Should
Student Success Include Happiness?
If we want our students to become happy
adults, research suggests that schools should focus more on students'
well-being than academic success.
Student success today
is defined by getting a job. The Common Core State Standards aim to make
students career-ready—and the U.S. Department of Education’s mission is to
prepare students for global competitiveness.
But does that brand of
success lead to happiness? Several studies have found that childhood
emotional health and kind, helpful behavior—two major factors that contribute to our happiness—are the greatest
predictors of life satisfaction in adulthood. The least important predictor? Academic success.
For sure, getting a
job is a huge and important part of adulthood. But anyone who’s ever been an adult knows that there’s more—so
much more—to life than work. And scientists have determined that experiencing
positive emotions and having a sense of meaning in both our work and our
personal lives are critical to our well-being.
So rather than making
it an either/or situation—either job skills or happiness and meaning—what if we
taught students both? In other words, what if teaching them how to build happy
and meaningful lives was integrated into the cultivation of their future
employability?
Research on the
importance of helping students develop skills that lead to happy and meaningful
lives behooves educators (and policy-makers) to at least consider the
possibility. Yet how exactly does learning to cultivate a happy and meaningful
life fit into education? And even more importantly, how do we teach it?
Where happiness fits into education
According to leading
happiness researcher Sonya Lyubomirsky, happiness is defined as “the experience
of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s
life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”
In other words, happy
lives are usually made up of a combination of positive emotions and
meaningfulness—both of which contribute greatly to a child’s learning process
and well-being.
Emotions play an integral role in education,
affecting students’ motivation, attention, social functioning, and ethical
decision-making. For example, enjoyment of learning motivates students to put
forth greater effort, whereas boredom only decreases effort. Anxiety lessens students’ ability to problem-solve, but
hope and pride can increase self-efficacy. Thus, creating safe and caring
classrooms and designing engaging lessons, both of which promote positive
emotions in students, should be high on a teacher’s agenda.
One
caveat: Emotion researchers state that feeling positive emotions all the time should not be the
goal, as this actually lessens our well-being and happiness. And in certain
circumstances, negative emotions such as anxiety can actually motivate students
to study harder.
Instead, educators
should recognize and validate students’ emotional lives and help them work
with all their emotions in a rich and balanced way. In this
way, teachers are promoting students’ emotional health, which is foundational
to happiness.
In addition to
positive emotions, happiness also depends on a sense of meaning—that our lives
and our experiences make sense and matter. Students often complain that what
they’re learning in school is not relevant to their lives, which can lead to
disengagement.
Yet researchers have
found that students who see the connection between their school work and their
future work goals find more meaning in what they’re learning—on one condition:
their goals must benefit others in addition to themselves, and not be
oriented towards making money. This is a finding that holds true across
diverse socio-economic and racial lines. In other words, focusing too much on
money and careers can actually contribute to a sense of meaninglessness.
Research
also shows that students who hold this kind of prosocial orientation experience
greater well-being, are more likely to persevere in tedious academic tasks, and
stay on track for college. Moreover, teachers who encourage their
students toward this kind of approach to life are, once again, laying the
foundation for happy and meaningful lives.
But can you teach happiness?
For teachers who want
to help students develop happy and meaningful lives, does this mean that you
have to completely rethink your curriculum and how you teach?
Not at all. In fact,
educators who include social-emotional learning (SEL) and mindfulness in their
classrooms are subversively cultivating their students’ happiness and sense of
meaning by fostering their emotional health and prosocial skills.
But there are some
subtle nuances to the teaching of these skills that can enhance students’
happiness and sense of meaning even more.
1. Make SEL and/or mindfulness a part of every
lesson.
If you think about it,
life does not parcel neatly into 50 minutes of academic content and then 20
minutes of happiness skills, such as SEL and mindfulness. Instead, life
requires us to have the content knowledge and, at the same time, the know-how
for getting along with others and, frankly, ourselves.
Teachers who integrate
SEL directly into content areas help students develop socially and emotionally
by making these skills relevant to their daily lives. Incorporating SEL and
mindfulness into the day does not need to be complicated, nor does it need to
take a lot of time. For example:
·
Before introducing a
tough math concept, remind the students that if they start to feel frustrated,
instead of quitting, they might do some belly breaths to help them stay calm
and focused on the task at hand.
·
Carefully select books
that allow students to consider how a character in the text might be feeling.
Allow them to explore what choices the character made and try to understand and
empathize with why the character made those decisions.
·
Start and end the day
with two minutes of mindfulness practice, so that students learn the value of
approaching life with a sense of calm and focus rather than distracted
“busyness”.
Let students work things out.
Imagine how awesome it
would be if we only worked with people we got along with… but that’s not life!
One of the greatest
things teachers can do to help students cultivate skills for happiness and
meaning is to give them opportunities to work with other students who challenge
their social capacities. In this way, students learn the ins and outs of
happiness-boosting qualities such as compassion, kindness, and forgiveness.
Yet, standing back and
observing when cooperative groups are struggling can be really hard for
teachers. And sometimes, just to avoid the whole situation, teachers will
“engineer” working groups so that they’re only made up of students who get
along with each other—or they’ll just throw cooperative learning out the
window.
But rather than
fearing the chaos that can ensue when students make behavior mistakes,
educators might try embracing those golden moments because that’s when students
can really learn. In order for them to develop the skills and strategies they
need to build positive relationships, they need chances to learn from their
mistakes. Many SEL programs teach conflict resolution skills and the regular
practice of mindfulness can help students become aware of when their ire has
been roused and make the choice to respond in a more kind and helpful way.
In academic content
areas we might start a lesson by saying, “I know some of our groups have
struggled to work together. So what can we do today to make working together go
more smoothly? What ground rules do we need to set? What tools do we have if
things get tough?” And then after the lesson, reflect on what worked and what
did not work. Make a list that you can refine and revisit each time students
work together.
Build in time for reflection.
Reflection helps us
build meaning in our lives. It allows us to bring our humanity into what we are
doing by asking how something changed our thinking, our view of the world, our
beliefs about others or ourselves.
Teachers who give
students time to reflect on what they’re learning and experiencing—both
internally and externally—help make the curriculum relevant to students’ lives.
They see that not only are they learning content knowledge, they’re also
learning to connect with each other, to be empathetic, to understand their own
needs and the needs of others. In other words, they’re learning the foundation
of what it means to live a happy and meaningful life.
Ultimately, we must
ask ourselves, “What exactly are we educating for?” As our society evolves and
as we gain a deeper understanding of who we are as human beings, the answer to
this question is changing. No longer is it enough to train for job
skills—because how we live our lives really matters.
By Vicki Zakrzewski, Peter Brunn
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/should_student_success_include_happiness?utm_source=GG+Ed+Newsletter+May+2015&utm_campaign=GG+Education+-+May+2015&utm_medium=email
No comments:
Post a Comment