We can motivate students to be more agentic by creating the conditions for happiness in our classrooms. As many teachers will attest, the happier students are and the safer they feel, the more likely they are to help sustain learning through authentic engagement, investment in the learning community, and increasingly independent decision-making.
Cultivating happiness, however, is no small pursuit. Tal Ben-Shahar, professor of positive psychology at Columbia University, says that the conscious pursuit of happiness is actually more likely to lead to increased levels of unhappiness. Rather than chasing pleasant feelings, happiness comes from establishing consistent habits and routines. Learners need to build resilience by developing tools and strategies to handle any situation that comes their way, be it pleasant or unpleasant.
Learners need to build resilience by developing tools and strategies to handle any situation that comes their way, be it pleasant or unpleasant.
Educators can use this adaptation of Ben-Shahar’s SPIRE framework to help reinforce the kind of sustainable habits that cultivate students’ spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational, and emotional wellness.
Spiritual Wellness
Spiritual wellness is generally defined as having a sense of purpose and a connection to something greater than yourself. In the classroom, purpose and connection can be built through community-building and authentic academic tasks.
1. Help students understand their strengths. Asset-based teaching requires centering students’ strengths, so they can use them to overcome challenges. Teachers can invite students to list their strengths in reflective journals. They can also facilitate daily verbal reflections, asking students to identify what went well and what was challenging.
2. Be transparent about the “why” behind lessons or activities. When kids understand the purpose of a task, they are more likely to engage in it. For instance, good spelling grows writing fluency because it makes spelling high-frequency words and key vocabulary more efficient, which in turn makes students’ lives easier. It also makes it possible for others to understand their writing, connecting them to different audiences. When kids know this, they understand why spelling matters—and how it can help them.
Physical Wellness
Physical wellness requires sustained rituals for helping students care for their bodies. For our purposes, we’ll focus on physical regulation.
3. Teach students strategies for regulating their bodies. For instance, create a sensory corner for students to use as needed. You can also teach students to “tap” when they are feeling dysregulated. Tapping is just what it sounds like: students lightly tap their fingertips on parts of their bodies, including their collarbones, chests, legs, and even their faces to provide sensory stimulation that fosters regulation.
4. Provide students with the vocabulary to describe the current state of their bodies. Offer students sentence frames and body-oriented vocabulary on a word wall. Using the sentence frame My ___ feels ___. I need ___., students can state that their legs feel wiggly and they need to get up and walk around. They might also say their chest feels nervous, and then determine they need to tap their face to regulate.
Intellectual Wellness
To be intellectually well, students must build a sense of mastery. According to Daniel Pink, mastery isn’t a box we check; it requires helping students connect their efforts to progress.
5. Be clear about what you want students to learn—and what success looks like. Clearly articulate learning targets, unpack them with students, and provide learner-friendly success criteria. For instance, if students are calculating the area of rectangles, clarify that they need to write an equation and describe their method for calculating using capital letters, periods, and proper spelling. This informs them how to be successful in this task.
6. Make students’ progress visible through qualitative reflections that connect their efforts to progress. After students see the results of a formative assessment, facilitate scaffolded reflection, asking students to articulate one strength, one challenge, and a next step. For example, after calculating area, a student might say, “I can write equations to show area, but I am struggling with multiplying. I need to practice my multiplication facts.”
Relational Wellness
The strength of our relationships will determine relational wellness. Therefore, we must be proactive in building and nurturing relationships between students.
7. Engage in identity studies so students can get to know one another. Students can’t build relationships with people they don’t know. By explicitly teaching identity vocabulary through identity studies (exploring concepts of personal and group identity), students can share pieces of themselves with others.
8. Infuse collaboration into academic tasks. Collaborative learning improves student outcomes; it also humanizes our teaching. Through collaboration, students will see each other’s strengths, support one another through challenges, and even find authentic opportunities to resolve conflicts in a healthy way.
Emotional Wellness
Emotional wellness resides in the relationships each of us have with all our emotions, not just the pleasant ones. For students to be emotionally well, they need to be equipped to experience the full breadth of human emotion, processing and responding to these emotions in a healthy way.
9. Provide students with tools to practice naming their emotions. Consider using tools like the Feelings Wheel, Zones of Regulation, or RULER, each of which build emotional vocabulary. Clearly articulating emotions is paramount, as emotions are signals. For instance, anger is indicative of a crossed boundary, while frustration tells us there’s a barrier in the way that we don’t know how to overcome.
10. Validate students’ emotions and teach them how to respond to them. To validate students’ emotions, say something like, “It makes sense you feel frustrated. You are trying to overcome an obstacle, but you don’t know how to.” Then, teach students to ask for what they need, or provide tools that might address their emotions. “Try using a different math tool to solve the problem. Grab the base-ten blocks instead of the number discs.”
Our Habits Define Our Character
By definition, habits are executed repetitively, compounding over time, until they become part of who we are. Therefore, if you implement one of these strategies once or twice, it will not lead to sustainable results.
My advice? Start with one of these strategies, execute it mindfully, and once you are ready, add another one in. Through this process, you will find that your classroom will not only be a more sustainable place to teach and learn—it will also be a happier one.
