The Living Beast

The living beast is a heightened state of collective learning. When the beast emerges, Diana and her students are immersed in the “magic” of learning. While Diana plays a role in bringing about this process, she says she cannot control it. She says it is bigger than she is. In fact, she becomes part of the beast, as do her students. The beast has a life of its own:

There is just this magical chemistry that happens, and you can’t predict when it’s going to be. The frequency, I would say, is at least four days out of five, at least one of my classes will run very smoothly and you’ll really feel that magic. But it’s not every class, every day; it’s not every class on a particular day. It’s a living, breathing thing that evolves, so you can’t predict it with accuracy. Even if you set up the environment to create that magic, it doesn’t always happen. And sometimes when you think it’s going to be the worst day and you just wish you wouldn’t even have stepped out of bed, things go wonderfully well, and that’s the type of thing that really keeps you wanting to teach.

While this description may seem strange, in this book you will read other, similar descriptions. Many of the teachers we interviewed spoke of this process but struggled to describe it. Powerful practice seems to be associated with this elusive process of emergent, collective learning.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a psychologist who studied individual learning at its peak. He identified something he called the flow state. Individuals enter the flow state when they have a clear goal. In pursuing the goal, the person gets immediate feedback, knows how he or she is doing, and understands how to adjust to stay on target. Flow tends to occur when the person feels challenged but skilled. Csikszentmihalyi writes:

When goals are clear, feedback relevant, and challenges and skills are in balance, attention becomes ordered and fully invested. Because of the total demand on psychic energy, a person in flow is completely focused. There is no space in consciousness for distracting thoughts, irrelevant feelings. Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. The sense of time is distorted: hours seem to pass by in minutes. When a person’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification. In the harmonious focusing of physical and psychic energy, life finally comes into its own.

In this elevated state of learning, people flourish. Flow can occur during a variety of activities, including writing, playing a sport, or doing surgery.

When Diana talks about the dance that gives rise to the “living beast” in her classroom, the focus is not on individual learning. It is on collective learning. The living beast is a process of group flow. To facilitate the emergence of this dynamic state, Diana takes the pulse of her students: “You have to constantly read the kids; you have to read their receptiveness; you have to read their interest; you have to read their current condition as they come into your room …. You read that through their body language, their facial expressions, their conversation with you, their eye contact. So I read that constantly. I’m checking their pulse all the time.”

The capacity to read each student as the group is focused on even higher levels of learning is another example of working across quadrants. When there is some degree of structure from the red quadrant, and the trust of the yellow quadrant is deeply intertwined with the focus and the tenacity of the blue quadrant, the magic of the green quadrant may emerge. Collective flow gives rise to creative collaboration. Learning is co-created. Living in such a community may be a key to the acceleration of learning reflected in high value-added scores.