Joyful Learning: Tools to Infuse Your 6-12 Classroom with Meaning, Relevance, and Fun

Joyful Learning: Tools to Infuse Your 6-12 Classroom with Meaning, Relevance, and Fun is a guide for teachers seeking to energize their practice and deeply engage students. Author Stephanie Farley shows how to create student-centered learning experiences that immerse students in meaning, relevance, and joy. She shows how you can foster student engagement and motivation with a combination of choice, challenge, and play, thereby improving learning outcomes.

Practical strategies are included in each chapter, such as how to write rubrics that foster effective feedback, how to incorporate performance and competency-based assessment, and how to have students grade themselves through a process of self-evaluation and reflection. Throughout, she offers tools such as targets and rubrics, checklists to guide planning, and prompts that help you apply the ideas to your own assignments and assessments.

With the book’s specific, immediately applicable examples, you’ll be able to help your students feel connected to the lessons, happy about their progress, and joyfully engaged in the learning process.

Stephanie Farley is a writer and consultant working with schools and teachers on issues of curriculum, assessment, instruction, SEL, and building relationships. She is a former English teacher and independent school administrator and has served as a member of California Association of Independent School accreditation teams.