Here is a printable Joyful, Efficient Resource from some of our best posts on joyful and efficient classrooms.
| Old Thinking | New Thinking |
| How many things can I accomplish in a day? | How can I best spend my time to maximize results? |
| Efficient meant getting things done quickly. | Efficient means spending time on things that matter. |
| Focus on short term accomplishments. | Focus on the long term. |
We are EFFICIENT: Class is well-organized and predictable, our systems maximize our learning time, we know what to do and when to do it!
We are JOYFUL: It is more fun to follow the rules and participate in activities than not to; we celebrate ourselves and each other; it feels good to be here!
3 Questions for joyful, efficient classrooms:
- Am I putting the intellectual burden on the students or am I doing most of the thinking for them?
- Am I infusing joy into my lessons or does it feel more like cajoling, threatening or bribing students to learn?
- Am I ensuring that every student is mentally engaged and responding to my prompts at the same time or am I doing more telling than asking or calling on one student to respond at a time?
How can joy make class more efficient?
When my class feels inefficient, I’m not going to ask myself how I could have emphasized routines more, or made directions clearer, or commanded the room with my “teacher voice” (not that these things are unimportant). I’m going to ask myself, what happened to the joy? How can I bring out what is most compelling about the content? How can I make sure my passion for the subject is contagious? I think this is a better starting point.