The pedagogical panic – from interruption to progress: reflecting on creativity under pressure

By Laura Dyer - Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes - Language Centre

"This isn't working with my students.  I’ve never taught this before.  There isn’t enough time to prepare.  How am I going to teach this online?"

I’ve been through what I like to call a ‘pedagogical panic’ many times in my career, where I have perceived an activity to be challenging for me to implement in the way that I wanted or is not going as I had hoped.  These distractions have caused me significant issues with stress and anxiety and remains some of the biggest vexations in my career.  The context of these pedagogical panics is where there is an interruption in the flow of the processes that help me to have a successful outcome (Stansberry Beard, 2015), or one that I am comfortable with.  According to Csikszentmihalyi’s Theory of Flow (2008), the optimal mental state is where happiness creates an immersive situation where you can lose track of time; when success in this is achieved, the activity is repeated.  However, it is issues such as these pedagogical panics can cause interference to my professional happiness and being ‘in the zone’.

Yet despite these panics and the pressure that I place on myself, it has been at times like these that I have created some of my most successful activities and I wonder how I was able to achieve this when I felt unable to focus on the task in hand.  Some of my most successful lessons have been the result of pedagogical panics, all of which now form part of my personal pedagogical repertoire.  These lessons include:

• Adapting activities for a more inclusive communicative environment
• Experiments with different digital platforms to improve the online learning experience
• Developing a student centred method for peer feedback

It continues to surprise me how I am able get through the difficulties and produce such positive outcomes.  Whilst I would prefer the easy route by not going through these issues, it seems that somehow I am able to enter fight response to deal with the situation, and research has shown that increased pressure and workload can increase creativity (Shao et al, 2019).  Reflecting on why I have had successful outcomes from the pedagogical panics, I consider the following to be likely causes in my situation:

• An ‘anything goes’ approach where I consider ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’
• Spontaneity where my brain does not overthink and just ‘goes with the flow’
• Trusting my instincts and beliefs in my capabilities as a teacher

Although I remain my own worst critic, I have learnt not to embrace these panics by trying something new or something different.   However, once I get past that initial interruption phase by applying my creativity under pressure, I am pleased to return to the state of happiness in the Theory of Flow.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 2008. Flow: the psychology of optimal experience.  London. Harper Perennial

Shao, Y., Nijstad, B. and Täuber, S. 2019. Creativity under workload pressure and integrative complexity: the double edged sword of paradoxical leadership. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 155. pp 7-19

Stansberry Beard, K. 2015. Theoretically Speaking: An Interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow Theory Development and Its Usefulness in Addressing Contemporary Challenges in Education. Educational Psychology Review. 27(2). pp353-364