Get In The Flow - Implicit Vs. Explicit Learning

To the inspired musician!

I want to explain, briefly, the idea of implicit vs. explicit learning. I hope this will help many people when it comes to understanding the value of different kinds of practicing.

First let me quickly sum up the definitions we are going to be working with.

1. Skills - the necessary abilities to accomplish a task. ex. You will need to have the skill of adding soap to the water in order to clean your dishes. 
2. Demands - the complexity or difficulty of a task. ex. It is much more demanding to clean a pan with baked on food than a spoon that was used for soup. 
3. Explicit - Openly shown
4. Implicit - Understood, although not clearly directed or shown
5. Reframing - the basic unit of learning. When a problem is solved or reframed, you come away with a new way to think of the world.

In terms of learning:

1. Explicit learning happens when the teacher or guide is working on increasing a skill or demand, through direct demonstration and exercise. Another way to look at it is, the teacher reframes an idea, or shows a new idea creating a new frame of reference.
2. Implicit learning happens when the student gets into the "flow" or the zone and has an ah ha insight or a number of insights. The student has a "cascade of insights" that leads to the reframing of problems thus leading to new learning and pattern recognition. 

Understanding the differences between these two types of learning, can really help keep students from the two major reasons for quitting on music, or any learning task for that matter. Those two major reasons for quitting or either too much anxiety, or too much boredom. 

Anxiety is occurs when one loses the ability to act on the world. It is very much different from fear, which is a direct result of a physical stimulus. There is a tiger in the room!! That's fear. Anxiety occurs when the demand overextend the skill level. The student with anxiety is unable to reframe a problem based on their current paradigms, and is no longer able to act. If you put a student in a state of anxiety, learning ceases to occur. 

Boredom is much easier to define. It is the state in which the skills a student has overextends the demands of the task. No learning can happen in this state because you are just operating in a static frame of reference, and its reframing that needs to occur for learning to be present. There is no ability here to find a problem to solve as you've already solved the problems. Its like getting stuck on level one of your video game after you have already beat the game. 

The place in between anxiety and boredom is the flow state, according to John Vervaeke and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I believe that the flow state is what musicians are always chasing after. Its a state where you are so fully engaged in a task that time stops mattering. You've made an intense connection with the art of sound. All musicians can get into this flow state, and I'm sure that if you are studying music, and reading this blog, you can relate to a time where you felt intensely connected to the creation of music. In these states, Csikszentmihalyi talks about a cascade of insights. You start taking all of the connections that you have found in music, and creatively arranging them, like solving little problems over and over again, which teaches you to implicitly predict the next set of problems and connections. This is a reframing that occurs in the flow state and for the artist or musician, is one of the most valuable learning experiences.

Practical Applications

There are several practical applications for applying this flow state as a musician or as a music teacher:

1. Helping students to understand how to get into a mindful flow state in practice will be one of the most valuable explicit lessons that can take place during instruction. The flow state naturally, or implicitly, teaches students to find patterns, recognize the patterns, sort the patterns and then apply the patterns. It is the application, or the testing of the new patterns that create the reframing that we are after in regards to learning. The big idea is to explicitly program some time for implicit learning in a lesson.
2. The flow state occurs only in a state that is balanced between anxiety and boredom. That means that as a teacher, or student, you need to recognize the demands of a task, and whether you have the skills to be able to meet the demands. What this should mean for teachers is getting to know your students. For learning objectives, its important to try and break them down into the skills necessary. Explicitly teach those skills, and then offer tasks in which the demands can be met in that flow state, so that the student will be able to practice them. The more these skills are broken down, the easier it is to be able to track and assess whether a student has the appropriate skills to meet the demands of the task. 
3. Sending students home to tackle a brand new task that is suppose to "build" on demands explicitly is going to cause the student to function alone in the state of anxiety. In that anxious state, no learning is going to be able to take place. If a student continues to be placed in this state, with the expectation that "practice makes perfect" success will not follow. In other terms, its best to say that "Perfect Practice makes Perfect."
4. The opposite can occur with homework to practice. Not recognizing when or how to increase the demands appropriately to the skill level will cause a perpetual state of boredom. If a student finds that practicing is "boring" (and I know that I have personally dealt with this) than as teachers, we need to reassess the objectives, the tasks, and the skills necessary, and the demands of the tasks. If you go to http://www.musicitup.com/#!resources/c1fzb  I have created an easy tracking chart for those objectives and tasks. I talk about the just right learning zone, which I believe is the concept of "flow" that Csikszentmihalyi advocates.

Here's a visual representation that can help you visualize this concept:

In conclusion, assessment drives your ability to understand the students' objectives, skill levels, and interests. This helps you, as a teacher or student, understand that lessons and practice need to include explicit learning, and most importantly, the implicit learning that occurs in the flow state. 

If you'd like to know more about this approach, and have access to exclusive downloadable resources for free please fill out the form below, and I will send these resources directly to you. You can also find the majority of these articles at www.musicitup.com.

Thank you for reading, and I hope that if you find value in the information here you share it with people that will also find value.

Chris Eakins
www.musicitup.com

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