How to make teaching kids to write (or teaching anything) as engaging as a video game
FLOW is a state of consciousness when we are doing an activity that is challenging but not defeating for us. It’s the sweet spot where we are highly alert but not anxious, competent but not bored.
Makers of video games know how to regulate the challenge/skill ratio to try and maximize a state of flow. As soon as you finish one level and are feeling high on your accomplishment, you are immediately taken to a new level of challenge. It’s satisfying and makes people want to keep going to see how far they can get. Which is perhaps why a first grader asked me when struggling with reading:
“Isn’t there a video game that could teach me all this?”
At the time I just thought it was one of those funny comments kids make that we pass along to our colleagues or on Facebook. But several years later when I read a book Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow, I thought this kid actually had a point. Really, his desire to learn through a video game was just a plea for more success and less frustration, more immediate rewards and less drudgery, something that most video game makers have mastered and most curriculum makers have not.
Allow me to expand on this for a moment and I promise I will deliver on my title if you read on.
Picture a tennis player with an equal opponent playing a match at their highest skill level. Picture an artist losing track of time and immersed in the world of color while bringing an image to life on canvas. Picture a musician so connected to the music that it seems to come out of the instrument on its own.
And flow doesn’t belong only to experts. Do you have an activity you love so much that time passes quickly and you forget about everything else while you are doing it? It is so inherently satisfying that no one has to make you do it? (Watching something doesn’t count, in order to be in a true flow state we must be participating.)
Let’s look at the origins of this term “flow”. It starts with a guy with a long name.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Mee-hi Chick-sent-mee-hi) was born in Hungary in 1934 and experienced the trauma of WW2, losing both of his older brothers in the war. As he watched the adults around him try to recover from their war experiences after losing careers, homes, and family members, he began to wonder what it is that makes life worth living. As a young man, traveling in Switzerland, he happened to hear a lecture by Carl Jung and decided to pursue the study of psychology. This brought him to the United States, where he became a college student and eventually a PhD in Psychology and then a university professor.
He spent many years studying thousands of people to find answers to the questions, “What makes people happy?” and “What gives meaning to life?” He found that people are happiest when in a state of what he named “flow”.
Flow can happen while playing a sport or game, working at a job, expressing creativity in some way, or having a good discussion, among many other possibilities. We can’t be in flow 100% of the time, but it’s a state of mind we can cultivate.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… the best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
So how does this apply to the classroom?
Since this kid’s comments, which were probably made around 2015, the number of learning apps and tech supported learning programs has only increased, and there are probably some good ones for supporting learning to read. But what I’m thinking is that we can take the video game creator mentality and incorporate it into how we teach reading and writing. We can use the strategies that video games use to create flow, without having to plug kids in to a device. Ultimately, in learning a skill such as reading or writing, feedback from a human is more meaningful than a machine.
Situations that create a flow state can be created, as video games demonstrate. Here are some elements that help to create a flow state:
have clear and specific goals
eliminate distractions
access to immediate feedback
have a balance of skill and challenge
no fear of failure and no self-consciousness
the activity becomes an end in itself
A lot of these items on the list look familiar to me, because they are also aspects of explicit instruction (clear and simple goals, immediate feedback), and cognitive load theory (eliminating distractions both inner and outer).
There have been times in my classroom during writing that I would describe as everyone being “in the zone”. I remember on several occasions an adult entering the room and none of the students even looked up. I attribute this to the “expandable lesson”, part of the design of Growing Writers that helps everyone to have their learning needs met, so that most students are in the sweet spot of skill level and challenge at any given moment.
Just for fun, tell me what puts you in a flow state!
Leave your comments below.