Have you ever seen a child engaged in musical activity or free-play for hours? What is it that can drive someone to strum a guitar or play a melody on a piano over and over for an entire afternoon without going off task? What keeps us focused, excited, and energized? And how can we teach kids to maximize on that?
In a continuation of my interview with Dr. Patricia St. John, St. John explains, “The flow model as developed by Csíkszentmihályi asks how is it that people can engage in tasks for such long periods of time, and then we’ve got other people who can’t stay focused on things. Csíkszentmihályi looked at surgeons, rock climbers, and ballet dancers. He had them wear beepers and he had them record various psychological states, how do you feel about this right now and different questions like that. Then he extended this across the gamut—factory workers, gardeners, Japanese motor cycle riders, Italian farmers, and he did a whole other thing on adolescence. His book on adolescence is titled Beyond Boredom and Anxiety if you wish to read further.”
If you missed my first post, titled: Music On Your Child’s Mind: Improving Focus Can Be As Close As Your Favorite Song (Part One), Dr. Patti St. John CSJ is the founder/Executive Director of Carondelet Music Center, a private music school (est. 1992) in the north-eastern United States with 350 students. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
St. John’s ideas on children and flow are partly rooted in a model that operationalized the flow paradigm for children generated by Dr. Lori A.Custodero of Columbia University. St. John comments, “Custodero made it an observational protocol. She devised variables, different traits that match the characteristics of Csíkszentmihályi, and then rated and scored each of the flow indicators.”
Here is a peek:
The CHALLENGE-SEEKING INDICATORS (to get oneself into flow) are:
self-assignment, self-correction, and deliberate gesture.
· Self Assignment: The child initiates purposeful action, not the teacher or adult
· Self Correction: The child adjusts his approach to task without adult intervention. This involves the reception of immediate feedback and perception of clear goals.
· Gesture: Child’s movement is very focused and controlled, may be exaggerated but includes no irrelevant motion
The CHALLENGE-MONITORING INDICATORS (to sustain flow experience) are: anticipation, expansion, and extension
· Anticipation: Child verbal of physical behaviors to show what might come next
· Expansion: Child creates novel movement to presented material, this according to Custodero is where creative impulse is most recognizable
· Extension: Child continues to engage with presented material outside the time during which the material is offered
[Info described in CHALLENGE-SEEKING INDICATORS and CHALLENGE-MONITORING INDICATORS sections of this blog was based on material found in ‘Observable Indicators of Flow Experience: A Developmental Perspective on Musical Engagement in Young Children from Infancy to School Age’ Music Education Research 7(2): 185–209. Custodero (2005)]
St. John and I discussed this model at length. She provided an example of self-assignment from a music class, though one could easily see its ramifications to lessons we might teach at home as parents or those of us who are educators glean for use in the classroom. According to St. John, a teacher presents a task and the child figures out a way that she can be engaged. “How am I going to assign myself this task?” thinks the child. In her example, St. John gets the child some sticks, puts on some music and asks the child to keep the beat. The child is keeping a “four four” beat, but then switches to a more complex beat. She (the child) has raised the challenge level for herself.
My immediate question is “What if the child doesn’t raise the challenge?”
“In order to be part of the task, they have to figure out another way to play the sticks,” St. John explains and demonstrates other various beats. However, she says, she has seen some kids put down the sticks and instead start conducting with their hands because they know that they cannot keep the beat, which goes back to St. John’s other idea that children WANT to be part of the experience. “So if the task is too challenging, they can figure out another way.” They can stay with it, and as far as she is concerned, that’s good. “They are still in a state of flow,” she says. “The challenge and the task are high and equal.”
So she has asked her students to keep the beat and they’re doing it, they’re right there in the moment. A child that’s doing this other thing (a more complex beat, she demonstrates with sticks) we might say is off path because that child is not keeping a steady beat. They’re making it more challenging. We could say that the child who is conducting is off path as well because he is not keeping the beat. But he is conducting and that’s a way he can be part of the experience. All good as far as St. John is concerned. The child’s good and the greater good.
I ask, “Do you want to see that the child is calm and aroused rather than scrambled and frenzied?
“The arousal piece is important,” she says.
According to St. John, you may see children scrambling at first until they figure out how they need to focus in. St. John warns:
“I think that what we do sometimes in educational settings is shut this down before they figure out how they can be part of an experience.”
“Or we give them the answer,” I offer.
“Or give them the answer,” she replies. “So there’s no self efficacy of finding the joy of discovering it on my own.” There it was again: the idea of intrinsic reward and its relationship to getting into flow as well as staying in it. I can’t help thinking that when you add in a layer of endocrinology (i.e. the effect of dopamine), it’s easy to see how self-reward can be so pleasurable when we attend to things. St. John goes on to caution:
“By covering the lesson we’re not uncovering learning.”
And we certainly run the risk of inhibiting flow. Children, according to St. John, are in a constant state of flow until they are around 5 or enter school. And it seems to this author that, as educators and parent, we would like to sustain (or rebuild) as much of their natural ability to focus attention as possible.
Flow will ultimately affect all aspects of life: what you think, how you feel, what you do and in general your world view.
With music feedback is immediate. And feedback helps us stay in flow as well as make necessary adjustments stay on task.
“I’m playing some music,” St John plays a melody on her piano and doesn’t finish the line she’s playing. She smiles. “You see, the feedback is immediate.” The point is that the missing chord hangs in midair like a ghost whose presence you can’t help but feel.
She plays another line and intentionally hits t a wrong a note. “Feedback is immediate,” she smiles. “Children know by their response to music if they are with it or not because it’s so natural to them. It’s focused attention: the goal is clear. Play your sticks with the music. That’s the goal.”
St. John’s research and continued work with the psychology of music and children adds another layer to the mix by bringing elements of social and cultural influences to bear on flow. For St. John:
Learning is capable of driving development rather than development driving learning.
