I admit I’m a little wary of the phrase, “centering student joy.” Don’t get me wrong: I think classrooms should be joyful. It’s not OK when school is a dull, lonely, exhausting, or threatening place—as it is for too many students. At the same time, we need to make sure that “centering student joy” doesn’t become code for using food, games, parties, trips, field days, prize bins, free time, and other pleasures to (sometimes literally) sweeten what is overall a bland or bitter experience.
Setting aside time for joyful activities can remind us that joy is a worthwhile endeavor, and that school should be a site of joy. However, making joy its own activity sends students the message that joy exists separate and apart from the “real” business of school—their classes. Creating fun activities can also make us feel like we’ve done something to promote joy (because we have done something) and the resulting sense of accomplishment might keep us from doing more. That doesn’t make us lazy box-checkers; the normal response to satiation is to stop, as when we stop eating when we’re no longer hungry. To maintain that hunger for centering student joy, let’s explore what centering student joy truly means, one word of that phrase at a time.
Centering Student Joy
Centering joy means making joy part of students’ central work at school: learning. We’re not canceling classes so students can do other things that bring joy; we’re making joy part of the classroom experience. We’re also not relegating joy to a playful check-in at the beginning of class or a one-minute dance party at the end. Joy shouldn’t be a tool we use to hook students into learning, or a treat we give students as a reward for learning; it should be a quality of learning. Our job is to design experiences that invite and enable students to find joy in their learning. That means using
- materials that help students see themselves reflected in their learning and encounter unfamiliar ideas and perspectives;
- rituals that help students understand where they are in their learning, where they are going, and why it matters;
- prompts that help students relate their learning to themselves or bring themselves to their learning;
- discussion structures that enable all students to make meaningful contributions, listen to and value one another, and build community in the process of learning together;
- assignments that ask students to create things that not only will serve as assessment evidence but also are important to them personally and in the world;
- protocols that structure collaboration so that every student in a group gives something to the group and gains something from the group, and so that what the group creates is more than the sum of the individual contributions; and
- reflection tools that have students evaluate their actions and interactions not only to assess their progress and set goals, but also to acknowledge their relationships with and within the learning community.
We should also remember that learning itself presents many opportunities for joy: the joy of discovery, the joy of improvement, the joy of accomplishment, the joy of self-expression, and the joy of self-making. Celebrating these moments—not necessarily with a party or ceremony but by simply noticing and naming them—amplifies students’ sense of satisfaction and increases the likelihood that they’ll work for these joyful moments in the future.
We’re not canceling classes so students can do other things that bring joy; we’re making joy part of the classroom experience.
Centering Student Joy
Joy is personal. The activities that tend to bring me joy, such as hiking and experimental cooking, might not bring you joy. Joy is also highly contextual. An activity that brought me joy in a certain time or place, or with a certain set of people, might not bring me joy under other circumstances. High school me loved roller coasters, but 48-year-old me gets queasy just thinking about them; cooking shows bring me joy except when I get interrupted trying to watch them.
Because joy is personal and contextual, we can’t assume everyone will think the “fun game” we planned is actually fun or want to read about football just because they enjoy playing it. What we can do is create opportunities for students to choose how they approach their learning, because they’ll experience joy when their chosen actions match their values.
When our goal is for students to understand a particular concept (such as plate tectonics or immigration patterns), we can create choice by having students select a learning tool, strategy, or modality. For example, to learn about immigration, students might have the option to watch a documentary, read an article, or visit an online exhibit. They might decide among drawing, choreographing, sculpting, or animating the various types of tectonic plate interactions. In cases like these, they can choose a task that brings them joy and learn the material in the process.
However, when our goal is for students to learn how to complete a particular task (such as collecting data or writing an essay), we must give an assignment that has everyone complete that particular task. When we must give everyone the same assignment, we can make that assignment specific enough that students can visualize the process and its outcome, yet broad enough that students can find their own ways to connect meaningfully to the work. For example, asking students to write an essay arguing for or against installing solar panels on the school roof might be too narrow of an assignment, as some students might have strong opinions but others might not know or care enough to connect to the topic. However, if we are too vague with parameters—such as if we ask students to write an essay arguing for or against anything—students might struggle to identify a meaningful or relevant topic. The trick is to meet students somewhere in the middle: Ask them to write an essay arguing for or against a behavior their caregiver thinks is important. When the assignment is both clearly defined and broadly relatable, all students are likely to find something meaningful to write about.
Whatever the goal, we and our students can co-construct definitions of success so that our rubrics include criteria based on established learning objectives alongside criteria based on the individual student’s interests, strengths, and values.
People don’t always choose what’s most important to them in the long term. We can expect some of our students to choose what seems easy, comfortable, or pleasant in the moment. If we want them to experience the joy and vitality that comes with making choices consistent with their values, we need to teach them how. For instance, we can encourage values-based topic selection by having students generate a long list of potential topics, articulate a personal connection to each one, and rate the strength of those personal connections before deciding which topic they’ll research or write about. To encourage task selection, we can ask students to identify and reflect on tasks that might be appealing in the present moment, useful for their future growth, and different from what they’ve done in the past before deciding which task they’ll complete.
These and other strategies from my book Teach for Authentic Engagement (ASCD, 2023) structure the choosing process so students can discover what matters to them. Ultimately, though, they’re the ones who make those decisions. The best we can do is to keep offering students opportunities to choose and ask questions about their experiences so they notice the deeper and more lasting joy of values-based action.
Our emotions tell us what we value, and the stronger the emotion, the greater the value.
Centering Student Joy
Joy is an emotion—one of many—and we aren’t truly centering student joy if we don’t honor the full range of emotions that comes with being human. To begin an honest conversation about joy, we can ask ourselves about the emotions students already feel:
- Which emotions are predominant in my classroom?
- Which emotions are present but not predominant?
- Which emotions are nearly or entirely absent?
This isn’t to say uncomfortable emotions such as worry, frustration, and embarrassment are bad. Emotions mean something important is at stake: We feel worried when something important might be taken away, frustrated when we struggle to do something important, and embarrassed when we’ve failed to do something important. Our emotions tell us what we value, and the stronger the emotion, the greater the value. If students feel only mild emotions in their classrooms, there’s nothing happening that truly matters to them. Aware of this, we might further reflect:
- How strong are the emotions my students feel in my classroom?
- How do I help my students connect the emotions they experience in my classroom to the communities, events, and ideas that matter to them?
We can teach our students (and ourselves) to notice, name, honor, and learn from the full range of their emotions, not only in social-emotional learning programs, but also in class, which is and should be a source of many different feelings. When we take the time to ask students how our curriculum and instructional processes make them feel, and what those feelings can tell them about their own values, we show that emotional experiences—including joy—are worth centering.
Finally, we limit what it means to center joy if we don’t remember that people can feel multiple emotions at the same time. Joy is often a component of other, more complex emotions, and sometimes we have names for those combinations—or what I call joy hybrids. For example:
- Delight is a combination of joy and surprise.
- Amusement involves both joy and disgust.
- Awe involves both joy and fear.
- Confidence is a combination of joy and trust.
- Contentment is a different combination of joy and trust.
- Exhilaration is joyful excitement.
- Inspiration is another kind of joyful excitement.
- Nostalgia is a mix of joy and sadness.
- Vindication is a mix of joy and anger.
Joy is personal and contextual, but if we expand our thinking about what joy is, we might imagine more ways to elicit joy in our classrooms for more of our students. We might start looking for how pure joy and joy hybrids show up in our classrooms (a “joy audit,” if you will). If we look at teaching and learning with a joy lens, what practices might we adjust? What practices might we more fully recognize and appreciate? Which colleagues might we more fully recognize and appreciate for the ways they elicit student joy?
Reflecting on our work in these ways helps remind us that student joy is not a reward for learning, or a break from learning, or a certain type of learning. Joy is intrinsic to learning itself—and centering our students’ joy as we design their experiences can even make our own work more joyful.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ What does “centering student joy” mean to you? Which word in that phrase feels the most important to you and why?
➛ How might you conduct a “joy audit” in your classroom or school?
Teach for Authentic Engagement
Strategies, tools, and classroom anecdotes that help students authentically engage with the content, with their work, and with each other.
