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Monday
Sep222008

Joy in the classroom

DateMonday, September 22, 2008 at 08:21PM

Steven Wolk begins his article, "Joy in School" (Educational Leadership,Sept 08) with a great quote:

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win the ability to read and write, if in the process the individual lose his own soul? - John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938

and goes on to ask

If the experience of "doing school" destroys children's spirit to learn, their sense of wonder, their curiosity about the world, and their willingness to care about the human condition, have we succeeded as educators, no matter how well our students do on standardized tests?

Mr. Wolk is my kinda educator. He writes that the following essentials can bring joy to students' school experience.

  1. Find the Pleasure in Learning
  2. Give Students Choice
  3. Let Students Create Things
  4. Show Off Student Work
  5. Take Time to Tinker
  6. Make School Spaces Inviting
  7. Get Outside
  8. Read Good Books
  9. Offer More Gym and Arts Classes
  10. Transform Assessment

Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote Designing Research Projects Students and Teachers Love. I am still as proud of that article as of anything I've written before or since, and it echos many of Wolk's points.

Education that is not enjoyable is a dead end street - learning on a subject will stop as soon as a child is out of range of the educational institution.

How do you bring joy to learning in your classroom, library or computer lab?

Does your school worry about increasing joy as much as it does increasing test scores? (And might there be a relation between the two???)




AuthorDoug Johnson | Comment7 Comments |

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Reader Comments (7)

'How do you bring joy to learning in your classroom, library or computer lab?'

If I could amend your question, Doug, I would substitute joy for engagement.

I wouldn't say that all learning is necessarily joyful. Personally if I am engaged in the topic at hand, time flies and I am consumed by my pursuits.

What's important is providing students with meaningful engaging activities: effective anticipatory activities, graphic organizational opportunities, energizing collaboration, modelled reading, and writing with a purpose.

Equip students with the dynamic learning skills necessary to pursue life long quests.

They'll forget the content but remember the fire.

September 23, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterPaul C.

Doug,

Thanks for posting this, and for the link to the article from 1999. We look at so many factors when we look at how to improve our schools: assessment, engagement, curriculum, technology. But we rarely look at the most basic of factors: do they dig it? Will Richardson posted about some of the experiences he remembers as he went through school, and the most memorable for him were the ones in which he had the choice to demonstrate his learning in manner of his choosing. We all need to understand that we can teach our students to show us their learning in a format that is not standardized.

We have created a class in our middle school that focuses on critical thinking and writing and we stress that the teachers create assignments that are atypical in their outcome. If the students are expecting to write an essay as the culminating activity, flip it and ask them to create a cartoon, or a chart, or some other non-linguistic representation to show their learning. As we move forward, we plan on really giving students choice in showing us the links between their classes.

Joy, as Paul states above, does not have to be the unbridled kind that we read about or watch in teacher movies, but rather can be that deep engagement that overcomes us as we become immersed in a project that just has to get done.

September 23, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterPatrick

Thanks for these thoughts Doug:
I become more and more worried that we focus so much on testing that we lose the joy of learning - I see a parallel in our teachers and staff - some of them seem to get so busy and so stressed with jumping through all the hoops and doing all the DIBELS testing etc. that they don't have the joy of learning something new. In a recent discussion with a frazzled staff member, I pointed out that if she took 10 minutes to learn to do the task she was trying to do in a different way, it would save her hours over the school year - the response; "I don't have time to learn anything new". (She called back 2 days later to apologize )

September 24, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterTim Staal

@ Hi Paul,

Perhaps it is just semantics, but I see "engagement" as subset of "joy" - just one of the things that make a classroom environment a happy place.

This is by no means dismissing engagement as something of little importance. I've written about the importance of engagement myself.

http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/columnists/johnson/johnson026.shtml

I like the rest of your list as well. Would that my own kids have had you as a teacher!

Doug

@ Hi Patrick,

I like your approach to alternative means of how students can demonstrate their learning. Combine that with formative, authentic student-designed assessments!

And yes, joy has many appearances.

Thanks for the comment,

Doug

@Hi Tim,

I suspect a joyful learning environment for students would create one for their instructors as well.

Where is the subversive spirit that teachers once demonstrated? So many buy into this bogus over-reliance on testing as a measurement of good teaching.

I suppose it is a good thing that I am closer to the end of my career in education than the beginning.

All the best,

Doug

September 24, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterDoug Johnson

I thought your post and the article were great. I also wrote a blog post about it and it will be posted tomorrow so I was thrilled to see this one come up in my Google Reader. Glad we are on the same wavelength.

September 24, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterPat

Thanks, Pat. I look forward to reading your post.

Doug

September 25, 2008 | Registered CommenterDoug Johnson

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