Having my cake and eating it, too: how good teaching makes pupils feel good.

This Friday, I went into the staff room before briefing and found a plaque with this infamous quotation in my pigeonhole.

Along with the quotation by Haim Ginott about how a teacher’s “daily mood…makes the weather.” this has to be one of the most commonly used quotations about education. It is also a quotation I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with. After spending a good part of the morning stewing over who wanted to poke the bear on a Friday, I decided to correct it.

If someone were to ask me how I want pupils to feel in my lessons, I would say that obviously they should feel safe, successful and confident. I think that all of these are components of long term happiness. However, I would stop short at saying that I aim for my pupils to be happy. As I discussed in my previous blogs “Where Fun Comes From” and “Satisfaction and success: infinitely better than fun”, I believe that happiness is not generic and therefore it is impossible to make pupils feel genuinely happy by making happiness the ultimate goal. Rather, long term happiness and positivity about a subject are derived from satisfaction and success. Therefore, prioritising feelings over learning is largely fruitless.

This quotation could also be taken from the commonly held perspective that motivation is actually the reverse of success resulting in positivity: many people, including many pupils themselves, argue that pupils who feel positive about a subject in the first place will then be successful. As a result, making pupils feel positive is the most important part of teaching, as it will then result in discretionary effort.

Discretionary effort is a factor in a success. However, this perspective fails to recognise that pupils and novices are often poor judges of efficacy when it comes to learning techniques, their own comprehension of a subject and they often fail to recognise that the most effective learning techniques are often not the most ‘fun’: Making a poster about a single topic that pupils already know will make them feel positive about that topic and the subject in general, but it will probably won’t result in significant success or retention. This in turn, may result in long-term disappointment. We should be aiming for long term happiness. The majority of pupils will be remember fondly those teachers who helped them achieve good results and who prepared them for the next level of education, not those with whom they just had fun.

My main issue with this quotation is that it seems to argue that teaching subjects effectively and having happy pupils are mutually exclusive and, when prioritising the two, emotion comes first. To me, this is essentially excusing poor quality teaching in favour of emotion. There are hundreds of factors which affect pupils’ success, and there is evidence to suggest that teachers have a much smaller impact than they are led to believe. However, to argue that the most important part of being a teacher is making a pupil feel good, rather than equipping them with the knowledge and discrete skills which will allow them to be successful, is irresponsible.

Of course I want to be remembered positively and of course I want pupils to feel happy in my lessons but does this have to be at the expense of long term learning? Are effective teaching and happy pupils mutually exclusive? I’d argue they are actually dependent, with learning at the forefront.

Done well, we can have our cake and eat it, too.