaffolded teaching and learning strategies to ensure that your students are able to move to the next stage.

So if you were, for example, to incorporate frequent low stakes assessment, quizzes, or any kind of methodology that the students would have to demonstrate what they know in order to move on to the next stage of the curriculum. Those are the types of things that first of all, we’ll give the students feedback about whether or not they’re off on a tangent and miss the point or they are really on track.

And it’ll also help you, as the educator, know whether or not you are reaching your students and that they’re fully understanding everything because so much in science is about building blocks along the way and if there is a piece missing, it’s really hard to keep building on missing information.

So that’s one approach to applying this into the classroom. And the other is, is to really tap into the fact that some of your students are going to have a very clear understanding of the concepts. And we know that one of the best ways to really consolidate knowledge is to teach it. So what if the students who had a very good grasp on the material worked as a kind of like a peer tutor with some of the students who were struggling.

Now it takes some organization to make that happen but both will benefit. So that the peer-to-peer learning leads to both stronger students, consolidating their knowledge and the students who are struggling learning enough so that they can really have it as a building block to the next step.

Another way to kind of inspire your students who have an aspiration of flow in their university experience is to invite them to either interview someone who kind of lives in flow or experiences flow on a daily basis to understand better how they get there or invite a guest speaker who’s so excited and passionate and interested in what they’re doing in their life they can talk about and unpack what they do in order to enter into that state of flow and perhaps even stay in that state of flow. Hopefully, make it really specific to the topics that you’re teaching to the curriculum in the classroom. Another practical application in the classroom is to really think about how to understand and utilize the stress performance curve which I’ll be showing you on the next slide, to help us cultivate a state of flow in our students.

[Dr. Brecher presents the Yerkes-Dodson Law of optimal performance diagram. It represents a bell-shaped curve that increases and then decreases with higher levels of arousal.]

So the Yerkes-Dodson Law of optimal performance has some direct application to the academic experience. So when we’re kind of bored or unstimulated, our performance is low. However, as the stimulation increases, so will our performance. Until we reach that peak performance where we’re truly focused and engaged. But at a certain point, there are no additional benefits to be stressed out or stimulated. And what starts to happen is a decrease in performance as the stimulation goes beyond a certain point to the point where we become stressed and restless when the stimulation level is too high. So if we think about the kind of optimal performance where there’s just enough stress to keep you on your toes, focused, engaged, and invested in what we’re doing, your performance will be the highest possible. If the stress goes too high, it interferes with that performance. So it’s a delicate balance. It’s not something that instructors can actually control in a classroom but we can try to build in some of the support so that the stress level doesn’t get too high and students can devote their attention and their focus to what they’re learning rather than managing their stress levels. And so, the more we can put into the classroom that helps the students stay at this kind of peak stimulation level, the better. And when I explain this to students, I’ll often say, “This is where you probably get a D when you know, you’re kind of bored, your performance is low and maybe you’ll be getting a C when you’re a little bit more invested, but you’re not doing that great. But as your stimulation level and your investment and focusing increase, you might be getting B-pluses or maybe A’s or even an A-plus, but as time goes on and that stimulation and stress increases your performance continues to decrease. So over here, you might be back to a D or an F. And so this graph applies to students and applies to the workplace. And I think it’s a very helpful thing to even be explicit about it with our students and to say to them, “I want you in that focus and engaged zone. What do you need from this class or from each other or from me so that you can stay there?” And it might be you’ll begin with students saying, “we need to review this concept that you talked about three weeks ago because we still don’t get it.” And then that gives you the opportunity to really build in the skill levels so that they’re able to improve their performance.

And with that, I’ll say, please feel free to contact me (Diana Brecher: dbrecher@ryerson.ca) or my colleague Fenella (Fenella Amarasinghe—Senior Manager, Education Planning and Development famarasinghe@ryerson.ca) about this video or these concepts. Thank you very much.