Reframing - Learning is Satisfying

"Good afternoon, Beth. Enjoy your workout." 

When I first joined the Y, getting greeting like this was very helpful. And it wasn't because they knew my name, which pops up on the computer when a member scans in. It was the word "enjoy." It had been a long time since I had done any workouts other than walking, and while I was excited to try new things, I also knew it was likely to be uncomfortable. Framing the workout as something to enjoy changed my outlook on what I was about to do. While that was only a small part of how the Y changed my life, it was an important part.

Often, in school, we give in to a negative view of work - student work anyway. Then, we take one of two approaches at either end of the attitude spectrum.

1. Make everything super fun, even if it sacrifices the actual learning or takes longer than the curriculum pace would allow for. We hope turning everything into a game or relay race will distract kids from the fact that learning is work.  Fun is what matters because it is motivating! And, if we need to trade in some content for the time it takes to tally game points, so be it.
2. Adopt a "suck it up and do it anyway" attitude. This technique is employed most with high school students. We tell them that the "real world" is filled with things they won't want to do but still have to do, and this is good training for that. I'm here to teach you, not entertain you. Who cares if you are motivated or not.

There is truth involved in both of these extremes.  Certainly adult life does involve a lot of things that have to be done whether you are motivated to do them or not, and certainly some things are inherently fun.  But the day to day of school exists between these two extremes.  Motivation often comes from places we don't expect and find it difficult to plan for.

What if we reframed work for our students the same way the Y reframed a workout for me? 

Example:  Lifting heavy things is not inherently fun, and no peppy song will change that. It's uncomfortable on purpose. Does Matt change the "lesson plan" to make it less difficult? Does Dana say, "Let's skip around outside instead of doing triceps because you will be more motivated if it is fun"?  No. (Although that second one would be a decent aerobic workout; it would not achieve the purpose of the BodyPump class.) They do two things that are motivating:

1. They are joyful. This is not the same as making activities fun. It's an attitude they communicate. I have had instructors for this class that take it (and themselves) so seriously you cannot focus on anything but the number of reps left. That makes for an awfully long class. I have also taken it with an instructor that just makes everything silly, singing along with every song to the extent that you can't know what you are supposed to do next. Matt and Dana are neither of these. They are joyful about the workout. They make some jokes, but the class isn't about the jokes. They create a community spirit by knowing who likes certain songs or certain movements. "We're doing planks just for your today, Dan." or  "I know Kamryn is going to like the Rhi-Rhi bicep track today" or "Beth's favorite - shootouts." Planks, shootouts, and biceps are just as challenging, but they are now framed as someone's favorite, so others might find joy in them too.
2. They focus on the satisfaction of the outcome. While I have never heard the phrase "no pain, no gain" in my time at the Y, the sentiment is still there. The payoff of the discomfort you are feeling in the moment or the soreness you will have tomorrow is in the satisfaction of the outcome. So, while you are doing a sumo squat with a weighted bar on your back, Matt tells you which muscles you are strengthening. While you are clenching your upper thigh in Barre, Dana says, "It's your free butt lift, courtesy of the YMCA." 

So, school teachers, what can we learn from this? We can learn that there is a happy medium between frivolous and fatalistic. 

A teacher doesn't have to be a non-stop fun machine to approach learning with joy. You cannot out-entertain or out-engage their phones, so stop trying to. Show them your joy and watch it spread. There are not many ways, for example, to make learning the periodic table a rip-roaring good time, but my students knew how much I loooooooved the periodic table. I constantly expressed my own amazement of it and told them that I hoped they would one day learn enough about it to appreciate it as much as I did.  "Every year, I find something new to appreciate about it," I would tell them, even after teaching it for over 20 years. When we balanced chemical equations, I would say, "If you are the type of person who enjoys solving puzzles, you will probably enjoy these" because there is definitely a satisfaction that comes from the equation finally coming out right.  I took EVERY opportunity to communicate how much I loved learning new things, including my delight when they asked a question I couldn't answer because then we could find out together. I didn't limit it to science because I wanted them to see that learning is joyful outside of what you do for your job, so I talked about art and music and books and how much I liked the unit circle. If someone had Julius Caesar sitting on their desk, I made a big deal about it being my favorite Shakespeare play. Learning can be joyful for its own sake, and we don't have to gamify our classes to communicate that. (I'm not trying to dog on people who gamify, by the way. I would just ask you to think about the opportunity cost involved if you are spending a lot of time on it.)

Learning is hard work. There's no getting around that fact. If you think changing your muscles requires focus and energy, it pales in comparison to changing your neurons. But a teacher doesn't have to adopt a "Life's hard; then you die" mentality to help students learn. They can, like a good weightlifting instructor, emphasize the outcome of the work. "When you learn to write a well-crafted paragraph, you will be able to communicate your ideas in a way that is actually persuasive to others" will help a student realize that the hard work of writing well has purpose.  "You know who uses this kind of math? Video game designers" will help kids recognize purpose beyond the grade book - even if they don't intend to become a game designer themselves. Learning has multiple outcomes, so think about value and relevance outside of making money from it.  I once had a student who was clearly going to be a musician and didn't understand why he needed to learn chemistry. Was I going to convince him that he needed science as a fallback? No, that would have been stupid, but I didn't convince him that the brain training he was doing to write chemical formulas would help him ad lib when he forgot the lyrics on stage later in his life.  

By being joyful and focusing on outcomes, we can help students reframe the learning experience. It is challenging and requires work, but it is also satisfying and enjoyable. We must communicate that these are not mutually exclusive.