Teaching for the Joy

Why do we not teach for the joy?

Simple.

What is:

• Standardize Testing
• Class Disclipline
• Content Curriculum
• How to survive a shooting
• DARE, Common Core
• differentiate our classroom
• Literacy

What are the effects of not being happy?

Are U.S. students happy at school?

The extent to which students are happy at school depends on whether we look at students in fourth or eighth grade. While about half of fourth graders (49 percent) say they are happy in school “all or most of the time,” 26 percent of eighth graders say this is so.

National Assessment of Educational Progess, (NAEP, 2017)

As positive psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth explain:

“If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about your social network – about your friends and family and the strength of the bonds with them.”

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"On this shared journey towards more joy in our work with children and teachers. For me, joyful teaching and learning starts with connection. Without connection, joy comes and goes but with it finding joy becomes sustainable."
--Katie Egan Cunningham--Facebook Response, October 2019

How do we make connections?

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert defines happiness as frequent positive feelings accompanied by an overall sense that one’s life has meaning.

“Happier students report positive relations with teachers,” Schliecher stated in a pre-webinar interview with the Alliance. “Students in ‘happy’ schools reported much greater support from their teachers than did students in ‘unhappy’ schools.”

Positive student-teacher relationships involve “[i]nteractions [that] are courteous and kind, and they focus on learning the material and building academic skills,”

--Carrie Furrer, a researcher from Portland State University and her co-authors
--2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

" John Goodlad's A Place Called School (1984). After finding an "extraordinary sameness" in our schools, Goodlad wrote, "Boredom is a disease of epidemic proportions. … Why are our schools not places of joy?" (p. 242).

A generation later, if you were to ask students for a list of adjectives that describe school, I doubt that joyful would make the list. The hearts and minds of children and young adults are wide open to the wonders of learning ...But school still manages to turn that into a joyless experience." --Ed Leadereship, Steven Wolk, 2008, Vol 66.

The best homes and schools are happy places. The adults in these happy places recognize that one aim of education (and of life itself) is happiness.

They also recognize that happiness serves both means and end. Happy children, growing in their understanding of what happiness is, will seize their educational opportunities with delight,

and they will contribute to the happiness of others. ...too often we forget this obvious connection.
(Noddings 2003: 261).

We need to put

The question we most commonly ask is the "what" question--what subjects shall we teach?

When the conversation goes a bit deeper, we ask the "how" question--what methods and techniques are required to teach well?

Occasionally, when it goes deeper still, we ask the "why" question--for what purposes and to what ends do we teach?

But seldom, if ever, do we ask the "who" question--who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form--or deform--the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world?

How can educational institutions sustain and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes?
(Parker Palmer 1998: 4)

How can knowing "who" I am as a teacher bring joy to me, my students, my work, my world?