Tuesday teaching tips are designed to bolster your teaching toolbelt with local examples grounded in teaching and learning literature and relevant professional development opportunities.

TUESDAY TEACHING TIP: Making Room for Hope, Creativity, and Joy in Teaching

 

Introduction

Research on the interconnections between emotion, social experience, and cognition (i.e. Immordino-Yang and Damasio, 2007 and Immordino-Yang, 2024 podcast) reminds us that learning engages the whole person. Amid growing concerns about student isolation and well-being, and the increasing presence of AI and other technologies in learning, faculty across SCU are exploring both time-tested and emerging pedagogical approaches that attend to the  whole humans in our classes. Our pause for Indigenous Peoples' Day this week also invites a reflection on the diverse ways of knowing and being that emphasize the interconnectedness of people, place, relationships, and community.

As we look ahead to next Tuesday's Faculty CAFE, Mind/Body: Joy and Creativity in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (RSVP), we invite you to consider:

What becomes possible when we make more intentional space for our whole selves in teaching and learning? Where might hope, creativity, and joy open new possibilities for our students and ourselves?

Three SCU colleagues who will share more at next week's CAFE provide perspectives and practices from their teaching and scholarship to help spark this conversation.

 

Dave Feldman | Professor, Counseling Psychology I seek to help students find hope that’s grounded in the reality of their lives, with all the challenges and possibilities this entails. In my view, hope isn’t just “nice to have”; it’s crucial—perhaps more now than ever.

Research spanning more than three decades shows that hope is an essential resource for students, predicting greater academic achievement and goal accomplishment, lower depression and anxiety, and a greater sense of meaning and purpose. One of my strongest convictions is that true hope shouldn’t involve painting a “smiley face” over the real problems in our own lives or in our world. It begins with firmly grounding ourselves in these realities—even allowing ourselves to grieve them—and then asking what we can do about them. 

In my teaching and research, I keep coming back to three evidence-based conditions that help hope thrive: 

• having goals that matter to us,
• creatively envisioning possible pathways forward (even given the real obstacles we face),
• and finding sources of personal agency and motivation to keep us trying. 

 

Laura Norris | Associate Dean of Innovation and Clinical Professor, Law Creativity, in the form of creative problem-solving for a legal client, is an important skill that differentiates great lawyers, especially in an AI-enabled legal environment.  I work with students in the Entrepreneurs' Law Clinic, who are representing real startup clients, to use principles of human-centered design, specifically Design Thinking, to ideate on solutions to their clients' legal problems.

One practice that is very helpful at encouraging creativity is rapid ideation. Ask students:

• to take out a piece of paper,
• list as many uses for a paper clip as possible - in 3 minutes. 

Three minutes is deliberately long! The first ideas often come quickly; sustained exploration encourages increasingly imaginative possibilities. Afterward, invite students to compare their first and last ideas, share surprises, and consider how generating multiple possibilities might inform their approach to other problems.

Try it: Adapt this exercise to a problem, concept, case, or design challenge in your discipline. This is also a great activity to do solo, if you want to practice pushing your own creative boundaries.

 

Christine Quince | Assistant Professor, Teacher Education Program, School of Education and Counseling Psychology One way to incorporate joy into your teaching is to think about your inner-child and remind yourself what you enjoyed in the classroom as a student and to incorporate that into your classroom today. Did you enjoy journaling, games to review material, or music playing while you worked? If so, these memories can provide starting points for imagining learning experiences that spark creativity and joy for you and your students.

I also invite colleagues to explore my research on educator well-being as a spark for their own conversations and development. It offers an opportunity to reflect on our own networks of support and how educators sustain their well-being through connection and community.

 

Further Reading:

“Never Give Up on Hope,” (Feldman, 2024 TEDx talk)

Making Hope Happen (Lopez, 2014).

Quince, C. L., Martin, J. T., & Bristol, T. J. (2024). Looking Back to Move Forward: A Healing-Centered Approach to Teacher Professional Learning in one Urban Center. Journal of Negro Education, 93(3), 294-309.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS:

• Department Committee FAR Evaluation Training on Wednesday, October 14 RSVP
  
  
• Third Thursdays Shut Up & Write on Thursday, October 15 RSVP
  
  
• CAFE: Mind/Body: Joy and Creativity in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship on Tuesday, October 20 RSVP
  
  
• Faculty Advising Skills Workshop with Diana Morlang on Thursday, October 22 RSVP

 

Missed a teaching tip? Read them all here. 

And check out our full calendar of CAFEs and other Faculty Development events.