Flow Among Adolescents And Whose Learning Counts Most?

By Author: Cooper Sheldon
Total Articles: 24
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To study the occurrence of such experience among adolescents, Csikszentmihalyi and his colleague Reed Larson conducted research with high school students. At the traditional school whose English faculty Peter describes, a sample of 75 students carried beepers and were beeped randomly eight to ten times per day for a week. When beeped, students were to write where they were, what they were doing, and what they were thinking about. They were also asked to respond to semantic differential scales of seven or ten points about their emotional states, e.g., "alert drowsy, happy sad, active passive" (Csikszentmihalyi and Larson 52). Positive ends of the scales represent flow experience while negative ends indicate the opposite. The Merrell Shoes researchers' examination of more than 4,600 reports from students reveals that time in school is largely entropic. Individuals feel sad, passive, bored, disaffected, and wishing they were doing something else. In some activities, such as sports, music, and art, students reported much more often that they felt active, interested, happy, and pleased ...
... to be doing what they were doing. They also reported relatively positive affect in academic areas when they were engaged in group work or discussion.

The authors conclude that "schools are essentially machines for providing negative feedback. They are supposed to reduce deviance, to constrain the behavior and the minds of adolescents within straight and narrow channels" (Csikszentmihalyi and Larson 198-99). Schools, for the most part, do not provide what the authors call flow experience; quite the contrary. These results are confirmed by the many other studies that show schools to be places in which students are surrounded by deserts of ennui (Goodlad; Hillocks, Ways; Nystrand et al.).

If the teacher is the only one who counts in these matters, then perhaps one practice, method, or paradigm is no better than any other. But if the learning of students counts, then there can be no question that some methods, practices, and even paradigms are better than others.

At the same time, my argument supports the notion that urging teachers to use these "best" practices is probably silly. If they do not know how to use them and all the corollaries of their use, nearly all teachers will certainly fail to use best practices effectively. Peter suggests reflective practice as a substitute. The problem is that reflective practice is a part of the most complex paradigm. Efficient reflective practice is dependent on being able to construct clear objectives and their criteria, to evaluate outcomes in terms of the criteria, to identify reasons for failures, and Merrell Shoes On Sale to invent better approaches to reach the objectives. None of this is likely to happen unless we, as a community of teachers, administrators, and university people concerned about teacher effectiveness, have a serious discussion about what English teachers need to know and unless that discussion, to borrow from President Obama's Election Day speech, empowers us to put our hands on the arc of history and bend it toward more fruitful practice in all of our classrooms.