Finding The Fizz: Practical Ways to Renew Energy and Support Student Success
This may sound familiar. A faculty member walks into their classroom—or opens their online discussion board—ready to dive into a topic they love. But instead of vibrant energy, they are met with blank stares, silent screens, and a heavy sense of detachment. Somewhere between the mounting workloads and shifting technologies, the spark in the classrooms has gone missing.
The truth is, many faculty report they are running on empty. Teaching in higher education has always been demanding, but recent years have made it feel significantly more tiring. When faculty feel drained and the students seem disengaged, it is easy to lose touch with the passion that brought individuals to this profession in the first place.
Members of our team recently attended an inspiring webinar featuring celebrated educator and author Flower Darby to talk about exactly this challenge. Based on the conversation with her, our team realized that supporting student success starts with supporting faculty vitality. There is a need to shift the focus from just surviving the semester to intentionally bringing joy back to the classrooms.
Here are a few practical “micro-moves” to help renew the energy, connect with students, and find the teaching fizz again—whether classes are taught online or in-person.
High-Level Overview: The Unspoken Crisis of Faculty Vitality
- The Reality of Burnout: Broad survey data (N = 500) indicates that 35% of faculty feel actively drained, emotionally fatigued, or burned out. An additional 41% feel their teaching is meaningful but significantly more tiring than it used to be.
- The Strategic Shift: Faculty success and student success are linked. Centers for teaching and learning that support faculty, must shift from purely technological tools to intentionally supporting faculty flourishing, well-being, and genuine human connection.
Primary Barriers vs. Practical “Micro-Moves”
| What Suffocates Classroom Joy | What Restores Classroom Joy (Faculty “Micro-Moves”) |
| Student Disengagement: Silent, passive classrooms that drain an instructor’s natural teaching energy. | Atmospheric Anchors: Playing warm background music or music videos (e.g., Playing for Change) as students enter the room to disrupt tension. |
| The Content Overload Trap: Racing through a dense curriculum leaves zero room for spontaneous interactions. | Syllabus Deflation: Intentionally “cutting content” from over-packed courses to create breathing room for active reflection. |
| Rigid Academic Stuffy Culture: A historical resistance in higher ed to treat learning as playful or social. | Gamification & Play: Incorporating 5–10 minute low-stakes review games, creative entry mapping, or interactive prompts to build peer community. |
| Administrative / Time Pressures: Multitasking and heavy clinical workloads that isolate faculty from their peers. | Reframing Questions: Changing the defensive “Do you have any questions?” to the welcoming “What questions do we have?” to remove fear. |
Core Strategic Blueprint: The 5 Elements of Classroom Flourishing
Inspired by Martin Seligman’s PERMA model and Flower Darby’s pedagogical frameworks, centers for teaching and learning can help faculty focus on five core design components:
- Emotion & Connection: Creating welcoming online social channels in asynchronous spaces, using warm tones, and explicitly normalizing mistakes so students feel safe, seen, and valued.
- Student Voice & Ownership: Increasing agency by allowing students to make predictions, choose their own assignment delivery formats (audio, text, video), and co-create aspects of the lesson.
- Celebrating Small Wins: Building intentional checkpoints into the curriculum to express gratitude, highlight incremental student progress, and share mutual successes.
- Active & Multimodal Engagement: Replacing long-form passive lectures with real-world applications, structured peer debates, interactive case studies, and hands-on problem-solving.
- Authentic Instructor Presence: Encouraging faculty to inject their genuine personalities, passions, and eccentricities back into their teaching to spark their instructional “fizz.”
Resources
- Foundational Text: The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz in Asynchronous Classes by Flower Darby.
- The Dartmouth College Joy Lab Tool: Joy Cards for Faculty Distribution (A curated catalog of minor behavioral prompts that spark workplace and classroom happiness).
- The Unwell Educator Network: Specialized support resources and institutional pathways focused on faculty residency, mental wellness, and systemic burnout recovery.
- Ambient Classroom Engagement Assets: Playing for Change Foundation (Global music collaborative highly recommended by faculty for setting an inclusive, high-vibe entry atmosphere).
- Theoretical Framework Reference: Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (Martin Seligman, 2011). Publisher website.
By shifting the focus from merely delivering content to nurturing human connection, faculty can help the students thrive while protecting their own instructional energy. When faculty bring their unique presence back to the classroom, they don’t just teach—they find their fizz again!
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