Getting into the "Flow", Educational Nirvana.

Let me explain what I mean by getting into the flow when you are teaching. It’s a little bit like when you take advantage of a “teachable moment”, and the student makes the connections that you want them to make. Connections that will have an impact on their reality,( even if it’s just a critical perspective of their reality.)  Metaphysically speaking, that's pretty powerful! First and foremost, we as teachers want students to make powerful connections between their present and future reality with what they are learning.
         Here is a definition that I found on About.com: Elementary education. A teachable moment is “an unplanned opportunity that arises in a classroom where a teacher has an ideal chance to offer insight to his or her students.”  The article goes on to say, " that you can not plan for; rather it is a fleeting opportunity that must be sensed and seized by the teacher.” Let’s take this a bit further to get into  the “flow”. I think getting into the flow might focus more about how this process works to be both mutually beneficial for both the teacher and the student.  The type of experience that empowers us to know that we are in the right place, doing the right thing,.. simply put. Hopefully, we have all had a lot of these “flow” experiences in our teaching and our students have benefited from them also. They truly are sacred moments when you feel as if you have had some influence on learning for students that will help them........ whenever they recall it, or put in into practice. I can remember some meaningful  lessons, classes and teachers words or phrases as a young student. They were never, ever  about the subject material. They were generally times when the teacher was really leveling with us about life and being grown up, or our future, things of that nature. Pretty powerful occurrences, I’ll say again...at the risk of being redundant ! I have revisited some of these experiences time and again, and interpreted them to help fit my reality.  Students also need to be given flexibility to develop their creativity. Space and time in the classroom are not structures to support creative thinking, planning and work.  Most teachers and schools need more time in the schedule.  More use of digital technology and technology in general can help us with this.
           The teachable moment as well as getting into the "flow" is organic.  We do have to suspend our lesson plans or schedule to accommodate such unplanned occurrences. Have you ever veered away from a teachable moment just because it wasn’t scheduled? Horrors,.....be honest?  Well we all have had to at some point, for some reason. What would happen if we actually structured our school space and time to allow for this teacher and student creativity nirvana? How do we structure our time in school to allow for more teachable moments, and the “flow?”  Why must we constantly circumvent this for testing, not enough time in the block, etc? We need more of this OHMMM and nirvana time. We crave it, both teacher and student. it is the essence of true learning and creativity. The flow lessons are the lessons that we live for... both as students, and as teachers. Daniel Pink has much to say about the way we structure our time so as to create creative flow for both teacher and student. Economic studies have shown that positive growth has always occured when workers are given flexible space and time. I’m psyched, I’m all all for it. I am hopeful that being more flexible with our time and space for educational purposes will be our  near future.