Podcast Season 2 Ep. 3 - Bringing Joy into the Classroom with Dean Shareski

In this episode Dean Shareski is invited to discuss aspects of his book “Embracing a Culture of Joy: How Educators Can Bring Joy to Their Classrooms Each Day.” He has worked as a K-8 classroom teacher for 14 years and as a district leader for 9. He has been an educational consultant for Advanced Learning Partnerships and was the Community Manager for Discovery Education Canada for several years and also a Digital Learning Consultant with the Prairie South School Division in SK.

Dean believes that teachers and students ought to use technology to connect ideas and learners in safe, relevant, authentic ways to answer questions, share ideas and develop community. Learning he believes, can be, and should be, fun and personal.

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Podcast Transcript

Hi, my name is Blue. And I'm the host of this podcast, the 21st-Century Teacher with Live It Earth. And my job is to ensure that our teachers and students get the most out of our programs. This new podcast series is just one of the ways I'm going to be supporting our community of educators, with a monthly conversation with a special guest educator discussing a different aspect of 21st century teaching and learning. 

Today, I'm talking with Dean Shareski, the author of “Embracing a Culture of Joy: How Educators Can Bring Joy to Their Classrooms Each Day”. He has worked as a K-8 teacher for 14 years, and as a district lead for nine. He has been an educational consultant for advanced learning partnerships, and was the community manager for Discovery Education Canada for several years. And also a digital learning consultant with the Prairie South School Division in Saskatchewan. Dean believes that teachers and students ought to use technology to connect ideas and learners in safe, relevant, authentic ways to answer questions, share ideas, and develop community learning he believes it can be and should be fun and personal. So Dean, thank you so much for joining me on the show today, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you for having me always looking forward to talking to and meeting new people. Like that's one of the things that I don't brag about a lot of the things that I do and have, but I do brag about the fact that I know a lot of really cool and smart people. So meeting you is just adding that to my list. So thank you for doing that.

Yeah, you're welcome. And thank you so much. So you wrote a book called “Embracing a Culture of Joy”. And so I'd like to start there and ask you, what do you mean, when you're talking about bringing joy into a classroom and maybe explain, you know, what joy means to you?

Sure. Yeah, that, you know, writing a book was a fine experience. Again, I didn't write that book. But it was just, you know, I got asked to write it because I had been talking about joy. So it's something that's been a part of my experience as an educator, for a while, it didn't really come, I didn't really have the words to articulate exactly what I meant by that. Until about 2010, I had an experience where I got together with 35, or 40 educators from across Canada who met in an isolated place Park in Northern Ontario. And for three days, we had no internet, nothing. And we just wrote, and so each of us kind of came up with the task of like, what matters most in education. And so that was my task going into it. And that's kind of when I spent some time thinking about it, it sort of just came back to this idea of joy. And it was something that, you know, as a kid growing up, my mother, who passed away pretty early in life, she, she talked about that a lot. It was part of kind of her persona. And, you know, as I thought about being in it, because I taught elementary school, for about 15 years of my first 15 years, my career and I mean, I was pretty clear early on in my career that like, what mattered most to me was the fact that these kids would have a lovely experience in my classroom. And you know, that didn't necessarily mean that I focused on the curriculum and mathematics and reading, it wasn't that I wasn't doing those things, right. But that just wasn't the priority. And I always think about the idea that we are asked to do so many things as educators like do you know, like, you think about elementary teachers like you, okay, we want them to be good readers, we want them to excel in this. And we also want them to be good people, we want them to learn how to get like there's a infinite number of outcomes and tasks that people want. And so when we say what is most important, like we all you know, it's easy to default to well, we want to do all these things. And that's true, but it does matter what you start with, it does matter what you lead with. And for me, I lead with the fact that I want to learn how to be a joyful experience. So that's kind of the sort of where it began. And then as I began to think about, like, what does that actually mean? Like it's an easy word to throw around. And I'm really, I'm really one who is not so skeptical, but I think people throw around lots of terms in education. And it becomes as you speak, and after a while, like, what does that even mean? Right? So I always ask, what do you mean by? So I think it's a valid question for you asked me what do I mean by joy? And for me, joy is more of this sort of sustained sense of well being, and in the world we live in now where we are talking about social and emotional well being. It's really the manifestation of it. So joy is this outward, visible, tangible evidence of well being, is probably the way he did it.

So I began to think about, well, what is that like? And teachers see and experiences every single day, right? Like one of the best examples is when you're a primary teacher, and you're reading a story for with the kids and the bell rings, and they don't move. They're just with you. Like, that to me is like, that's joy. Because then as as an educator, you feel like, okay, this is awesome. And you know, and that's the example of elementary, but it's the same thing when you're teaching high school physics or whatever, when, when you can see that this is more like this being together. And doing this thing is way more than about a grade or the compliance of it, like I'm doing the thing, because I love the thing. And I love being with these people. I love learning this thing. And sometimes it's just moments that you just, ah, that's it, right? Like, and teachers live for those moments. Like, that's when that happens. It's like, yes, I'm doing the thing, I signed up to do it. But it's really difficult to sustain that I don't expect that to be the experience all day long. But like those moments are, and so I spent a lot of time teasing out what those moments are. And I tried to use the book to sort of frame them in sort of bigger ideas. And I talk about, you know, things like community as being an example of joy, right? Like, how do you just create a space where I just want to get to class because I want to be with these people, which is really hard to do, in the sense that unlike most of communities, where you get to pick which community I'm involved in, like, kids don't have a choice, like there's a classroom I have. So it's a pseudo community. But that's a real interesting task and challenge that a teacher might have is like, how do I make this a place like I want to be here?

Yeah, very much. I've worked with kids in the outdoor environment, which is very different from the four walls and the structure. And there's so much more freedom when I'm working with kids in the outdoors. And of course, teachers over the last couple of years with a pandemic and everything that I've been hearing back from our community of teachers that use our platform is burnout and stress, people are exhausted, there's tons of online resources they're expected to be using and trying out. And the kids, of course, to have been through this as well, with everybody else. So with the burnout and stress, do you have any thoughts of how can teachers bring joy in a meaningful way into the classroom? How can we do that? How can we make the classroom given the last couple of years as well? 

A joyful learning environment again, well, without overly pandering to you. Being outdoors is actually, it's a really big deal. Like I read an article that said, you know, this was probably last year, the year before, it was just talking about the fact that you know, if we've learned anything, it's like, do one thing differently than we did before. 2020 go spend more time outside. And so I think that's just kind of a no brainer. And I think that in itself, you know, it's fascinating to see how educators have been able to figure that out. And it doesn't matter if you're teaching kindergarten, or if you're teaching high school, like there's ways to do that. So that's certainly, I mean, that's a very tangible, simple thing to do. So my recommendation is, no matter what you teach, figure out a way to do it out of doors, and so figure that out, and I have lots of examples and colleagues who are doing it and you obviously, you know, that's your world. I think other things are that I think are important is to just, just slow down like slow it down and reduce.

One of the things that I think and you know, teachers are phenomenal, phenomenal people by and large, they get it it is like I know I'm biased, but I just don't know of another profession that has the number of high quality people that this profession does. And again, I don't work in a lot of other professions. So it's easy for me to say that but I believe it's true. But one of the things that I think teachers are notoriously bad at is bringing on self induced expectations. So I remember working with school districts and in a school district where teachers are stressing about stuff and that and I get to the bottom of it and I know like, nobody's making you do that, like those are expectations that you're putting on yourself, which is fine, right. And it's good to have high expectations of what you want, you know, in terms of student success and so forth. But I think reducing some of those expectations, because a lot of them were about pacing, and I gotta get through stuff, yand ou know, boy, I work with so many district leaders, who really do push back against that notion and say, like, don't worry about all those things. And like, just, you know, focus on the people in the room and like, what they need, one of the things I learned, I spent a little bit of time at the district working supporting our First Nations Indigenous learners, and it was a short lived portfolio. But I learned, you know, from that culture, how important it is, just to take time to get to know people, they would have a meeting that started at nine o'clock, and you never got to the agenda until 9:30, or 9:45, you know, and as sort of a company from my culture, it's like, you're looking at your watch, like, what time is it going to, how long like it just didn't matter? Like that, you know, the joke was, they would joke themselves about Indian time. And you know, what they really meant is just chill, like, it's fine. Like, we're going to get to know one another, we're going to spend time working with each other, we're going to get to know one another. And we're going to ask about families, we're going to spend, and that's not a waste of time, that's not just filling the air. That's integral and so slowing it down and spending more time and I think many, many teachers are better at this than they used to be. So I think this is a healthy change. At the same time, though, it opens up to like, if you're gonna do that, well, now, you're gonna get to know that the kids in your class are going through a lot of difficult times that maybe you didn't know about before. So it's not just about, you know, unicorns and rainbows here. It's okay, so now we're getting real with one another, and we're finding out okay, so and so's got a bit of a problem. And now I have that extra burden, if you will. So it's again, it's complex. But I think at the same time, that's where you have to get to like, you have to get to the point where you actually can get to know kids. And so there's again, there's lots of little practical ideas I could share. And I think those are two big things that I would probably start with. 

I really liked that I always found in the outdoor work that I've done. And often it would be a group of kids for one week at a time on a trip. But the connection you get with the kids makes all the difference. And if they can, yeah, if they really feel a connection with you, I think you can get a lot more out of them and have a lot more fun and be more playful with them. Because there's a trust that starts to build through that connection, which I always really liked. So I wonder, do you have any examples about real classrooms that have successfully implemented joy? Any teachers that have been doing that?

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's lots of them, I think about one that just sort of comes to mind. Diana Williams is a teacher in Surrey, British Columbia. And she's just just one of these, like, meant to be teachers, but she does a really interesting thing called Figure It Out Fridays. And so what she does, is she brings in, whether it's new technologies, or puzzles, or whatever, and just says to the kids, it's time to figure it out. And she doesn't really provide any structure, but it's really about play. It's about them. And it's about reflection, right? Like, if you don't figure it out, that's okay. So let's reflect on how far we got with it. And so I was in her classroom during one of these sessions. And this one little girl made me a duct tape wallet that she was trying to figure out because she'd seen it on YouTube. That's really cool. So there was a bunch of duct tape, so she made me a wallet out of duct tape. But like, that's just an example of embedding that as part of the classroom.

I think about how I talked to so many teachers who, you know, I share a lot of things around, you know, ways to sort of build those relationships. And so I know a lot of teachers that incorporate similar structures to their classrooms, where, you know, they do a minute to win it games and they kick off the day with a game and they have a little fun. You know, it's funny watching teachers now, use Wordle in their classroom, and you know, I've seen videos of kids, their daily Wordle they do it together and they're like, cheer again. We got a three year got it in four. So I think doing, you know, that idea of community like there's something about building something or creating something or doing something together. That's why I think seeing Nino is such a big bit of music is such a big part of of that experience, right? Like how do we bring music into our classroom as part of that experience, and again, probably pretty easy to figure out a way to do it in any subject area, right. And so that's a powerful implement to us.

There's a teacher that I know who he teaches overseas at the time, he was in Singapore, high school English teacher, at the beginning of the class, he turns the lights down, and they have tea for five minutes. So they go and serve themselves a cup of tea, and they just sit for five minutes, just quiet. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they just sit quietly. And you know, he just said it's such a contrast to their, you know, them rushing around from class to classroom. And, and so for those five minutes, we just have tea together. And what a simple thing to do, that just sort of sets the tone for it. And you know, there's lots of other even more practical curricular things that I think about even just the idea of, and again, I could spend a lot of time talking about the ways in which we can bring students into the assessment conversations, like having them assessors of their own work, and really taking ownership of it and taking pride and joy in their work. And you kind of playing a little different role instead of evaluator and judge, play or more of a role of coach. And that can really transform the assessment experience so that it becomes something that kids actually look forward to sharing their learning and so forth. So lots and lots of examples of things that teachers can do in any kind of context.

Yeah, I think that's great. And actually, from conversations I've had recently around all the technology that's coming into classrooms, that teaching, I like the coach term, because it's almost like teachers are becoming facilitators, but I like the coach, the idea of the coach as well. So as a digital consultant, because I know you've done a lot of that work in the past, what are some of the challenges that you hear about in the classroom? And I wonder, with the digital learning aspect? Is this impacting the sense of community that you can get in a classroom between teachers and students? Because, you know, with the screen time, and that sort of individualized learning, I just wonder how that impacts things?

Well, I mean, again, there's lots of great stories, and there's lots of challenges, I think one of the challenges that still remain, and it happened, I was in Montreal last week, and we had difficulties with the technologies like, technology is still kind of hard. Like, that's things don't always work, right. Like when you're trying, especially in an environment where you've got networks, and you've got security things and so forth. And so stuff just sometimes doesn't work the way it's supposed to. So that's challenging to start with. I think the other thing that's challenging is, and this is where sort of a sense of play, which is another one of the sort of tenants that I talk about in my book, in other words, like, you have to have a sense of play when it comes to using digital tools. Like, back to this Figure It Out Friday thing well, I don't know, like, how does this, you know, robotics program work, right? And you have to be able to invest time to do that, because it's not like, okay, here's out of the box. And now I can, here's lesson one, and just dive right in, which is, you know, a mindset that teachers have traditionally had, like, no, we actually have to take time to explore how this works. And that's a challenge, because time is not always easy to find, and so that's a real challenge when it comes to using digital technologies. And for me, you know, I always think of like, what technologies actually make us more human, not less human, right. And that's really sometimes a challenging thing.

So there's lots of teachers who, you know, get off, you know, find particular tools, and strategies that end up being their go to tools, and they use them all the time, like, whether it's something like Google Slides or whatever, and it becomes after a while, you're just using the tool here, there's no sort of why would we use this over something else? So you're always, you need to be asking those questions. Like, there's lots of times when, and, you know, I've gone back and forth between, even one to one computing, which, I mean, I think it's still valuable for kids to have a device. I think there's still so much stuff to do. But it's also true that when you have limited time with kids that maybe that's not the time to be diving into using screens because this is precious. I wonder, you know, I think about what we may have learned from kids being learning virtually for, you know, for some kids just a few months for some kids, it was more than a year that they did that in and people recognize that's not a healthy experience to sit in front of a screen all day long. But it was certainly useful in many ways, because it allowed teachers and students to connect in ways that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. That said, now that we're face to face, you know, really begs the question of like, how do I want to make the best use of my time?

I've taught post secondary for years, and it was all virtual. But I had a couple of classes where I taught once a month, I was in person. And I really had to think hard about like, what is that once a month experience? How is that going to look different from my virtual experiences, because if it's just the same thing, that doesn't make sense, you're not taking advantage. I mean, I want people to take advantage of the technology, but I also want them to take advantage of what being in person means. And so that's why environment and space, as we kind of mentioned earlier, is kind of a big deal, like just sitting in a row in a desk, that doesn't really take advantage of being together. So okay, what does that look like? So I think there's a real challenge around that right blend, and there are teachers that get it right like that says, like, this is something that the kid says, okay, I want to go home and explore more, okay, take your device home, and maybe you're watching three YouTube videos to help you get more of a context of what it is, maybe I can build something, create a model or something on digitally that might enhance my learning. Maybe a friend and I can collaborate on a document as we're sort of thinking through and capturing our notes and thinking some way. So there's certainly ways, obviously tons of ways that it can be done thoughtfully, and really takes advantage of the best of humanity. But you know, there's also a caution of, I don't want to over, I don't want to utilize it here when there's other ways that are richer and better experiences.

So I have a question that just popped into my head around what is the role of the parents in the modern classroom given that technology is creeping in more and more, of course. And I think it probably got accelerated with the pandemic. And so if kids are working on screens at home, and just in terms of, you know, safety, of course, around technology, and accessing the internet, where does the parent fit into this? Because it's not always any, you know, they don't always know their role. I know, I'm a parent that is, very much trust the school, and you know, what's happening there. But when the education is coming into the home environment, particularly with the pandemic, which is a unique situation. What is their role?

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's difficult because it's a really interesting sort of dichotomy that exists because, you know, people have used the word and I don't like the term “digital natives”. I think it's a bit divided and divisive. Because I can tell you, as somebody who is much older than the students of the day, I have much more depth with technologies than they do. And so it's nothing to do with age. It has more to do with, there's a David White from the UK talks about digital residents versus visitors. So I'm more of a resident of technologies, then many people are, but so sometimes kids come home, they have a better understanding, sometimes they have less understanding than their parents, so that is unique to each household. But I mean, at the end of the day, I think it comes down to the same ways that we would hopefully interact with our kids outside of digital technologies by simply being curious about, tell me about what you're doing, like, talk to me about this. And because you don't have to know anything about it. But I mean, if kids are using a particular app, like on an iPad, and to that end, even though I said what I said before about my my abilities with technology, like I had. I spent a lot of time with my teenage daughter talking about TikTok, because they didn't really understand it wasn't a platform that I was using. So it was like, help me understand. TikTok like, how does this work? Like, what's the appeal of it? Why do kids like it? What do you find on there? That's interesting, that's valuable. What are the caution things that you should be aware of? So I think that's just to me, the bottom line with it is like, as a parent, just be curious with your kids. It's like, tell me more about this. Oh, that's really interesting. How did you do that? Like when, you know, kids will interact at varying degrees of either just leave me alone, I'm just trying to get my work done here. I don't want to but you know, that's your job as a parent to figure out a way to engage that conversation so that to me, that's the bottom line.

And then the other thing that's super super hard, and I you know, I'm not really good at it myself is model for your kids what a healthy relationship with technology looks like. So, you know, being better at putting your phone away, which I mean, it's such a bad habit that I know I have and I catch myself with my grand kids, and then I feel like an idiot when I'm supposed to be paying attention to them. And I'm not. So I have to sort of trick myself into that away and just forget about it. But that's challenging. So being aware of it, obviously, is the first thing to show your kids. And, you know, you hear of these examples all the time where, you know, kids or parents have gone to the route of taking their kids technology away for the weekend, and they hate it and they're mad. And then usually, by the end of it, it's like, okay, this isn't so bad. So I think we need to figure out, I think part of it is coming up with routines, and structures that like, yeah, every Sunday afternoon, we go to this place, and we play like, going back to talk, we talked earlier about my passion for golf. And one of the things I love about golf is it's four hours where technology does not come into the equation at all. And it is amazing what that does for me mentally, just not having to think about that. So figuring out as a parent, what that looks like, and you know, as a father of younger children, you're in that position now to sort of create some structures where we can begin to see and develop a healthy relationship with technology, because you can't go the other way and say, well, technology is horrible. It's bad, never use it, which is what some parents do, because they revert to like, you know, it's a binary conversation. It's not bad or good. It's just like, what does it look like, when we have a really healthy relationship? Because there's no doubt that it has amazing and powerful and awesome potential. But there's more to life than that as well. 

Yeah, I agree. Modeling good behavior. But yeah, it is a powerful tool that, you know, is important that we learn how to use it in a positive way. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts today. And so much of it resonates with me. And yeah, I think at a time that we often the times we've had over the last couple of years, there's no more important time to embrace the culture of joy, that's for sure.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's fun to talk.

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