Connect joy to learning. Or rather – don’t sever that connection. It’s the principle of – first: do no harm. And this joy is not a synonym for fun or amusement – not that there is anything wrong with either. The joy of learning is that deep and satisfying sense of personal accomplishment that comes with investigation and wonder. It is when you lose yourself in a task and forget the time. It’s about tenacity and effort and mastery. It is the state of being in what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls “flow”. It’s that sweet spot of learning, the zone of being on the edge of your discovery and pushing yourself to the next level.
What’s the purpose of school? If children just play the game of school and learning is not a source of personal satisfaction then think of the disservice we have done to children. The ability to learn and re-learn and keep learning is the key competency of the 21st century. So what happens when we shut children down and disconnect them from wonder, creativity, curiosity and natural love of learning?
The disengagement that is epidemic in high school starts much earlier. And if we actually believe in that cliche about the importance of lifetime learning then it must take joyful root in school. And when it does not, it should be a cause for alarm. For more on the disease see School Epidemic.
So what can schools do to make sure education and school are more of a joyful experience for more children? If the disease is disengagement and drudgery, boredom and failure here is a prescription for the cure – the headlines from an excellent article by Stephen Wolk in the latest Educational Leadership from ASCD
JOY 1: Find the Pleasure in Learning
JOY 2: Give Students Choice
JOY3: Let Students Create Things
JOY 4: Show Off Student Work
JOY 5: Take Time to Tinker
JOY 6: Make School Spaces Inviting
JOY 7: Get Outside
JOY 8: Read Good Books
JOY 9: Offer More Gym and Arts Classes
JOY 10: Transform Assessment
JOY 11: Have Some Fun Together
Teaching As a Joyful Experience
There’s more on each of these at Joy at School
Can I borrow this for GVHS? this is brilliant !
Of course. There is more on the ASCD link including a reminder of John Goodlad’s research “A Place Called School” that came out about the same time as “A Nation at Risk” – providing a wonderful counterpart to that controversy.
Let’s make a collection of references and quotations about the essential connection: joy and learning.
It’s all about ownership and who is at the center of the activity.
I just discovered this idiosyncratic and personal account of “supreme joy of learning”. It’s from Mortimer J. Adler’s essay:”The Joy of Learning”:
“Finally, I come to the pleasure which is for me the supreme joy of learning. I have already touched on it, but now I want to describe it more fully. It began for me when I was a small boy in the seventh grade. I had a teacher (I can remember him clearly to this day; his name was Mr. Duke, and he had one glass eye), a teacher who taught me how to construct outlines. For some reason which I do not fully understand, I developed a passion for outlining, and became extremely proficient at it. This ability has stayed with me all my life. All the lectures I have given were written in outline form. Most of the books I have written were first completely written in outline form be fore I turned them into ordinary expositions in which one paragraph follows another, without the structural elegance of an outline, in which every element occupies a special numbered position and is either supraordinate to, subordinate to, or coordinate with every other element. Once or twice I insisted upon keeping what I had written in outline form and compelled my publisher to bring the book out in that form, but I soon discovered that most people did not get as much pleasure from reading outlines (in fact, most people cannot read outlines) as I got from writing them.”
http://radicalacademy.com/adlerjoyoflearning.htm