It’s
true. I can’t give you the magic lesson or the simple trick that will make your
classroom a wonderfully joyful place.
I can, however, share what I think every teacher needs to do
to create a joyful learning environment for their students. (It's worth noting that these same elements will help you to create a more inclusive classroom.) Embracing these ways of thinking, teaching and living can
help you to build the kinds of lessons and experiences that can help your students (and you!) find
joy.
Be mindful.
Be flexible.
Be realistic.
Focus on relationships.
Pay attention to details.
Laugh often.
Forgive others.
Don’t give up in the face of adversity.
Forgive yourself.
Allow yourself to experience joy.
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How can
we build this kind of trust in our classrooms?
Rarely
use the word “wrong”
Students
need to know that you won’t press a buzzer every time they make a comment or
ask a question, no matter what. Accepting their errors and misgivings means
that you’ll get to know your students and their styles of learning. Also, you'll demonstrate the way that you will respond to questions. The
word "wrong" in a classroom is a non-starter and can inhibit further
participation. We have so many ways to say that an answer is incorrect without
using a word that leads a student to think, "I might as well not."
Don’t
just talk about trust, develop an atmosphere of trust
Talk about
yourself and your interests; become a person to your students. Take an honest
interest in their lives and demonstrate it by asking them about their
interests. Even better, remember what they are involved in and follow up after
a sports game or a special event. Have the students share the responsibility
for decorating your classroom; doing so shows that you trust their instincts,
their sense of design and their desire to contribute. Ensure that students
understand why they are doing assignments and that you are not just assigning
busywork. And wherever possible, involve them in classroom problem solving.
Demonstrate
emotional constancy
Being
emotionally constant earns students’ trust because they know you are under
control. Students will come to count on this constancy and begin to
demonstrate it themselves. Our goal is learning, not teacher-pleasing. Therefore
consider swapping phrases like, “I am disappointed in you” for, “The
expectation of this class is that you give it your best effort.”
Create
a joyful classroom
Bring
your energy, passion and humor into every learning environment. Laugh
together and share stories. Infuse art, drama, song & dance, suspense &
surprise and joy into all of your lessons. You can't directly teach joy, but you can cultivate it.
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I recently wrote about the difference
between joy and fun. I feel strongly that as a society we continue to conflate
the two, leading children and others to believe that fun is necessary or “required”
in order to experience joy. This is felt particularly keenly, I think, in the
world of education. Too many educators are spending their time figuring out
ways to make their lessons more fun rather than considering what would help
their students experience joy. As I shared in that last post, I don’t care if
my students have fun in my classroom.
By the way, I know that they often do have fun, because many
have told me as much. But I still don’t care. This is not my goal. My goal is
to find ways to help my students experience joy.
So I guess now you are expecting me to write a post that
will tell you how to do it. Nope. I can’t.
Because you can’t teach joy.
I can’t say, “Try this – it will bring joy to your students,”
or “This is a sure-fire technique to bring joy to any classroom”. The
experience of joy is a personal, individual experience. It is unique to each
person. No two students will experience joy in the same way, at the same time
or for the same reason. And even the same person won’t experience joy in the
same way twice – no matter how similar the circumstances.
So what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to make
it possible for our students to have such experiences if all of the variables
keep changing?
Here, my friends, is where the link between joy and being committed
to inclusion comes in. Helping children to experience joy will require an
individualized and nuanced approach based on meaningful goals and is dependent
upon a trusting relationship. Sound familiar? If you are committed to being
inclusive, you can be committed to helping students experience joy (and, I
believe, vice versa).
Just because you can’t teach joy, doesn’t mean you can’t
cultivate it.
Be mindful. Be deliberate. Focus on relationships. Be
flexible. Pay attention to detail. Breathe.
Most importantly, allow yourself to experience joy. Your
students will follow.
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Stumbling Block:
So often, when we have
conversations about the inclusion of people with disabilities in synagogue
life, the conversation turns to money. It is inevitable that well-meaning
leaders will wonder what accessibility and inclusion might mean for their
bottom line. Yet, when confronted with this concern, rather than rattling off
the items on my long list of affordable options, I have taken to responding
with a question of my own; “How can you afford to NOT be inclusive?” (Read more
about my thoughts on this in the two-part series Affording Inclusion). To be clear, when I use the word “afford” there is certainly a reference
to finances. But it is essential that we make inclusion a reality regardless of
our means. When I say we can’t afford to turn anyone away, it’s because I
believe, genuinely and wholeheartedly, that there is a place for every person
in the Jewish community. Those who argue that
inclusion is detrimental to the bottom line also tend to find it difficult to
consider building programs and making necessary accommodations for a seemingly
invisible population. Maybe you even find yourself thinking that you don’t need
to do these things because you don’t have anyone with disabilities in your
congregation. For argument sake, I will accept that notion (I really don’t. So
many disabilities are not
visible.), but if it’s true that your congregation has no members with
disabilities, then it begs the question, “Why not”?
Most individuals with disabilities
are not within our congregations because they can’t be – they are not
physically able to enter, they are not made to feel welcome, and their needs
are not met once they are there.
We must remember our moral imperative as Jews to make our synagogues fully
inclusive. Exclusion, intentional or not, causes us to be a less desirable
community. As we learn from Pirkei Avot: “Ben Azzai taught: Do not
disdain any person. Do not underrate the importance of anything for there
is no person who does not have his hour, and there is no thing without its
place in the sun.” Each one of us, created in God's image, has a gifts to offer
and a right to belong.
Isn't it time to make the
shift from wondering how we, as synagogues, camps and Jewish institutions, can
afford inclusion, to recognizing that exclusion costs us so much more?
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As
we celebrate the life of a man deeply committed to equality for all
people, I can't help but think of the ways in which his impact can be felt by those
who love, support and advocate for people with disabilities.
I
challenge you to think deeply about how the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. can inspire and shape your
inclusive practice.
"Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
"Our
lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
If
you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then
crawl, but whatever you do keep moving forward."
"I
have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."
We
can quote MLK Jr. today, but how will we be doing his work tomorrow?
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I think about joy a lot; which is likely why I chose it as my focus for a year of blogging. That, and
because I actually want to be thinking about it more. I think about what joy is, what
it isn’t, how to find it and how to tune in so that we can truly experience it.
It’s not as simple as you might think.
Let’s clear something up. Joy and fun are not the same
thing. One might experience joy when one is having fun. Or maybe not. But
simply having a good time and doing something that is fun is not automatically
going to mean that you will experience joy.
I think people confuse these ideas a great deal. It’s a lot
like the way people confuse the concepts of fairness and equality (read about my
ideas on that if you are curious).
Fun is defined as “enjoyment, amusement, or
lighthearted pleasure”. I think it is worth noting that some synonyms suggested
are enjoyment, entertainment, amusement and pleasure. Not joy.
Joy is “a feeling of great pleasure and happiness”.
And while there is overlap in the use of the word “pleasure” in these
definitions, you should note that the various synonyms - delight, bliss, glee,
elation, euphoria, rejoicing, exultation, happiness and exhilaration - make no
mention of “fun” or “having fun”.
And yet, one of the things I hear A LOT as a school director
surrounds the notion of having fun. In particular, because I run a supplemental
(part-time) religious school, I have listened to many discussions over the
years about finding ways to make school “fun” for students. I suppose the
concept there is that if it is fun, kids will want to come and therefore, by
some magical osmosis, if they want to be there AND they have fun when they are there,
then, by default, they will learn. Ugh.
Students say, “This is boring, why can’t we just have fun?”
Parents ask, “What can you do to make religious school fun
for my child?”
Teachers say, “I need ideas to make my lessons more fun.”
It’s a terrible cycle, actually. The kids complain so the
parents do, too. Or worse, the parents bring their own baggage to the game
(yup, we are a faith-based school after all) and recall that they didn’t
have fun and assume (you know what they say about assuming, right?) that their
kids won’t have fun, either. So we end up with teachers who figure that
if they make their lessons more fun no one will complain. Again, ugh.
Here’s the thing folks. Fun isn’t joy.
And here is a revelation. I don’t really care if my students
are having fun. (GASP!) I want my students to experience joy. I want my
students to connect to something we do or discuss or argue about in a way that
makes them feel elated, exhilarated and gleeful. I want them to have a moment
(or many moments) that they experience in their whole bodies, in their souls
and that sticks with them long after they have left my classroom.
It’s time to move away from fun. We need to figure out what we
can do to help our students experience joy.
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One
of the things that I am asked to do most often when training teachers or teens
in ways to become more inclusive is to share specific activities that can be
replicated in the classroom. I believe that some of the most important
activities for those who want to be more inclusive involve teaching the difference between fairness and equality and teaching the value of diversity. Here is another simple activity to teach the value
of diversity to students of any age.
Teach
Diversity Using Oranges
1.Give each student an orange.
2.Direct each student to study their orange carefully
by sight, touch, smell, etc.
3.Put all of the oranges into a bag or a box and
shake it up.
4.Dump out all of the oranges into one contained
space.
5.Direct each person to find their orange. When everyone has found theirs, they return with it to their seats.
6.Have students explain how they knew which orange
was theirs.
7.Make a point to highlight the unique features they
identify, noting that each of us has them, too.
The
conversation around this activity will be most rich when teachers use it as a
jumping off point for students to share their own gifts and imperfections. There is also the potential for an interesting conversation around the last few to find their oranges and why this happened.
Finally, this
activity could be easily extended by adding an art project, using it as an introduction to teach colors or foods in Hebrew, cooking something
with the oranges (what a great way to connect this to an Israel lesson - Jaffa oranges!) and/or creating a classroom bulletin board.
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