It’s been a little while since my last article on the flow of thought, or how Mihayli Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow can support the philosophy of classical education. In the meantime, I’ve shared an early version of my eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration in the classroom (see our new Narration page for more information). My hope in making this resource is to inspire more classical schools around the country to adopt narration as a teaching tool in the classroom, because I think it’s incredibly powerful.
Past installments – Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake, Part 2: The Joy of Memory. Future Installments – Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games, Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.
In this article I’d like to weave these three strands together to explain how the practice of narration can get students (and adults!) into flow better than many other standard classroom “learning activities.” My thoughts on this connection are a bit more anecdotal and reflective, drawing less from Czikszentmihalyi’s chapter than other articles in this series. But based on more than a decade of experience with narration, I think the connection I’m making is still valid.
The Concept of ‘Flow’
To recap, the idea of flow is that there is a state of mind a person gets into when wholly immersed in a challenge commensurate with their abilities. From extensive studies on this experience, it’s clear that it is widely regarded as the optimal state of mind. People describe it glowingly; in fact, that’s where our psychologist got the term ‘flow’. It’s almost a timeless state in which the natural disorder of the mind (worries and fears, self-consciousness and despair) are set aside by the perfection of focus on a meaningful activity.
Passive entertainment, like TV watching, on the other hand, correlates with mild depression (Csikszentmihalyi 119). We may think we want to be entertained, but we actually want to be challenged with a meaningful activity that develops our skill or knowledge in some way.
The Practice of Narration
Where I think this connects with Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration is that the concept of flow seems to be another modern confirmation of this traditional practice. If you’re new to the practice of narration, it is a simple but elegant practice, in which students are first exposed to rich content (most often through reading a passage of a book) and then asked to tell it back or narrate it in a connected format from memory.
Narration can come in many forms: a single student of a class could tell the whole passage, students could narrate to a partner, or they could all write down their narration. Of prime importance to Charlotte Mason is that the students be expected to know and tell after only one reading, that the book be rich and full of ideas (“living” is the word she often uses), and that students tell in full. Narration is not a summary.
Narration is also distinct from word-for-word memorization techniques, because it doesn’t aim at that level of micro-focus or precision. To be sure narration involves memory and therefore should be considered under the art of memory, but in a more natural way that builds off of a single focused effort, rather than the refining process of exact memorization, which necessarily hones in on much less material and aims to get it word perfect.
The Challenge of Getting into the Flow of Narration
Imagine for a moment the type of skill it would take for you to sit down and listen with quiet attention to a passage of a novel, without letting yourself be distracted by the clock ticking in the background, the movements of the students next to you or the various ideas and plans floating around in your head about your afternoon. Then imagine that you know with certainty that there is a genuine probability that once the passage is done, your teacher will pull your name out of a stack of cards, and you will be expected, without looking back at the text, to tell in a connected format the story of that passage with as many of the details and author’s language that you can.
On the one hand, this probably sounds like a bit a of a scary experience! To our modern students who are used to being passively entertained and cajoled into learning by a teacher, it might seem almost inhumane. And of course, to a shy or socially conscious student, narration can initially be quite daunting.
We might think that we don’t want to be faced with this prospect on a daily basis. This last June I read Karen Glass’ Know and Tell: The Art of Narration, which is a great book on narration by a long-time homeschool mother practicing Charlotte Mason’s philosophy. In it she tells of how some of the negative feelings that homeschool students practicing narration have felt over the years often resolve into a grateful recognition of how well the practice works for studying material, when those students reach college. (By the way, the effectiveness of a technique like narration has been confirmed through learning science on retrieval practice or the testing effect. For more detail, see my eBook.)
At a recent benefit for the school where I work, one parent shared of how one of her children, now in college, discusses the incredible power of narration for studying and how grateful she is for her early training in it, since it makes learning new content so much easier for her than other students around.
Narration is painful and challenging. It requires you to bring the full force of your mind to bear. It requires training the attention to high degree as well as self-control.
But narration is also pleasant and agreeable. In fact, when it has been solidified into a habit, narrators engage in it naturally and joyfully. Thousands of times I’ve seen students’ faces light up as they begin to tell of the engaging and interesting passage of some text they’ve just read.
Narration meets all the requirements of a flow activity described by Csikszentmihaly in Flow. If the text is graded appropriately at students’ reading ability, the activity is challenging but not overwhelming. It is constantly new and different, since the content always varies. When practiced well, it engages the mind fully in a rewarding and meaningful activity, the assimilation of knowledge and celebration of story.
Aside: Download the Free eBook “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom”
Wondering how to practically apply the idea of flow in your classroom? These 5 actionable steps will help you keep the insights of flow from being a pie-in-the-sky idea. Embody flow in your classroom and witness the increased joy and skill development that result!
You can download “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom” on the flow page. Share the page with a friend or colleague, so they can benefit as well.
Narration’s Connection to the Classical Liberal Arts
After all, narration is a complex language skill, like the classical liberal arts of the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric). It builds on the same imitative foundation and joins that imitation with reason as the student thinks their way through the text.
It helps facilitate the student’s progress in grammar (grammatiké) which in ancient times included the whole art of reading and interpretation. When the text is logical or argumentative, or when students discuss the passage’s ideas and meaning afterward, narration also prepares the student for dialectic (dialectiké) by providing the fodder on which the analytical reason can work. Perhaps, most obviously narration involves a student in recreating verbally the literary content of a great author, and so, with variations depending on the genre of the text, is an ever-adaptable progymnasmata on its own, providing endless exercises in the rhetorical art (rhetoriké).
Flow and the Art of Narration as Deep Practice
Training in any of these arts is, of course, a fruitful way into flow itself. This is partly because the classical liberal arts themselves embody the classical principle of self-education, the idea that the students themselves should be engaging in the art in order to grow in skill and mastery. Great artists and speakers and writers become so through doing the activity, again and again and again, for thousands of hours, in fact, of what modern researchers have called deliberate practice.
Recently I read Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, where he used the term ‘deep practice’ to capture that state of focused training that is ruthless about improving. I was fascinated to hear him describe the process of myelination in the brain, in which neural networks are covered in the fatty substance called myelin through the repeated firing in the practice of some art or skill, like deep reading, playing a classical music piece, soccer or narration.
It’s through getting deep into flow that we not only experience that ecstatic and timeless state of enjoyment, but also that our neural networks are sufficiently lit up to send the signals in our brain that ensure the wrapping of myelin around them. When this happens, the myelin allows those same neural networks to fire more quickly and efficiently, leading to the development of skill.
Too many classroom “learning activities” focus too much on what the teacher is doing as entertainer, while students sit back passively. Perhaps they are mildly entertained, but are they in flow? Are they developing skill? Are they engaged in deep practice? Are they training in the classical liberal arts?
Practicing the art of narration is one of the best and most efficient ways to get us there. And I think every classical school should adopt the practice, not just for the students improved learning, but also for their enjoyment of learning, as the challenges of narrating get them into the flow of thought.
If you haven’t requested a free copy of my new eBook How to Implement Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in the Classical Classroom, go to our webpage on Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration, and input your email to receive your copy of the early version.
New Book! The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow Through Classical Education
Enjoying this series? Jason Barney revised and expanded it into a full length book that you can buy on Amazon. Complete with footnotes and in an easy-to-share format for teacher training or to keep in your personal library, the book aims to help you apply the concept of flow in your classical classroom.
Make sure to share about the book on social media and review it on Amazon!
Past installments – Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake, Part 2: The Joy of Memory. Future Installments – Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games, Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.