When focusing is easy, so might be balance

Over the past few weeks, we have twice written about the mental state known as flow, its ability to elicit high levels of concentration with ease and the implications that has for how we teach movement. Today we have an anecdote that builds on this same line of thinking.

As a brief recap, in the first of our two previous posts we spoke about how we observed that a certain movement challenge very regularly caught and held the attention of children in our autism program. In the second I think discussed flow in the context of my not yet two-year-old daughter learning to do puzzles.

So, what have we noticed recently that will use today to build on these discussions?

The other week we were working with one of the children in our autism program. He is a boy under 7 years of age. He’s very playful. While playing a movement game with him we snuck in a low balance beam (strictly speaking it was a cricket bat lying on the ground!). We weren’t sure how he would go with it, but as soon as he came to the bat he slowed down and showed great control walking across it. The next week we returned with a proper balance beam and lo-and-behold he balanced across it with good control as well. That’s interesting, but it’s not actually what this story is about. It’s what his mum told us next that makes this story.

The boy’s mum saw him balancing walking along the beam and we commented on how well he was doing. She then said something along the line of ‘yes, he’s really good at that sort of balance, but if you ask him to stand on one leg, he really struggles’. We then test this, and she was right. Ask him to stand on one leg and he struggles.

But here’s the thing. In course of walking along the balance beam he was occasionally needing to pause to catch his balance, and he was often doing that on one leg. What’s more he was doing it quite successfully. Not perfectly, but with reasonable success.

Ask him to balance on one leg and he couldn’t, but if he needed to do it while on the beam to catch his balance and he could with reasonable, but not perfect, success. And this is where this story ties back into focus.

It’s our hypothesis that this boy can balance on one leg, but only if it’s during a task that has already caught his attention. Asking him to balance on one leg doesn’t seem to catch his attention, but if it pops up by accident when he’s already engaged balancing on a beam and he might just be able to do it!

So, what’s the lesson for us all?

The lesson from this little anecdote is probably this. For us, or anyone else assessing the movement abilities of children it seems increasingly important that we ask ourselves “has this task caught the child’s attention?” If it has, then we’re probably accurately assessing whatever movement ability that task was designed to assess, but if it hasn’t, then it’s more likely that all that we’re assessing is to what extent they can be bothered focusing on a task they don’t really want to be doing. That might be a useful thing to assess, but it’s certainly not the same thing as their movement ability!

Jack Mullaly