Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 63: Joy factor
Building student motivation and trust

The finest teachers offer up the work of learning to students with generous servings of joy expressed through passion, enthusiasm, humor, and the like—not necessarily as the antidote to work but because those are some of the primary ways that work gets done—and just possibly because work, done right, can evoke joy. The classroom can and should be a joyful place and a few points of emphasis and understanding can help bring that to the fore in a sustainable and productive way. This is beneficial to achievement as well. A place where students (and teachers) feel satisfaction, gratification, and happiness is also likely to be a place where they work hard and persist, learn more, and are just possibly more creative. A bit of Joy Factor can help make yours not just a happy classroom but a high-achieving one.

Joy is complex, though—it can take a surprisingly wide array of forms. It can (but need not) involve singing or dancing, but it can just as easily be quiet: the pleasure of doing a challenging problem well, or as a team, or of seeing your work praised by your classmates. It is experienced by individuals and in small or large groups—for the most part, it is enhanced by sharing in some ways with others, which makes it ideal for classrooms. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor discusses research on three component elements of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. We are happy when we find pleasure, but happiness goes well beyond that. We are happy when we are connected and when we perceive ourselves to be doing something important. “People who pursue only pleasure experience only part of the benefits happiness can bring while those who pursue all three routes lead the fullest lives,” Achor continues. Pleasure, engagement, and meaning: all three should be the foci of our efforts to make our classrooms joyful places.

Let me start by drawing a small distinction between joy and fun.⁴ I don't draw this distinction to rule out fun in the classroom. Fun is part of joy. But joy is broader than fun. And seeking fun as a purpose rather than joy in learning can lead us astray and so deserves caution. Let me explain both of those ideas.

In distinguishing joy from fun, one teacher wrote me to emphasize the feeling of joy brought about by “the feeling of success after hard work” and the “celebration of success, both individual and collective,” not to mention “a bit of awe and wonder—experiencing something new and amazing.”⁵

Two powerful sources of joy that I have discussed elsewhere in this book are belonging and flow. Belonging is an intense feeling of membership in group. Inclusion in groups was maybe the single most important factor in our evolutionary success as a species. Those who were able to join with, collaborate in, and maintain membership with groups survived. Those that weren't, didn't. We evolved to be intensely sensitive to the status of our own membership. “Belonging feels like it happens from the inside out, but in fact it happens from the outside in,” writes Daniel Coyle in The Culture Code. But, he adds, people don't just need to hear once that they are included; they need to receive signals over and over, to be happy. Belonging, according to Coyle, is “a flame that needs to be continually fed by signals of safe connection.”

We often feel the greatest joy when we feel belonging. This perhaps is why singing, in particular choral singing, is part of practically every culture on earth and specifically a feature of worship in those cultures. When we sing together we affirm that we all know the words, literally and metaphorically, and show our ability to coordinate. We subsume our own yearnings in the group. Done even briefly this can have a profound effect on us, which is especially worth remembering in the midst of the most individualistic society in the world. The wholeness and joy of belonging that our evolutionary self requires is something [or the thing, or the one thing] that our rational self is most likely to overlook or even scorn.

This is something we can unlock in the classroom. Singing is an obvious example. Watch the joy in the faces of Nicole Warren's students as they start their class signing a math song they know by heart (see Nicole Warren: Keystone). It's everything a part of us is socialized to scorn: rote, ritual, memorized, familiar to the point of repetitive. And yet the students are clearly happy. (Note also the joy in their faces at the end of the video when Nicole circulates and helps them to see their accomplishments.) Note that the gestures emphasize the chorality of the experience—people love to “know the moves,” and here knowing the moves is visible and so therefore is the belonging. Our own math song is even better than one lots of people know; we all know the words and can voice in unison something other people don't know about. Knowing things others don't know or aren't aware of is a key to belonging.

Music can be a source of joy even when it is not choral. It is unclear why, but every culture on earth sings and creates music. They use those things to define themselves. Some evolutionary biologists suggest that singing predated language as we know it—that before we had words we had music, which allowed us to express emotion and urgent information over distance. We sang ourselves into battle or into comfort afterwards, and this is wired into us. We have evolved with a proclivity for music, so we can assume it had evolutionary benefit in some way and that we evolved to take pleasure in it.

You can hear snippets of song throughout some of the videos in this book, such as Summer Payne in Cold Call singing, “individual tur-urns listen for your na-ame,” or Christine Torres in Format Matters singing, “don't turn to the wall ’cuz the wall don't care.” And every time you use Call and Response (technique 35) you are in fact using a sort of simple chanting: together in one voice, you are saying, we all belong.

So singing, especially shared songs, can be a source of joy. But it can also remind us of how profound coordinated activity is to building a sense of belonging. Even sharing the experience together of hearing a text read aloud or reading a text aloud together as a group (see technique 24, FASE Reading), taking turns and bringing a whole to life through our efforts as individuals can awaken this feeling—the construction of a whole in which we subsume our individuality briefly and emerge gratified and infused with a sense of belonging and meaning.

Knowing “what to do” makes us feel as if we belong. Perhaps this explains the unexpected happiness students sometimes exude in learning the routines of the classroom. We think we're teaching a tool for efficiency but students are receiving a signal that they belong. Done well, known routines and choral behaviors can be the seeds of membership.

Several pages back, now, I also mentioned “flow” and this too is critical to understanding the difference between joy and fun: We like to lose ourselves in a challenging activity that sweeps us up in its momentum. We are often happiest when this happens. Any coach will tell you that one of the biggest teaching challenges in a sports setting is breaking the flow. You blow the whistle to talk about how the defense should be positioned and after a few seconds you start to see a gradual lurking frustration: We want to play, Coach; please stop talking so we can play. This reminds us that the core activity and its design are critical and that when they are well designed, joy is powerful because it is sprinkled in small moments—playful, silly, absurd, expressing belonging—that come and go quickly enough to augment and work in synergy with the sense of flow.

Consider how Christine Torres drops quick humorous comments into her lesson. The vocabulary word is “caustic” and the Turn and Talk asks students to engage an inside joke: “Imagine Ms. Torres is a contestant on American Idol; what's a ’caustic’ remark a judge might make about her singing?” Don't be silly, she adds, he would never make a caustic remark about Ms. Torres's singing. Maybe you see the belonging cues there: Ms. Torres's talent as a singer is an ongoing discussion, a sort of inside joke you would only get if you were in her class. But also note the speed of it. It’s a quick laugh that preserves the sense of flow. The joy students feel comes as much from their engaged study of the vocabulary as it does from the joke. Christine’s humor sits off stage and comments amusingly on the main action, but the lesson is still the star. Nicole Warren's math song works because it is fast. It would be half as joyful if it were twice as long.

This, I think, is another reason why it's important to differentiate joy from fun. We can play Jeopardy! to review during class today and that will be fun, but interestingly it may not also be joyful unless we engineer it well so that it is designed for flow. We can all recall the “fun” activity we designed that sparked no joy because the flow wasn't there or because the group dynamics didn't work well. And while we're at it, please recognize that the word “fun” can distract us. Most young people have fun when they play video games—though interestingly I am not sure they are joyful, perhaps because the degree of connection and belonging is missing. You can refer to “having fun” by itself but you don't “have joy” by itself. You take joy or feel joy in doing something. “Joy” is clearer on purpose than “fun.” It has meaning and engagement.

In a recent social media post I asked teachers for insights on how they thought about joy in the classroom. How did they create “productive joy”? I asked. I used the phrase to stress the idea that what we sought was joy that served learning. That seemed obvious to me. “Sounds controlling,” one skeptic responded. She wanted to know why I felt the need to make it “productive” and to dictate the terms of someone else's happiness. But I hope it is obvious to the great majority of teachers that the goal is to achieve joy in the tasks of learning. If we don't seek to make joy a cause of as much learning as possible and the maximum amount of learning joyful, we have lost our way. But of course there is the risk that the fun runs away from us and we forget that it is there to serve the learning. Happily it is not only possible to do both, but the goals are just possibly synergistic. People generally like learning things. Don't play Jeopardy! unless it is rigorous enough to support learning, but also know that if it is challenging and engaging, joy will be more likely to arise from it.

Let me apply the conversation about flow and belonging to an additional source of classroom joy: humor is immensely beneficial to creating joy—we almost always smile when we laugh, and we often remember the joke forever (see note 7 in this chapter for an example). But small recurring inside jokes are especially powerful because of the way they maximize belonging and flow: Christine Torres joking about her excellent singing; a nickname for a character in history (one teacher called Orsino in Twelfth Night “wet wipe” because he was so spineless compared to the female leads in the play⁶); or consider my high school history teacher, Mr. Gilhool, who was the master of the inside joke: he (and soon we) always referred to the city of “Amsterdarn” to civilize its “vulgar” name; he dramatized Count von Schlieffen on his deathbed advising Bismarck “to keep the West strong” and afterwards anytime anyone mentioned World War I military tactics, Gilhool would remind us of von Schlieffen's words with a brief dramatization (except in cases where we remembered to do it first).

These jokes all happened in less than a second. That was part of the fun. Mr. Gilhool was also teaching with substance and pace while the inside jokes were coming at you fast, so you had to be paying attention or you'd miss the moment when he made a brief motion like he was weighing something on scales when he mentioned any philosopher's name,⁷ which was why everyone around you was laughing. (See note 7 for an explanation.) Part of what made Mr. Gilhool great was that we were learning a ton and part of it was getting the joke. These things were synergistic; so were the memory aspects. For what it's worth I still sometimes say “Amsterdarn” to this day and more importantly I still remember the Schlieffen Plan. Humor is powerful, especially when it is used in the service of learning via small recurring inside jokes.⁸

I'd like to make mention of the importance with Joy Factor of “being you.” I could probably come up with a few inside jokes—my children might weigh in on the small likelihood of their being funny—but I cannot and could not sing. Which is important to recognize and respect. No singing for some of us. Steer carefully with humor if you can't pull it off.

I mention this also because I'm about to discuss a video of a teacher who is brilliant at what he does and when I watch him I know I could not do those things. Joyful things are hard to force. The message of the video Darren Hollingsworth: Rabble is that enthusiasm matters. Enthusiasm can look a lot of ways. It doesn't have to be as extroverted as Darren's but his is certainly magic to listen to. He's greeting students passing in the hallway and at the Threshold (see technique 47) before class at Great Yarmouth Academy in Great Yarmouth, England. His banter is priceless. Consider the student to whom he says, “Are you Mr. Pellow's brother?” He's new to the school and suddenly feels known, picked out of the mass of students in the hallway, called a “top man.” (But also, à la Warm/Strict, reminded that “Yes, sir” is the proper response to an adult.⁹) The students are greeted joyfully, playfully, warmly, individually, and by name as they enter. Stopped and called—tongue in cheek—“a rabble” because the line is not tidy, but they're also expected to fix the line and come in properly. There's joy and there's high expectation and regularly the twain shall meet.

Most people can't be Darren but everyone can find a version of themselves that evokes a unique form of joy. And it's worth remarking on the power of the happiness whatever form it takes. “Students primed to feel happy before taking math tests far outperformed their neutral peers,” Shawn Achor writes in the Happiness Advantage. “Our brains are wired to work best when we are happy.” So simply smiling, and saying, “I think you'll enjoy this lesson today,” can be almost as good a starting point.