Bringing Happiness into our Classrooms

This topic is dear to my heart. After reading Carl Roger's "On Becoming a Person" years ago, I really was transformed and saw my classroom differently. I'll be relating this in my speech and how I see teaching as so important - not because it will create the next Albert Einstein but because it may help produce a happy person. And there is a lot we can do to enable this! This Times article also sheds some light on Happiness...

VISIT PROJECT PEACE! and play the PASS THE PAPER GAME

happiness

Here's my recent talk on happiness! Just a piece of it. Click on the video to go to the full screen or get the full version.

Find more videos like this on EFL CLASSROOM 2.0

Tags: happiness, happy, self, workshop

Attachments:

Bringing HAPPINESS into your classroom.doc, 662 KB
The Joy of Teaching.doc, 36 KB
Teaching people about themselves.pdf, 23 KB

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Permalink Reply by ddeubel on December 20, 2009 at 5:00am

Dan Gilbert, Harvard Prof and author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

He talks about the same thing I did - "synthetic happiness" is just as good as the real thing! If we can think we are happy, we will become happy. Watch his experiments.

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Permalink Reply by ddeubel on December 20, 2009 at 5:27am

Let's not forget Matthieu Richard, the world's happiest monk. He teaches us how we can be happy by training ourself to be happy.

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Permalink Reply by ddeubel on December 20, 2009 at 5:36am

Nicolas Hobbs started the RE-ED movement. A new way to see education and our relationship with students. His 12 principles cry out to be discovered and practiced by educators. Get the full Flash Presentation HERE.

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Permalink Reply by ddeubel on December 20, 2009 at 7:38pm

Here is the full story I told about The Secret of Happiness in the presentation...

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Permalink Reply by Ellen Pham on December 30, 2010 at 6:37pm

So nice to see this again, David!!

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Permalink Reply by ddeubel on January 6, 2011 at 9:52pm

And I'm HAPPY to see you here!

Will reply soon in full - just wrapped up with projects...

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Permalink Reply by ddeubel on January 30, 2011 at 9:07pm

Daniel Kahneman talks about the cognitive traps that make thinking about happiness difficult (and especially pursuing it). Really interesting and not so much about his discipline "behavioral economics" as about how we can manage our happiness. He talks about the difference between the remembering self and the experiencing self.

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Permalink Reply by ddeubel on January 30, 2011 at 9:32pm

Happiness - a wonderful thought poem by Raymond Carver....

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Permalink Reply by ddeubel on February 1, 2011 at 7:46pm

Some ordinary people talk about happiness. Insightful...

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Permalink Reply by Donald Payzant on February 24, 2011 at 7:59pm

I really like Marc Helgesons site 'www.eltandhappiness.com' it has many great conversation worksheets. I've used it to build empathy with advanced students towards struggling students in their class.