[originaltext]Interviewer: In your study, you identified students who stood out

Interviewer: In your study, you identified students who stood out from the crowd because they, more than their peers, could find enjoyment in both work and play. You also found students who were disengaged and passive about most of the activities they participated in. What was the context of your longitudinal study?
Interviewee: With the help from a grant from a famous Foundation, we identified 1,000 children who were in 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grades in 12 school districts from three states and everywhere in between. Nine years later, we are still following some of the participants as young adults, although a much smaller group of them.
   We selected students randomly. We were not looking for children who enjoyed school or did not enjoy school. We just tried to get as much of a cross-section as possible. We developed questionnaires and inter- viewed these students, but we obtained most of our data through giving each student a programmable pager for a week. This pager would go off eight times a day, early morning to 11 p.m., at random moments. Whenever the pager signaled, the students would take out a little booklet and write where they were, what they were doing, what they were thinking about, their level of concentration, how happy they were, and how creative they felt when doing different activities.
   They reported about 30 times during the week, so we received about 30,000 reports. And that allowed us to begin to see these children’s experiences, the feelings and thoughts they had during the day, both at school and out of school. For instance, every time the pager went off, they had to say whether what they were doing was more like play, more like work, or like neither work nor play.
Interviewer: Was life more like work or play for these teenagers?
Interviewee: About 30 percent of the time they stated that it was like work; 30 percent of the time, they said that what they were doing was like play; 30 percent neither; and they reported that for 10 percent of their time, what they were doing was like both work and play.
Interviewer: In your follow-up studies, you concluded that students who often say that what they are doing is like both work and play are more likely to go on to college or make a successful transition to work.
Interviewee: Those students who say that whatever they do is more like work seem to do well in high school. Although they say that what they are doing is work and they don’t enjoy it at the moment, they record on the response sheet that the activity is important to their future. So they understand that, "Okay. This is work. It’s not pleas- ant. But it will profit me in the future."
   Those kids who say that what they do is mostly play enjoy their activities, but they don’t think of them as being important for the future. But the best situation is when a person sees a life activity as both work and play. Unfortunately, only about I0 percent of the time do students report this experience. Some kids never report that they have this experience. The worst thing is to frequently feel that what you do is neither enjoyable right now nor good preparation for the future.
Interviewer: We’ve published many articles on multiple intelligences and learning styles. Do you think people of a certain kind of intelligence are more likely to have the flow experience?
Interviewee: It depends on whether there are opportunities for your particular skill or intelligence. If you are musically inclined, for instance, and there is no opportunity to play music at your school and no other place to get the experience of playing, then you are at a disadvantage. In some cultures, there will be opportunities for one kind of intelligence more than for another.
   The learning disability that may be an obstacle to experiencing flow is the inability to concentrate. Concentration is one of the hallmarks of the flow experience. If you have, for instance, an attention deficit, it may be difficult to get focused enough.
Interviewer: Have you found that any curriculum subjects lend themselves to more engagement than others?
Interviewee: Yes. There have been quite a few dissertations on this topic. Typically, students rate history the worst subject for engagement, whereas they rate anything having to do with computers high. And vocational subjects seem to be better than academic subjects for encouraging engagement.
   Students get flow from group work, from individual tasks, and from quizzes much more often than they do from listening to the teacher or from watching audiovisuals.
Interviewer: What recommendations do you have for teachers who want to structure instructional activities to achieve more flow or more engagement for students?
Interviewee: The more they can show the relevance of what they’re doing to the life of the student, the better. That’s the first and most obvious requirement. You also have to make clear the goal of every lesson. The student must know what he or she is supposed to achieve at the end. And teachers need a way to find out how well the students are learning. Computer-assisted teaching can be quite useful because there you can see your progress and you can change and correct your work as you move along. The fact that students feel positive about group activities suggests the need for more group work. There’s too little group activity in high school except in science labs where two or three kids have to solve a problem or learn something together. There are many things that adults could do to make learning more engaging to students.
Interviewer: What family characteristics are most conducive to inspiring a love of learning?
Interviewee: Modeling is the best strategy. If the kid grows up seeing that his parents and other adults have no interest in anything except making money, it’s unlikely that lie or she will learn that it’s fun to study or learn new things,
   It boils down to the essentials: support and challenge. By challenge I mean high expectations, high standards, allowing the child a lot of independence, exposing students to new opportunities whenever possible. Support means simply that the child feels that the family as a whole is interested in every member’s welfare. If the mother comes home tired, the kids will notice it and try to help her and so forth.
   Support and challenge impart different strengths. Challenge gives children vision and direction, focus and perseverance. Support gives the serenity that allows them freedom from worry and fear.