Joyful Teaching Starts with Small Moves

Brett Christie, Ph.D.
VP, Educational Innovations & Inclusivity

What 250 educators shared about renewing energy, strengthening connection, and supporting student success

Teaching today can feel both deeply meaningful and unusually demanding. Faculty are navigating student disengagement, shifting expectations, new pressures around AI and technology, social and political tensions, and the lingering fatigue of years of rapid adaptation. At the same time, teaching remains one of the most human and consequential forms of work in higher education. It creates opportunity, supports growth, and changes lives.

That tension was at the heart of our recent Alchemy webinar, Joyful Teaching in Challenging Times: Practical Ways to Renew Energy and Support Student Success, featuring Flower Darby, author of the 2026 book The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz in Asynchronous Classes.

Participants were invited to think about joyful teaching not as a denial of difficulty, but as a practical and evidence-informed pathway back to energy, connection, purpose, and student success. Drawing on research related to well-being, motivation, emotion, cognition, and social connection, she helped us consider how flourishing can become part of the learning environment, not as an added burden, but as a way of making teaching more sustainable and more human.

What participants told us as they arrived

The need for this conversation was clear from the pre-session poll completed by 500 registrants. When asked which statement best reflected how teaching feels right now, the largest group of respondents selected “Meaningful, but more tiring than it used to feel.” Others described teaching as manageable but disconnected from joy, while a smaller but important group indicated that burnout or fatigue was becoming a real concern.

At the same time, the results were not simply discouraging. Many respondents described teaching as energizing and meaningful most of the time, while others noted that their experience varies greatly by course, modality, or student group. In other words, joy has not disappeared from teaching. But for many faculty, it appears to be less consistent, less accessible, or harder to sustain.

Which statement best reflects how teaching feels for you right now?

The second poll sharpened the picture. When asked what most often gets in the way of experiencing joy or energy in teaching, respondents pointed most often to workload, time pressure, or competing responsibilities and student disengagement or lack of participation.

That pairing is significant. Faculty are not simply asking how to make teaching more enjoyable in the abstract. They are trying to sustain meaningful, relational, student-centered teaching while managing real constraints on time, energy, and attention.

What most often gets in the way of experiencing joy or energy in your teaching?

Together, the poll results reflected a central tension many educators are carrying: teaching still matters deeply, but the conditions surrounding teaching can make it harder to access energy, connection, and joy.

That context made our prompt for the Padlet activity later in the session especially powerful. Rather than asking participants to imagine sweeping solutions, we asked them:

What is one small, realistic teaching move you could try in the next two weeks to renew energy, strengthen connection, or support student success?

The responses were creative, generous, practical, and revealing. Across the community, a clear pattern emerged: educators are not necessarily looking for sweeping redesigns or one more major initiative. They are looking for small, meaningful moves that make teaching feel more connected, more energizing, and more responsive to students.

Here are five themes that stood out.

1. Sometimes joy starts with cutting content

One of the clearest messages from the Padlet was that joyful teaching is not always about adding something new. In many cases, it begins with subtraction.

Participants repeatedly named the need to “cut some content,” “make more time for fun activities,” or revisit material that had gone “stale.” These comments point to something many faculty know intuitively but may find difficult to act on: overfilled courses can crowd out the moments that make learning feel alive.

When every minute is already claimed by coverage, there is little room for curiosity, connection, reflection, or joy. Cutting content is not a lowering of standards. Done thoughtfully, it can be a pedagogical decision that creates more space for depth, relevance, and student engagement.

This theme also connects directly to faculty energy. If joyful teaching becomes another thing to add, it is unlikely to feel sustainable. But if joy is created partly by reducing overload, clarifying priorities, and making room for what matters most, it becomes more plausible.

A small move might be as simple as identifying one lesson, reading, activity, or slide sequence that could be trimmed, reframed, or replaced with a moment of connection, reflection, or application.

2. Small rituals can shift the energy of a class

Many participants suggested simple rituals that could help change the emotional tone of a course. These included music, games, check-ins, opening prompts, celebrations, and reflective routines.

One especially resonant example was a Monthly Joy Roundup, where students are invited to share what gave them joy or inspired them during the past month. The idea is simple, but powerful. It gives students a structured opportunity to notice something positive, bring part of their lives into the course, and see their classmates as people with experiences beyond the assignment queue.

Another participant described using walk-up songs, asking students to share a song that represents them and then using those songs when students give presentations. This is a playful teaching move, but it also has deeper value. It creates anticipation, affirms student identity, and transforms presentations from a purely performative academic task into a more personal and communal experience.

Other responses included five-minute games, opening questions, small wins, and moments where students share something positive from their week. What these ideas have in common is not complexity. It is rhythm. They create repeated moments where students and instructors can re-enter the course as humans, not just as task-completers.

These rituals do not need to take much time. Their value comes from consistency, intentionality, and emotional texture.

3. Connection is not incidental, it is designed

A major thread across the Padlet was the desire to build stronger connection with and among students. Participants suggested student introductions, connection-building questions, asynchronous social spaces, regular social posts, informal check-ins, and opportunities for students to share parts of themselves.

One participant described using student introductions in an asynchronous course discussion board, asking students to share enough about themselves that classmates could identify common ground. Another described using pre-course surveys to learn more about students and tailor parts of the learning experience to their needs and goals.

These are not merely “nice” additions. They are design choices that shape the social conditions of learning. When students feel seen, when they recognize one another as real people, and when they have low-stakes ways to enter the learning community, engagement becomes more likely.

This matters especially in online and asynchronous courses, where connection may not happen automatically. But the same principle applies across modalities. Connection has to be invited, structured, and sustained.

One particularly useful suggestion was to reframe the familiar prompt, “Do you have any questions?” as “What questions do we have?” The shift is subtle, but meaningful. It normalizes questioning as expected and shared. It also communicates that uncertainty is not a deficit, but a regular part of learning.

That is a small move with a potentially significant effect.

4. Student voice creates shared ownership

Several responses focused on giving students more agency in shaping the learning experience. Participants suggested inviting students to shape the course, offering greater choice in assignments, asking students to share what helps them learn, and allowing students to contribute ideas, playlists, examples, or discussion topics.

One participant wrote, “Invite students to shape our learning, not just receive our learning.” That statement captures a major insight from the Padlet. Joyful teaching is not only about how instructors feel. It is also about whether students experience themselves as participants in the learning environment rather than passive recipients of instruction.

Student voice does not require handing over the entire course structure. It can be small and bounded. Students might vote on discussion formats, choose from a set of assignment options, suggest real-world examples, help generate review questions, or identify topics they want to revisit.

Another participant suggested asking students what captures how they are feeling about a week’s topic and then using those responses to shape connections, themes, and openings for the next class. This kind of move helps faculty respond to the actual learners in the room rather than teaching only to a planned sequence.

The deeper principle is shared ownership. When students have meaningful ways to contribute, the course can feel less like something happening to them and more like something being built with them.

5. Playfulness can be purposeful

Some of the most memorable Padlet responses showed that play and rigor are not opposites. Faculty shared ideas that used prediction, music, creativity, games, humor, and surprise to support engagement and learning.

One participant described Barbie Bungee, an activity in which students use linear regression to predict the number of rubber bands needed for a Barbie doll to safely jump from a height. It is playful, yes, but it is also a concrete example of disciplinary thinking. Students make predictions, test assumptions, collect data, model relationships, and see mathematical concepts come to life.

Another participant described Win or Whoa, a weekly practice where students share either something that went well or something they struggled with. This kind of activity makes room for both celebration and honesty. It helps students see that they are not alone, while also giving instructors a window into students’ experiences.

Others suggested podcast-style predictions, games, team competitions, music videos, and social conversation channels. The best examples of playfulness were not disconnected from learning goals. They worked because they gave students a different emotional and cognitive entry point into the content. They invited curiosity. They lowered the stakes. They created memorable moments. They allowed students to participate in ways that felt active and personal.

Purposeful play can be especially useful when students are disengaged or when a course has begun to feel routine. A small playful move can disrupt passivity and remind everyone in the course that learning is not only a cognitive act. It is also emotional, social, and embodied.

What the community taught us

The participant responses offered an important reminder: faculty already have rich, practical wisdom about how to make teaching more joyful and connected. When given the space to name one small move, they did not propose unrealistic transformations. They offered practices that were specific, feasible, and grounded in the lived realities of teaching.

They suggested cutting content. Making space for connection. Asking better questions. Inviting students into shared ownership. Using music, games, reflection, and creativity. Creating small rituals. Celebrating wins. Normalizing challenges. Reintroducing curiosity.

Taken together, these ideas show that joyful teaching is not a retreat from rigor or a distraction from student success. It is a way of attending to the human conditions that make learning possible.

Perhaps the most important takeaway is that joy does not need to begin with a complete course redesign. It can begin with a single question, a lighter week, a short check-in, a more generous opening, a student choice point, a song, a story, or a moment where students and instructors recognize one another more fully.

In challenging times, those small moves matter. To borrow from the words of Flower Darby, they may be how we begin to “find our fizz” again.