Happy Enough Classrooms

What can teachers teach industry managers about keeping teams happy and motivated?

On April 29th, Henry Stewart, author of The Happy Manifesto and I will come together to compare notes and present ideas about what a ‘Happy Classroom’ might look like. We will draw ideas from my experience as a teacher and his as business coach and trainer. The event is being hosted by TheDay.co.uk.

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Henry works with companies on their staff culture. He helps managers create working environments where employees feel happier and as a result, more willing to put more than just their shoulders ‘to the wheel’. The table of contents from the Happy Manifesto sets out some of Henry’s ideas about creating happy working environments: “Freedom within clear guidelines”, “Less Management; More Productivity” and “Create Mutual Benefit” to name a few.

3 Salient Guidelines that Cross Over?

Like any workplace, these 3 salient guidelines could be applied to any classroom. Like any workplace, students have an obligation to arrive every day and to spend the majority of their daylight hours being ‘managed’.

However, unlike a worker in any workplace, the student isn’t getting paid – apart from with present learning victories or promises of future financial success and job satisfaction. And of course, the students teachers are dealing with every day are children; works in progress who may not currently ‘know better’. As such they use the classroom much more dynamically than their working ‘grown ups’; as a tool designed to help them hammer out their still malleable personal development.

The classroom is a place they learn as much, if not more, about who they are than they do the subject the teacher is asking them to remember. And where a disgruntled worker might demonstrate his lack of engagement with the task by working slowly or taking verbal sideswipes at management, an unhappy student will resort to much more vivid, public and reactive behaviours. From refusals to follow instructions, to tears to verbal attacks on others or even acts of violence, students are far more likely to tell you what they think by showing you their feelings. That’s before we consider the range of abilities, personal learning challenges and the varied impact of home environments that play out in most mainstream classrooms.

Yet, “Freedom within clear guidelines”, “Less Management; More Productivity” and “Create Mutual Benefit” remain great guidelines for happier working classrooms.

“Freedom Within Clear Guidelines”

Think back to your own time in school. What lessons did you love to be in? Like most people, I think not so much of the lesson but of the teacher. In primary school it was Mr Thomas’s classroom. I can still remember how I felt in those lessons. To be honest I can’t remember an awful lot about his teaching style. I can only really remember how much I wanted to be there, how I had a good feeling about myself and about being there. Like many teachers, he had a way of being there when you needed him to be and then getting out of the way and allowing you to get on with it. He was ‘strict’. We all knew the rules and most of us followed them. Yet, even when the rules were broken, the response from Mr T was always dependent on who broke the rules. In other words, he knew that his students were different so treated them differently without compromising the overall need for order. It was the meaning of the rule that he would reiterate rather than the letter. He didn’t shy from confrontation when it was needed. He was not ‘soft’. He didn’t always get it right and, like all of us, he had his good days and his not so good days. All of these human qualities meant that if he asked me or any other student to line up and jump out of the window to see whether we could actually fly, there would be a fight to be first in the queue

Boundaries = Psychic Safety

Psychologists, from psychotherapists to neuroscientists, are all agreed on the significance of psychic safety in any learning environment.

Humans are innately wired to background- scan their world at all times, checking for any possibility of threat. It is impossible to turn this mechanism off. Actually, it is this drive to survive that governs much of our ability to connect and learn from external sources – be they people or subjects.

As well as the physical boundary of our own bodies, we also have a psychic boundary, a psychic perimeter fence that we are constantly patrolling. To paraphrase Neuropsychologist Stephen Porges, we are ‘Nervous system to nervous system’ beings. We feel first and think second. When we get the signal from our nervous system that we safe enough – we never feel entirely safe – we turn off the alarms and open the gates and let in the new information, new people, new learning.

In tandem with this defensive mindset, we are also born with an innate survival need to connect – to external sources of food, safety and warmth. In infancy, this instinct to open up, connects us to the primary carer, our ‘feeder’ the ‘place of comfort, kindness, safety and fulfilment. The happy place. Interestingly, the drug that is released into our system when we connect to our primary carers and feed – oxytocin – the so called ‘happy drug’, is the same one that enters our system when we connect successfully to an answer in a Maths quiz or find the right Shakespeare quote in an English exam. In other words, our hand is always on the gate release. We both want others to come in and we are wired to keep them out.

Happiness = connecting to ‘the good feeling’

Part of our early psychological development is gaining an understanding that we are both independent and dependent creatures. A baby is born onto a world of feelings rather than thoughts. They have no reference points apart from their changing internal responses to external changes in their environment. In simple terms, in early days and weeks, when they are cold, hungry and un-contained within the arms of their carer, their internal state is one akin to terror and desperation. In contrast, being held, being kept warm and being fed give rise to happier feelings.

As grown-ups we can see these two experiences being dependent on the presence or absence of a caring parent. Yet for an infant, the two sets of feelings are experienced not as one person who comes and goes but as two people, one who satisfies her needs and who represents all good things and another who malevolently leaves them to suffer – who represents all things predatory and bad. This conditioning feeds into our attitude to others and also to what those ‘others’ they bring with them. Other people are at once both the one who leaves us to cry alone and the one who comes to feed and keep up safe. We are independent of others and suspicious of them and maybe their motives. We are worried by things that we can’t see, that aren’t present and are not yet known. Yet we are also wired to want to connect with others and with a world beyond our boundary because they and what they might bring – including opportunities for self-development – are the potential source of “the good feeling” that came with our earliest learning experiences of early childhood.

Cut to a classroom…

Students enter, teacher enters. This pre-wiring kicks in. Is it safe? Is this teacher going to bring ‘the good feeling’ with them in what they offer or are they going to engender an atmosphere that means students keep the gate leaver in the ‘off’ position?

Classrooms like that of my much-loved Mr Thomas, are what social psychologists called ‘containing environments’. They are both rigid and flexible, boundaried but human. They replicate the qualities of the child being held, comforted and fed by the present parent and as such lead to the innate connection to the good feelings. In such classrooms, children – like adults in a parallel workplace – open the gates to new learning, subjects and experiences believing that “the good feeling” or ‘happiness’ is on the way.

Create Mutual Benefit = Less Management, More Productivity

Although I have worked in school leadership, I have never been the leader of an organisation. However, I imagine that if I wanted leaders in my organisation to be able to make good decisions, I might invest in their personal development and pay for them to go on a leadership development course. They would personally benefit as would my business and hopefully my profit margin. They may of course get so well trained by me that they want to leave and look for more money or greater opportunities. That’s a risk. But, I imagine that far outweighing that risk is the loyalty and engagement they would show me and my business in the meantime. If my tactic of pursuing mutually beneficial is successful, I would convince those leaders that I am as interested in their personal development as I am in my own financial gain.

It is no different for teachers. Teachers invest time, energy and effort in helping children to develop. Although there are financial rewards, it is the reciprocal feeling of being on a parallel journey of development that is one of the major rewards of teaching. When a teacher helps a student and sees that student benefit, both student a teacher benefit. It feels really good to make others feel good.

Great Teachers, Great Managers?

I’ve been lucky enough to study aspects of both Educational Psychology and Organisational Psychology and have often thought that there is a missed opportunity in bringing teachers and industry managers into mutually beneficial learning space.

Successful teachers like successful managers manage tasks and other people by calling on a myriad of both hard and soft skills. Both are able to keep their eye on the goal even though others may lose sight of it. They seem armoured from personal criticism yet have the empathy to see when others may be struggling and are able to step in to help. They are secure but sensitive. They know the ropes but are sympathetic to those who don’t them know yet. They set boundaries and yet remain flexible in enforcing them. And where managers lead but always remember what it is like to follow, teachers are adults who are continually able to remember what the world looks like through the eyes of a child.

Happy Enough

It would be irresponsible to leave you with the idea that the aim of any teacher is to strive to make classrooms permanently happy places. A enforced culture of endless positivity can quickly turn smiles into grimaces as staff or students with nowhere to put unhappy and less positive feelings resort to other, more negative behaviours in order to have their feelings acknowledged.

Classrooms are a collection of people working together. As such the success or otherwise of that work is subject to the fluctuating emotional states of those people. Successful learning depends as much unhappy feelings as it does happy ones. We learn from making mistakes and the pain of getting things wrong and then via resilience and difficult reflection we find a way back. We summon up courage to try again and eventually, when we succeed, celebrate. Learning is a quest.

Although our happiness is satisfied by what we momentarily have in hand or what we have accumulated – be it goods, relationships, knowledge – sustaining happiness in any classroom and maybe in any organisation depends much more on providing an environment where students and employees feel happy and secure enough to find excitement and possibility in what we are reaching for and what is not yet here; the best of ourselves that is yet to come.