Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms pdfdrive com

Don’t forget joy
Around the world, there appears to be a growing movement to prioritize
happiness in schools. Alejandro Adler, while pursuing a PhD in positive
psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, ran a study of eighteen schools,
involving more than eight thousand secondary students, in the country of
Bhutan. Classrooms implemented either a happiness curriculum, which
emphasized ten nonacademic life skills like mindfulness, interpersonal
relationships, and self-awareness, or a placebo curriculum (Adler, 2015; Parker,
2016).
The study indicated that student well-being and standardized test scores were
significantly boosted by the happiness curriculum. “Well-being and academic
achievement seem not to be antagonistic, as some have suggested,” wrote Adler
(2015). “On the contrary, increased well-being raised academic achievement.”
In 2016, Finnish comprehensive schools implemented Finland’s newest core
curriculum, where joy is being prioritized as a learning concept. What I love
about this simple gesture is that it’s exactly the kind of thing that, research
suggests, can boost happiness.
In an experiment conducted by Raj Raghunathan (2016), one group of
workers got a daily e-mail for one week suggesting that they make choices to

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workers got a daily e-mail for one week suggesting that they make choices to
increase their level of happiness, and when that week concluded, that group said
they were much happier than those employees who didn’t get the e-mail.
Through that study and others, Raghunathan found that when people receive a
reminder on a daily-basis to maximize happiness, they make tiny decisions that
contribute to greater happiness in their lives (Pinsker, 2016).
This book’s most important strategy is probably the simplest: Don’t forget
joy. On difficult days (everyone has them), it might be tempting to forget about
prioritizing joy in our classrooms. We might feel like caving in to the
unreasonable demands of some pushy parents, or prodding our kids to work
nonstop without breaks, or rushing ahead without celebrating student learning.
Chances are, given the difficult situations that many American teachers face in
this age of test-based accountability, it may be easier to not prioritize joy in our
classrooms.
But it’s joy that keeps me going as a teacher, and I’m committed—whether
I’m teaching in Finland, the United States, or somewhere else in the world—to
remember it and prioritize it in my classroom. How about you?

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