15

How do you achieve ‘flow’ in your

teaching?

Özbek, the publisher’s rep, got on to the subject of ‘flow’. He was driving me from the airport
into the centre of Istanbul, and it turned out that he was currently researching a Master’s
dissertation on motivation. He was attracted by the idea that intrinsic motivation is located in the
present moment, and reaches a peak when you are so absorbed in a task that time seems to
slow down or even to stop altogether. The poet W.H. Auden describes the effect of this
absorption as ‘the-eye-on-the-object look’, when, for example, skilled craftsmen

wear the same rapt expression,

forgetting themselves in a function. (from ‘Sext’ in Horae Canonicae)

This is what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (1990) calls ‘flow’. It is the kind of ‘peak
experience’ often reported by artists or sportspeople, when there is a perfect match between
performance challenge and available skill. The alternatives, such as too much challenge, or too
little, are likely to result in either anxiety or boredom.

According to Csíkszentmihályi (1993: xiv), flow experiences have the following characteristics:

1. they have concrete goals and manageable rules

2. they make it possible to adjust opportunities for action to our capacities
3. they provide clear information about how well we are doing
4. they screen out distractions and make concentration possible.

Appearing as it did around the same time as the popularization of task-based learning, the
theory of ‘flow’ offered an elegant rubric for the design and management of second language
learning tasks. The theory suggested that good tasks should stretch learners, pushing them
beyond their immediate ‘comfort zone’, while at the same time providing them with sufficient
support so as not to induce anxiety. But since then Csíkszentmihályi’s theory seems to have lost
traction, so I was intrigued to hear my Turkish friend (in gridlocked traffic that was the antithesis
of flow!) update me on a couple of recent studies that have rehabilitated the notion of flow.

One of these (Egbert 2003) reports a study in which students rated their experience of various
classroom tasks (such as reading aloud, group discussion, etc.). The one task that seemed to
have induced the greatest degree of flow, based on self-report data, was one in which the
students (all US high-school students of Spanish) interacted freely in a chatroom discussion
with Spanish-speaking contemporaries. The researchers concluded that tasks which are most
conducive to flow are those in which the participants’ perceptions of challenge, control, and
interest are optimal.

The concept of flow applies not only to learning but also to teaching. Of course, ‘flow’ – in a
less figurative sense – is a concept that has often been invoked by educators to capture a
desirable quality of classroom management, as when we report that ‘a lesson really flowed’.
Flow, in this sense, is a function of having well-rehearsed classroom routines, and it typically
distinguishes the teaching of experienced teachers from the rather stop-start nature of novice
teaching.

But flow in the ‘forgetting oneself in the function’ sense is also a well-attested phenomenon. In a
study by Christine M. Tardy and Bill Snyder (2004), a group of teachers in Turkey reported
experiencing ‘flow’ in their professional lives, noting that ‘flow tended to occur when students
were more personally interested and involved’. Moreover, the study found that ‘these teachers
often perceived flow to emerge when they felt classroom communication to be authentic and
not mechanical’. And ‘flow was seen by the teachers … as something that could not be planned
or predicted, but seemed to arise rather spontaneously’.

Finally, the teachers ‘described flow as occurring at moments in which they perceived learning
to occur, for both themselves and their students’. The writers conclude that ‘experiencing flow in
their work may help to explain why teachers “stick with it”, despite the often minimal external
rewards’.

Looking back on my own teaching, and recalling ‘eye-on-the-object’ moments, they are often
associated with some kind of high-risk strategy that I had embarked upon. Quite often, in fact,
they were stand-by lessons when I was substituting for an absent teacher, working from very
little information about the class, and with zero opportunities to plan. It was real seat-of-the-
pants stuff. I remember once teaching two classes (in adjoining classrooms) simultaneously –
timing the groupwork so I could whip next door and do a bit of whole-class stuff, and then out
again. I felt like one of those chess grandmasters, playing a hundred games simultaneously in a
shopping mall! Pure flow!

Questions for discussion

1. Have you experienced ‘flow’ in the classroom – either as a learner or teacher? If so, to what
do you attribute it?

2. How would you know if learners were experiencing ‘flow’? How could you research this?

3. To what extent is the prosaic sense of ‘flow’ (as in ‘the lesson flowed nicely’) a pre-requisite
for the ‘peak experience’ sense?

4. Is flow really a function of spontaneity? In which case, what does that say about lesson
planning?

5. Is there a danger that ‘teacher flow’ might be achieved at the expense of ‘learner flow’?

6. ‘Flow’ seems to be associated with ‘stepping outside your comfort zone’: what are the
implications for teacher training and development?

7. Is ‘flow’ a 1990s idea, and has it been superseded by more realistic educational goals, such
as competence and communicative effectiveness?

8. Does flow compensate for the ‘minimal external rewards’ of teaching, such as low pay and
long hours?

References
Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, NY: Harper Row.

Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1993) The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, NY:
Harper Row.

Egbert, J. (2003) ‘A study of flow theory in the foreign language classroom’, The Modern
Language Journal, 87, 4.
Tardy, C.M. and Snyder, B. (2004) ‘“That’s why I do it”: flow and EFL teachers’ practices’, ELT
Journal, 58, 2.

To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/f-is-for-flow/