A learning classroom - Brian Boyd
One of the people who has done a lot of work with Howard Gardner over the years is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who works now in America, but is originally from Russia and he, as a psychologist, got interested in the whole notion of motivation, concentration, engagement with tasks and so on…and he eventually came up with a concept that’s become quite familiar now, which is a concept of “flow”. And, essentially to try and simplify that, he’s simply trying to argue that if you can get all of the elements right in a learning situation, so if the context is safe and secure, if the topic which is being engaged with is interesting and engaging, if the task which is given to the learner is sufficiently challenging in order to engage them with it but not too difficult to make them despair, if you can get all of these constituent parts right then what occurs is what he would describe as 'flow' ' in other words, the learner is completely engaged, completely concentrated and, in a sense, to be colloquial about it is 'in the moment'. And he would argue that is really what we are trying to achieve - we are trying to balance the level of challenge and support, we are trying to create a context for learning, a culture where learning is valued… and in a sense, what he is doing in his experimental laboratory approaches, is trying to give us a clue to what our classrooms should be like, so our classrooms ought to be places which have a culture of thinking and a culture of learning - where the classroom itself is attractive and where the surroundings of the class are all contributing to the learning environment, where the teacher has a set of relationships in the class between herself and the pupils and amongst the pupils which are mutually supportive - where collaboration goes on, and where the tasks that are given are chosen so that they will be engaging and they will be appropriate and the level of challenge is just pitched at the right level so that young people are totally able to get involved in the learning, and at the end of it, young people who want to learn and who want to do well at learning.
If you go into classrooms where you begin to see that happening, you’ll realise you can spot each bit of those constituent parts. So there’s nothing magical about it, but it’s a nice way of looking at that 'holy grail' of teaching - simply managing to get all of these things in place and create, what you might call a learning classroom.
One of the challenges of teaching is to get young people out of their comfort zone - in other words, it's to say to them, 'Well, actually, we can go to places you don’t believe you can go to.' So it’s to take them that bit further, it’s to raise their eyes above the horizon, it’s to make them aspiration, and in some respects again, some of the psychological theory behind that would go back to Carol Dweck’s theory of Self Theory that you believe that you can do more than you thought, that your brain is capable of greater feats of learning than perhaps you have been told in the past because of inadequate measures of your attainment. So, in some respects, that takes us nicely into quite complex Vygotsky Concept of Zone of Proximal Development because what you are always trying to get at as a teacher is what is that gap between what the youngster can currently do by himself or herself, and where I could take them to with support and with mediation and with teaching. I think that’s what we are trying to do. We are always trying to take young people on.
- Posted on 13 February 2009.