From Apathy To Flow

Are your gifted learners bored?

Feeling frustrated with their apathy?

Perhaps your students are over-excited, experiencing anxiety and worry.

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s work on “flow” (in the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience) attributes these feelings to a mismatch of challenge and skill levels.

Students with a low skill-level working with a low level of challenge are destined to be apathetic.

Pump up the challenge without increasing skill and your students become worried and anxious.

Correctly matching a student’s level of skill with an appropriate challenge leads to flow – more commonly known in sports as “being in the zone.“

And if you’ve ever seen a student working “in the zone,” it is a beautiful thing. How can we get them there?

Ways To Move Students Towards Flow

• Adjust Bloom’s Taxonomy appropriately.
• Increase depth or complexity.
• Move towards authentic problems.
• Offer novel choices.
• Utilize a different model of instruction.
• Connect subject matter across the disciplines.

It’s Our Job

It’s our job to draw out the excited learner inside our gifted students. Finding the right connection of skill and challenge is one way to accomplish this.