Motivation, Relationships & Joy
Plan the Joy
Schedule moments your class genuinely enjoys, and design them so the fun is also practice
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What is it?
Plan the Joy means deliberately writing moments your class genuinely enjoys into the lesson: a quiz answered from memory and run as a game, a dramatic reveal, a running joke, music while they pack away. The approach works because students tend to give attention and effort more readily in a room they are glad to be in, and because a planned moment is the only kind that happens reliably. The craft lies in choosing joy that carries the learning, so that the fun itself is practice and never merely a pause from it.
The steps
- Choose one moment and write it into the plan. Pick a slot you teach every week. Give the moment a name and a fixed place, such as the last five minutes on Friday. Write it into the plan like any other activity, so that a busy week cannot squeeze it out.
- Make the fun and the practice the same activity. Choose a format in which the enjoyable part is the learning: a quiz from memory (retrieval practice) played as a whole-class game, a reveal that answers the lesson's big question, a one-minute race to list everything they can remember. Before you use it, ask yourself one question: could the class enjoy this with the content removed? If the answer is yes, redesign it.
- Set the stakes at pride only. Play the class against its own record, or against you, and let the reward be the number on the board and the right to talk about it.The record is nineteen. Beat it, and I'll write the new one up in pen.
- Deliver it every time you promise it. If the plan says Friday, it happens on Friday, even in the bad weeks. Announce it the same way each time, so that it feels like a fixture.It's Friday. You know what that means. Pens down. Question one.
- Keep it short and end it cleanly. Two to five minutes is enough for most formats. Fix the length in advance: eight questions, one song, one reveal. End on your usual attention signal and move straight into the next task.
- Refresh the format when it fades. Watch the room and notice when the happy groan becomes a flat one. Keep the slot but change the game. Running jokes are allowed to retire.
What it looks like
Miss Winstanley ends Friday's history lesson with her class of 13-year-olds playing Beat the Board: eight retrieval questions, with the whole class playing against its own best score, which sits in the corner of the whiteboard all week. "The record is nineteen. I checked." Someone groans happily. She reveals the answers one at a time and pauses before the last. "Are we sure? Because if this is right…" The class counts the score aloud: twenty. There is brief cheering.
Then Priya calls out that Callum guessed question six, so it shouldn't count, and the mood starts to tip towards a squabble. Winstanley keeps her voice light: "Every record has one lucky answer in it. Twenty stands. Next Friday we defend it." Books are packed away to music, and the record is rewritten in the corner. The whole thing takes four minutes.
How you’ll know it’s working
- Students ask for the moment by name and protest when a week looks likely to miss it. Requests to play arrive before you have announced anything.
- The content sits inside the fun. Someone watching from the back could write down the questions practised, the words retrieved or the routine the music timed.
- Timed across a fortnight, the moment starts when you said it would, stays under about five minutes and ends on a single signal.
- Students who coast through written tasks join in. Compare the back row during the game with the back row during the worksheet ten minutes earlier.
Pitfalls & fixes
- Joy as a separate treat. Ten minutes of a video as a reward for finishing the work teaches the class that the work is the price of the video. Make the enjoyable activity and the practice the same thing: a game of quiz questions is still quizzing.
- Using it as leverage. Cancelling the promised game to punish Tuesday's behaviour turns the moment into a bargaining chip, and students stop trusting it. Deal with behaviour through your normal consequences and let the moment happen anyway. Its reliability is doing much of the work.
- Letting it swell. Five planned minutes drift towards fifteen, and the game starts to eat into the teaching it was meant to serve. Fix the length structurally: a set question count, one song, a visible timer, and your usual attention signal to close.
- Performing fun you don't feel. A forced wacky moment reads as fake within seconds, especially to teenagers. Build on what already gets a genuine laugh in your room: the joke that started itself, the deadpan reveal, the record in the corner of the board.
Weigh it up
Why it’s worth it
- The engagement is general-purpose. A class that looks forward to part of your lesson tends to give you more attention in the rest of it, and behaviour often improves without a single extra correction.
- Run as a game of remembering, it becomes retrieval practice at volume: eight questions a week across a term is around a hundred low-stakes practice attempts per student, and nobody experiences them as a test.
- It is cheap to run. A format designed once can repeat for months, packing-away music costs nothing, and none of it generates marking.
- A reliable ritual gives the week shape. It offers a flat class something specific to look forward to, and it gives you a fixture to build classroom culture around.
- You enjoy the lesson more too. Over a term, that can change how you teach the other fifty-five minutes, and students notice the difference.
The costs
- Finding formats that genuinely carry content takes trial and error, and some attempts will fall flat in front of the class. Retiring a flopped game gracefully is part of the job.
- The promise binds you. Once the class expects Friday's game, it has to happen even on the Fridays when you are tired, behind or being observed, because an unreliable version is worth very little.
- Joy amplifies whatever state the room is already in. In a class without settled routines, a game can tip into chaos and cost you the ten minutes that follow it.
Adaptations
- Early years: much of the day is already built on play, so the planning runs in the other direction: check that the delightful moments also carry the learning. A phonics song, a counting chant on the stairs and a puppet who spells badly all qualify.
- Primary: whole-class rituals land most strongly here: a class record, a register answered in character, a mascot with a backstory. Guard the length, because a primary class will happily let a good game eat the afternoon.
- Secondary: keep it quick and slightly dry. Teenagers accept a running joke, a record and a deadpan reveal, while anything announced as Fun with a capital F can die on contact. Deliver the game in the same tone you teach in.
- Post-16 / adult: rituals survive well with adults when framed as part of how the course works: a weekly five-question warm-up against personal bests, or a reveal held back until the end of the session. Adults are at least as easily embarrassed as teenagers, so pride-only stakes matter even more.
Where this comes from
Planning enjoyment deliberately is long-standing practice, and Doug Lemov codified it as "Joy Factor" in Teach Like a Champion, cataloguing the forms it takes in strong classrooms: games, drama and song, humour, suspense. Plan the Joy is our name for the same territory. No trial has tested planned joy as a move in its own right, so the badge stays at craft. The sturdier evidence sits beneath the things a good joy moment carries, such as retrieval practice and settled routines.
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