Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms pdfdrive com

Seek flow
In the Boston area, I once worked with a young teacher who preferred to keep
the hallway space outside of her classroom covered with her students’ work.
There was no bulletin board in that section of the hallway, but that didn’t deter
her. She’d usually stick dozens of sheets of paper to the walls. Often I’d pass her
classroom and feel a twinge of resentment. My classroom’s bulletin board was
just around the corner, where only a few people in the school would normally
walk, and there I’d display only a few student creations.
As pathetic as this sounds today, I grew bitter toward this teacher. As I
walked through the hallway, I started to think that all of her students’ sheets of
paper suggested that I was an inferior educator. But the truth, I’d reason with my
nose in the air, was that I was the superior teacher, because I was careful to put
up only “high-quality” work on my bulletin board.
In hindsight, I can see how clearly my insecure attitude decreased the joy in
my teaching. I’d bring those negative emotions, stemming from bitterness, into
the classroom, and I’d put increasing pressure on myself to perform better than
my colleague. Instead of feeling free to enjoy my work, I’d often get distracted
by this exhausting task of striving for superiority.
Superiority is an attractive goal, notes Raj Raghunathan. Researchers have
found that higher-status individuals experience higher self-esteem and a greater
sense of autonomy in their lives, indicating that being “superior” can actually
increase happiness levels. But this finding doesn’t mean that it’s worthwhile to
seek superiority—that’s because the pursuit of superiority will probably

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decrease your level of joy, according to Raghunathan. It would be wiser to seek
something called “flow” (Raghunathan, 2016).
But what is flow? The positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
commonly seen as the guru of flow, describes this mental state in the following
way:
Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls
away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows
inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is
involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost. (quoted in Cherry,
2016b)
As a teacher, I savor this mental state, in which I feel happily lost doing
challenging, interesting work with the students. But research suggests that flow
doesn’t just bring on nice feelings—achieving flow is something that can
enhance performance and develop one’s skills (Cherry, 2016a; Cherry, 2016b).
In other words, you experience positive emotions while working efficiently
toward mastery. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that there are several factors that
happen alongside flow. A person who is achieving this mental state may be
working on a task, for example, that is intrinsically satisfying, goal-directed,
demanding, and yet feasible (Cherry, 2016a; Cherry, 2016b).
The experience of flow is fostered, too, when we’re totally focused on the
goal we’re seeking to achieve (Cherry, 2016a; Cherry, 2016b). When I reflect on
those times when I feel like I’m doing my best work as a teacher, it’s when I feel
least distracted. It’s during writer’s workshops, for example, when my students
are happily engaged in independent work, while I’m conferring with a child
without any interruptions. Typically I’ve needed to coach my students to work in
a focused way, so I can give my full attention to my teaching. As many
experienced teachers know, a classroom environment where children do
successful work independently doesn’t happen magically.
If we want everyone in our classroom to achieve flow, minimizing obvious
distractions (such as cell phones and chattiness) is essential. Crafting a short list
of rules, with your students, could help in this regard. But one of the biggest
distractions I’ve needed to prune is something hidden: a culture of competition.
In the Boston area, caring about being the “superior” teacher distracted me
from doing my best work. I’d spend valuable time and energy worrying about
proving myself instead of seeking flow. These days I think I’ve become more
abundance oriented in my approach toward teaching. In Finland, I’ve met many
teachers who don’t seem interested in being superior. Simply put, they’re quite
happy to be competent in their work, and this noncompetitive mind-set seems to

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happy to be competent in their work, and this noncompetitive mind-set seems to
help them work better together. Also, I think it helps them to achieve flow on a
regular basis.
Being teachers who seek flow, not superiority, is something that’s not just
good for us; it’s also good for our students. Our students are watching us, and if
they see that we’re seeking to do our best work, free of comparing ourselves to
others, I’m confident that this kind of example will foster a noncompetitive
culture in our classrooms. We want our children to experience flow on a regular
basis, and minimizing the major distraction of competition is crucial. This
positive change we want to see—as is so often the case in teaching—starts with
us.