Teacher workshop on Happy Classrooms

A workshop on Happy Classrooms was conducted by School counsellor, Ms Jigyasa Khokhar on 7 September 2019 in the School auditorium. It was attended by all the teachers of The Indian School and The FoundationSchool. The objective of the workshop was to discuss ways to create Happy Teachers which in turn would create Happy Classrooms.

The workshop commenced with Ms Khokhar speaking about emotional self-regulation. She discussed this with role play. Three teachers volunteered to enact a situation where the teacher was upset and conveyed negative emotions in the classroom. In the second scene the emotions felt by the teacher were negative but she did not allow her mental state to come in the way of handling her classin a positive way and handled the situation well. Ms Khokhar laid importance on the fact that itsvery natural for each one of us to experience negative emotions but one should learn to cope with them. Extremes of happy and and sad states upsets emotional wellbeing and a Display of such extreme emotions makes us rigid she said.

Further she mentioned that we should regularly assess the behaviour of students by working on the concept of self-awareness. She urged the teachers to observe their students closely and try to find the reasons why they sometime behave difficult. She referred to Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Quotient. For a happy classroom, the teacher must work on her EQ.

Ms Khokar also shared the happiness formula with us, namely, H= S+C+V where H was theHappiness Quotient, S referred to the biological set up, C indicated Life Conditions and V meantVoluntary Activities. As the variables S and C are not under the control of an individual, one must exercise control on the voluntary actions to increase the level of happiness.

Towards the end of the session she conducted an activity involving voice modulation, a tool for a happy classroom.