At the intersection of challenge and skill, the state of flow emerges: a state of total immersion and enjoyment. Jason Barney’s book on flow, entitled The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education connects Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s study of flow with the classical Christian classroom. In this article I plan to build on Jason’s work by investigating some recent research that connects the concept of flow to grit and the growth mindset.
My claim is that in order to achieve lasting flow, one must achieve an appropriate level of intensity. The first aspect of this claim to elaborate is the concept of intensity. Intensity as I will be using it here occurs at the intersection of motivation and practice. It is only when students approach their work with intensity that they will achieve lasting flow.
The Winter Olympics recently concluded. The requirements for a sport to qualify for the winter games is that the sport occur on either ice or snow. That in and of itself sets the Winter Olympics apart from other sporting events. Consider the amount of practice athletes must accumulate in adverse conditions to become world-class competitors. After watching numerous interviews with athletes across many sports, a consistent picture emerged. These athletes were highly motivated, but also genuinely loved their sport. A twin pairing crystalized in my mind: motivation and love of the sport go hand in hand. Not everyone will be as highly motivated to put in long hours on the ice or snowy slopes, but perhaps there are other areas where any one of us might find the spark of motivation, and that spark most often consists in something that stirs our hearts.
Motivation
When we think about examples of motivation, we most often picture athletes. Whether it be the athletes of the Winter Olympics or some other sport, success stories are often the result of high levels of motivation. In her book Mindset, Carol Dweck highlights examples such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods to demonstrate how individuals “took charge of the processes that bring success – and that maintain it” (101). Athletes like this work hard every day to improve some aspect of their performance. Dweck quotes Tiger Woods as saying, “I love working on shots, carving them this way and that, and proving to myself that I can hit a certain shot on command” (102). This love of practice kept him returning day after day no matter the conditions outside.
Motivation comes in two flavors. Goeff Colvin, in Talent is Overrated, writes “The central question about motivation to achieve great performance is whether it’s intrinsic or extrinsic” (206). Extrinsic motivation is connected to external rewards such as stickers, candy or prizes, whereas intrinsic motivation is connected to the perceived value of the sport or academic subject. Notice the work “love” in the Tiger Woods quote above. Even though he has won a vast array of golf tournaments, he found intrinsic value in practicing the shots themselves. This occurs not only for athletes, but musicians, artists and mathematicians can be found who express this same kind of passion not simply for accolades or awards, but because there is a perceptual value in the subject.
An essential component of finding flow is connecting students to intrinsic motivation. In his 2018 research paper, Jeff Irvine was “struck by the dominance of intrinsic over extrinsic in many theories related to motivation” (12). He goes on to comment:
“This is even more striking considering the dominance of extrinsic rewards in current education systems. Motivational theories emphasize the intrinsic dimension where research has shown important gains can be made in positively impacting student motivation. A significant body of evidence suggests that motivation has a major role in student achievement.”
Jeff Irvine, “A Framework for Comparing Theories Related to Motivation in Education,” Research in Higher Education Journal 35 (2018): 12.
To put it another way, carrots and sticks do not provide lasting motivation, we cannot reward or punish a student toward achievement in language learning, mathematics or writing mechanics. A more fruitful pursuit would be found by highlighting the value inherent in a language, in numeracy or in written communication. Connecting students to intrinsic value has much more durative impact that rewards or punishments.
A more recent study of musicians found a link between grit, growth mindset and flow. Their findings are fascinating. Musicians who found intrinsic value in music were more motivated to engage in daily practice, which led to increased skill, which led to a deeper love of music, which reinforced daily practice, and the cycle goes on and on. The authors found that musicians experienced flow as a result of long-term engagement with music through daily practice. They write:
“In the full model, music performance anxiety and daily practice hours are the only significant predictors for dispositional flow in this sample of musicians, suggesting that the strongest predictors for musicians’ flow experience are how you feel while playing music and how often you engage in it” (6)
Jasmine Tan, Kelly Yap, and Joydeep Bhattacharya, “What Does it Take to Flow? Investigating Links Between Grit, Growth Mindset, and Flow in Musicians,” Music & Science 4 (2021): 6.
Musicians who connect to the positive feelings that music provides through regular, daily practice deepen their experience of the flow state.
But notice how anxiety can inhibit flow. Fear of performance can lock up a musician, creating a negative feedback loop. Anxiety lessens intrinsic interest in music, and leads to diminished practicing resulting in little to no experience of flow. In a study of rock climbers, this concept of anxiety was noted to reduce attention and focus (55). However, stress and anxiety are constituent aspects of life. So we cannot completely eliminate stress and anxiety. Instead, high performers learn how to cope with anxiety. The authors of the rock climbing study write, citing other literature:
“Stress is an unavoidable and potentially positive aspect of life (McGonigal, 2015). A person’s approach to stressful situations (climbing or otherwise) may predict his or her success at negotiating the challenge. The ability of a person to engage cognitive inhibitors and set-shift (Derakshan & Eysenck, 2009), invoking specific mental capacities during specific events, may enhance performance and resilience in many challenging life domains.”
Andrew Bailey, Allison Hughes, Kennedy Bullock, and Gabriel Hill, “A Climber’s Mentality: EEG analysis of climbers in action,” Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership 11, no. 1 (2019): 64
Notice how stress can be embraced as a positive aspect of life. Top athletes learn to identify pre-match nervousness as the body’s preparation for action. As opposed to allowing stress and anxiety to shut them down, they accept the stress as an aspect of high performance. This mental work take practice and coaching to transform something potentially debilitating for inexperienced learners into something that can enhance performance.
One immediate take away from this examination of motivation is both the nature and locus of motivation. First, motivation is about the intrinsic value of the activity or subject at hand. Our chief goal as educators is not to throw a bunch of external motivators at the students, whether those be rewards or punishments. Instead, we ourselves need to identify the intrinsic value in the activity or subject with the aim of guiding our students toward that sense of value. Even so, we need to be open to students finding their own sense of value in a given activity or subject quite apart from our own. This leads to the second take away, the locus of motivation has to be the student. It is counterproductive for us as teachers to whip up a frenzy of motivation only for the students not to catch the bug themselves. Now there is definitely a role for us to play as motivators, but for long-term flow to be achieved, students need to take on board their own sense of motivation.
Practice
The first component of intensity is motivation. One’s level of intensity corresponds in some measure to the intrinsic value one places in an activity or subject. The second component of intensity comes down to practice. Here we’ll talk about two kinds of practice that promote intensity: deliberate practice and retrieval practice.
I remember my first violin teacher had a bumper sticker on her violin case that said “practice makes perfect.” Well, that’s not entirely the case. Perhaps better would be “practice makes better.” And it’s really not just practice, it’s practice of a certain kind. I could mechanically play through a piece and never really improve. What I learned over time as a music student is that focused practice on the problem spots is where real improvement occurs. You never really play through the whole piece in one sitting, you stop constantly to rework a section, get the finger right, repeat and come back to it.
The focused, intentional type of practice is what we call deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson put forward a framework in his 1993 article which posits that expert performance is achieved through effort directed towards improvement, even when the effort is not enjoyable (see K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 (1993): 363-406). This is the article that gave us the 10,000-hour rule, later popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Angela Duckworth, though, explains that the 10,000-hour rule is not about accumulating lots and lots of hours on task, instead we should think of it as a factor of the quality of time we spend practicing. And yet, individuals who commit to long hours of arduous effort seeking to improve a skill eventually experience the state of ecstatic immersion that Csikszentmihalyi terms flow. In her book Grit, Duckworth writes, “I’ve come to the following conclusion: Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow” (131). Duckworth’s point is that even though deliberate practice takes perseverance or grit, as she calls it, there is a payoff in the form of higher levels of performance and enjoyment.
Ericsson summarized the state of research on deliberate practice in a 2008 article:
“Based on a review of research on skill acquisition, we identified a set of conditions where practice had been uniformly associated with improved performance. Significant improvements in performance were realized when individuals were 1) given a task with a well-defined goal, 2) motivated to improve, 3) provided with feedback, and 4) provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance. Deliberate efforts to improve one’s performance beyond its current level demands full concentration and often requires problem-solving and better methods of performing the tasks.”
K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview,” Academic Emergency Medicine 15 (2008): 991
Not the role motivation plays in Ericsson’s model. In addition, clearly defining goals and providing feedback are essential to deliberate practice. We will explore the fourth point in detail in a moment. But for now it is worthwhile to emphasize the word “deliberate” here. To do something deliberately is to do so with purpose or intent. Moving students away from rote or empty practice to practice that engages their understanding of the “why” of the exercise is essential to growth.
In an earlier article on deliberate practice, I used the analogy of weightlifting. In order to achieve hypertrophy, or muscle growth, weightlifters talk about making a mind-muscle connection. This has become an area of growing research (see J. Calatayud, J. Vinstrup, M. D. Jakobsen, et al. “Importance of Mind-muscle Connection during Progressive Resistance Training,” Eur J Appl Physiol 116 (2016): 527-533 and the extensive bibliography therein). For our purposes, the mind-muscle connection pertains to productive, effortful learning. Enabling our students to connect their intentional mind with their learning mind, in a manner of speaking, is a meta-cognitive goal we should strive for in our classrooms.
The second type of practice essential to achieving the kind of intensity that enables flow is retrieval practice. The book Make It Stick breaks retrieval practice into three components. First, there is spaced practice, or the spreading out of practice over time. “The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory” (49). It is better to allow a “little forgetting” to set in rather than massing practice in one session. It gives the feeling that learning has occurred, but the knowledge was simply placed into short-term memory.
Second, there is interleaved practice, or the randomization of skillsets such that the learner moves from skill to skill or subject to subject. This breaks up learning sessions. This process feels slow and can be confusing to students at first. However, it promotes long-term retention (50). So instead of grouping all addition problems followed by all subtraction problems, you would randomize the set so that you do a few addition then a few subtraction, and go back and forth.
Closely related to this is varied practice or mixing together different skillsets or subjects. Varied practice or variable training is more challenging than massed practice because it utilizes more centers in the brain, which leads to more cognitive flexibility (51-52). Consider a humanities class that reads short sections of literature alongside a philosophy book, with a smattering of poetry and scripture thrown in. Mixing subjects in this way highlights the uniqueness of the concept, forcing the learner to make associations drawing upon different parts of the brain.
Practical Steps
Getting students to a state of flow requires an accumulation of skill as well as a sufficient level of challenge. So it will not be every day that a flow state is achieved. However there are some practical steps you can take that will set your class on the path toward flow. Here are a few items to consider.
First, inspire your students early and often. Intrinsic motivation is such a key component that we should be demonstrating regularly the magnificence and wonder of the subjects we teach. You can do this by drawing upon your own sense of the intrinsic value of the concepts and ideas you are teaching. You can also have your students share what they find valuable or interesting or surprising.
Second, on the analogy of the weightlifters who prime their workouts by making a mind-muscle connection, we need to help our students prime their minds for the intensity of deliberate and retrieval practice. Because this kind of practice takes energy and intentionality, students cannot simply be given sets of exercises without proper priming. Here are a couple of suggestions to prime students for high performance. Use students’ imagination to visualize high performance. For instance, before beginning practice problems in mathematics, you could ask students, “How would a mathematician think about this problem?” This kind of imaginative priming has them take on the character of a high performer in math.
Another strategy to prime students for mental intensity is through nostalgic recollection, or remembering previous high performance. Whereas the previous strategy visualizes future high performance, this exercise primes students for mental intensity by recalling some previous experience they had of high performance. Taking mathematics as the example again, a student can draw upon any memory of high performance – in a sport, musical instrument or other academic subject – to get into the mindset of active engagement with their work.
Third, we need to place before our students what has been called “worthy work.” If in retrieval practice we are turning away from massed practice, in worthy work, we are turning away from empty repetition. Charlotte Mason describes the depths and heights of what we are striving toward:
“What we desire is the still progress of growth that comes of root striking downwards and fruit urging upwards. And this progress in character and conduct is not attained through conditions of environment or influence but only through the growth of ideas, received with conscious intellectual effort.”
Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 297.
If we are placing in front of our students materials that have proper depth to them or reveal the heights of the heavens, the “conscious intellectual effort” becomes the fitting disposition of the student. If the work is worthy, there is so much more scope to find intrinsic motivation.
