As a young teacher I was advised by multiple veteran teachers not to smile before Winter Break. The notion was that because I was new (and in my case looked fifteen), I needed to show that I meant business. That my class was business. 

This advice was nearly universal for new teachers when I came into the classroom almost two decades ago. These days it is less common, which is probably a good thing because it turns out a smile can be a potent tool for both pedagogy and one’s own psychology—especially during long slogs like the start-of-school-to-winter-break-one we are currently trudging through.

I will get to the classroom applications of smiling in a moment, but first let’s marvel for a moment at the humble smile. It is well established that the simple act of faking a smile can make one happier. A study of baseball cards found that those who are smiling in their cards lived seven years longer than those who weren’t. And smiles are often associated with competence, can boost your immune system, and can meaningfully reduce blood pressure and stress—all for the price of lifting the corner of one’s mouth up a millimeter or two. 

When it comes to our classrooms, one study found that welcoming students at the door with a positive message can increase academic engagement by 20 percent. Put another way, the simple act of welcoming students with a smile and hello can have the same impact of adding 36 extra days of instruction over the course of a year. For those seeking to help students catch up after all the disruptions and losses of the last three years, I haven’t seen much that offers a better return on investment than that. 

And the doorway is just one of many opportunities to smile, literally or metaphorically, at our students. This is why I strive—even though (or maybe because) smiling hasn’t always been as natural for me as it is for some others—to regularly bring smiles into my classes from the first day. My favorite ways to do that include the following:

• I seek to smile and welcome students at the door every day. It can be so tempting between classes to respond to one more paper or email, but I don’t know if either of those will have come with a 20% boost in engagement for the entire class. In the bustle and hustle of schools, I don’t always accomplish my goal of welcoming every student every day, but striving for it helps to keep me honest. 
• I smile a lot on papers. By this I mean that I quite literally draw a smile on the paper when something makes me smile or use Google’s new emoji reactions (see below). I have found the novelty and surprise of a teacher drawing or using a smile has an outsized positive effect on students, especially given the fact that it takes about three seconds to do. 

• We start each Friday with Good News from the week. This is a Matt Kay staple of making space for those in class to regularly share Good News—and spread some smiles.
• I seek to smile via finding ways to regularly share student work. Here is a post from last year about ways to micro-share student work, and to this I have added a regular Pear Deck feature where students pick a favorite line from a piece they wrote and share it anonymously with the class.  
• I take praise seriously. I wrote about the dynamics of praise last year, but in short the in-depth smile that is praise can be powerful, but only if it is sincere, specific, and focused less on fixed things and more on effort and strategies. 

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I can’t speak for you, but, as I alluded to above, this is the time of year when my smile can begin to dim. The papers and emails pile, the honeymoon period wears off, and the parade of conferences and back to school events grows exhausting. This is not a post advocating for plastering on a false smile during such harried times or finding a way to always look at the bright side. Smiles, like most things in the classroom, need to be genuine and aren’t always appropriate or fitting with our mood. And that is just fine. Instead, think of this as a friendly reminder that our jobs, despite their issues, have many joyful parts. Students are often funny, creative, and brilliant, and we get to spend our days thinking about how to help them to be better today than yesterday. There are lots of things to smile about, and when we find such things, there is a lot of good that can come for us and our students to show that joy on our faces.

Happy Friday (there, at the very least, is something to smile about), and thanks for reading!

Matt