Harnessing Joy in the Service of Learning

We all need more joy in our classrooms—not toxic positivity or circumstantial happiness, but deep, sustaining joy for teachers and students.

One day, my first-grade art teacher was passing out scissors and gave me the pair for left-handed students, since I am left-handed. She watched as I mistakenly put the scissors on my right hand before snatching them off my hand and giving me the right-handed scissors. I tried to use them on my left hand. The construction paper wouldn’t cut, so I tried with my right hand. I still couldn’t make the scissors work. Nothing escaped my art teacher, who eventually saw me crying in frustration and sent me into the hall.

After what seemed like hours as I sat on the floor against the cinder-block wall, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Taylor, walked by. She took me by the hand and walked me back to our classroom before asking what had happened. Through squelched sobs, I told her. She enfolded me in a hug, then did something that blew my first-grade mind: She broke adult and teacher code and said that what my art teacher did was wrong.

Because Mrs. Taylor was patient and perceptive, she eventually figured out that I was dealing with dyslexia. After a summer of practice, I was reading on grade level by the time I made it to second grade.

Joy is not freedom from struggle; joy is the fuel that allows us to struggle well. In fact, the depth of the struggle often determines the peak of the joy.

To get more classroom joy, we need to return to the ABCs: adversity, belonging, and curiosity. When we do hard things with others, we realize that we matter and that others matter to us. As we learn that we matter, we can become more curious about others in an increasingly incurious world.

Adversity

We do not want kids to experience trauma, but we do want to invite them into doing hard things with others. We need to help reframe adversity as an invitation into joy. We have never lived in a better time to be in education, as we know more about how people learn and have more tools than ever before. However, there have also never been more shortcuts available to students.

Students might be happy with an A on a paper that ChatGPT wrote for them, but that is not joy. A great educator I know from Vancouver, British Columbia, Darren Spyksma, leads a professional learning exercise where teachers of different grade levels take note cards, divide them in half, and place things below the line that could use AI (e.g., revision, grammar checks, ideation) and things above that should not (e.g., grading, initial drafts, science labs).

This can differ by school and even educator, but getting clear on how we want to struggle productively requires parameters on when and how to use tools like AI and when we want students’ humanity to shine. In my classes, we use eight-step feedback that puts the work on the students. They will develop three “final drafts” of their work, and as a teacher, I do not look at it until they have completed two of those drafts. This kind of adversity leads to excellence.

Belonging

Belonging is what we all long for—the idea that we matter and others matter to us. In 2025, 72 percent of teens reported using a chatbot for companionship. This is a dead end, as we are made for human connections.

Since 2024, we have been working with schools in rural Mississippi to reduce substance use/misuse, and one of our primary levers for this is ensuring that each student belongs. We survey students at the beginning and end of the year to determine their relative feedback, engagement, and well-being. We ask if they have a best friend in school. If they do not, schools have built intentional mentoring groups to connect those students with a mentor or others.

A teacher meets with a small group of students during an advisory, with special attention given to the kids who report not having a friend. This helps teachers and other students create opportunities where connection is more likely. Kids in these groups begin to realize that they matter and are missed if they are gone. After surveying over 50,000 teachers and students in five countries, we see schools making progress as increasing numbers of students are reporting that they “experience joy by doing hard things” in class.

Curiosity

We need to be curious about each student. As teachers, we need to help students tell their own stories of resilience—times when they succeeded when they did not originally think success was possible. Whether we are in science labs, English classrooms, or the performing arts, we need to help kids tell their own stories of resilience. Here are five questions that I have found work for students from elementary to graduate school:

1. When did you do something you initially doubted you could do?
2. Why did you think it would be hard?
3. What happened that surprised you?
4. How are you different than you were before?
5. Where did you see joy emerge?

Teachers can use these questions at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. Before asking students to answer the questions, we teachers need to do this for ourselves. Classes can share their wisdom with future classes through these exercises, but the most important thing is for students to own their stories.

Let Disneyland keep its designation as “The Happiest Place on Earth.” This year, let’s set our sights on something even closer to home: making our schools some of the most joyful places on Earth.