The Happiness Curriculum: Inculcating mindfulness and social and emotional learning amongst students every day

The Happiness Curriculum (HC) is the first systemic step towards holistic development of all learners under the formal education set up. Launched in 2018 by his holiness Dalai Lama, this is the first time in the world, that there is a curriculum that focusses on inculcating mindfulness and social emotional learning as a practice every day at such a big scale. It is being implemented with more than 800,000 students from kindergarten through Grade 8 across more than 1000 Delhi government schools.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

The environment in which children are growing up today is inconsistent and unstable with constantly changing social and economic dynamics. This makes it hard to imagine the future in which these children will live and work. While many children are growing up confined to middle class surroundings with excessive exposure to unguided electronic media, unlimited screen time, and little exposure to the natural world and society, others are growing up in difficult circumstances with little nourishment for the body and mind, not even having seen a book or a toy until they go to school. The children are constantly either overstimulated or under stimulated, increasing their susceptibility to psychological crises over the years.

The challenges in the school system have moved beyond poor learning outcomes and academic results. In addition to the pressures of academic performance and achievement, students come to school with stressors arising from many sources including family disturbances, peer conflicts, socio-cultural components, and exposure to physical and mental health risk factors. Prolonged exposure to such stressors leads to long term physiological and emotional disturbances, which severely hinder a child’s learning & development. Statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau show, under 18 years of age, 31 suicides were reported every 24 hours in 2020 due to issues including drugs, broken families, fights with friends, and breakups.

Education has a larger purpose to serve and hence, it needs to reflect the needs of today’s society. Educators and schools across the globe are realising the need for wellness lessons for children. According to the World Happiness Report 2015 (Helliwell, et. al., 2015), schools that prioritise learner wellbeing have the potential to be more effective, with better learning outcomes and greater achievements in learners’ lives. The purpose of education is not just to equip individuals with required knowledge but also to create individuals who are confident, mindful, responsible, and happy, who collectively build a harmonious society.

In 2018, the Delhi Education Minister, Manish Sisodia shared a vision for schools to be a space where children can be happy and engaged. The Government of Delhi has worked relentlessly to bring this vision to life in the design and implementation of the Happiness Curriculum. The curriculum addresses the well-being and happiness of students with a strong emphasis on the co-scholastic skills of mindfulness, self-awareness, critical thinking, reflection & other social-emotional skills. The classes utilise a variety of mediums such as guided mindfulness practice, games, storytelling, reflective conversations and role-playing.

By introducing this curriculum into 1000+ government schools, specifically, we can impact 800,000 students from communities that otherwise may not have access to quality, holistic education, as well as young people who come from adversity and may struggle more with development of life skills.

The Happiness Curriculum focuses on creating a holistic education system by incorporating 40 minutes of happiness classes into mainstream public schools each day for grades K-8. The weekly structure is: Monday - Mindfulness; Tuesday & Wednesday - Stories; Thursday & Friday - Activities; Saturday - Self-Expression. Each class starts with a 5-minute mindfulness activity, followed by 10 minutes for story telling/activity, 20 minutes for discussion, and closing with a 5-minutes mindfulness activity. The curriculum design has a strong child-centred pedagogy. Half the time is allocated for reflective discussions to ensure that there is sufficient time for all students to express themselves. As mindfulness requires practice, it is included everyday. This helps the students start their day by bringing awareness to their thoughts and feelings.

The objectives of the Happiness Curriculum are:

Students will be able to develop the practice of mindfulness
Students will be able to develop self-awareness
Students will be able to develop skills for self-regulation
Students will be able to understand their expectations in relationships and ensure healthy relationships with family, peers, and teachers
Students will be able to learn the skills of critical thinking & inquiry towards effective decision making
The government’s approach ensures that the trainers and educators themselves are empowered with life skills and passionate about disseminating the curriculum to students to help them thrive.

In the long-term, the project’s goal is to thoroughly develop and implement a curriculum that will foster social-emotional skills for students in Delhi government schools and beyond. By developing these skills, the ultimate outcome is to ensure that all students are able to thrive in the 21st century - have good mental health, be confident and employable.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

This is the first time a social-emotional learning curriculum has been given a formal space in the Indian public education system. It’s been integrated into the regular school day for more than 800,000 students (Grade K-8) in all Delhi government schools.
It is contextualised to help students more easily connect what they learn in the classroom to life outside school.
It enables students to think and reflect in their classrooms. Teachers have the flexibility to match the pace of their students rather than the pressure to complete a syllabus. This encourages both students and teachers to move away from rote learning methods.
Teachers are key to the transformation of students. They are trained regularly to facilitate enabling, safe environments, based on authenticity and deep listening.

What is the current status of your innovation?

At the date of the submission, the program has already completed four years of implementation (July 2018-July 2022). Based on the feedback of teachers and other stakeholders, the curriculum is being revised to establish even deeper connect. Teacher capacity building is a continued area of focus. To enable students to assess and take ownership of their growth we are now working on creating student assessments. We are actively collaborating with and aiding private schools in adopting the Happiness Curriculum.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

Multiple partner organisations were brought on board to actualise the monumental vision of the Happiness Curriculum. Under the overall leadership of the Government’s State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), a team of school teachers and counsellors assisted by 5 key external partners such as, Abhibhavak Vidyalaya, Blue Orb Foundation, Dream A Dream Circle of Life, Labhya Foundation, and Abhyudaya Sansthaan.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Our beneficiaries are 800,000 young children from Kindergarten to Grade 8 across all 1000+ Delhi government schools. These schools primarily cater to those from lower income backgrounds or have grown up in adversity. Our community also includes the teachers, teacher trainers and educators, who work with the young people in Delhi Government schools. Now with the gradual expansion to private schools, we are increasing the number of direct beneficiaries.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

To date the Happiness Curriculum has impacted more than 800,000 students from Nursery to Grade 8 across more than 1,000 government schools in Delhi.

The Brookings Institution India Centre conducted a study on the Happiness Curriculum in 2020. The high-level findings from the study showed that self-awareness, awareness of others, and communication were increasingly evidenced from lower to higher grades.

Mindfulness was strong across all grades, while critical thinking varied across grades but was strongest in grade six. The results demonstrate that the Happiness Curriculum writers were responsive to the maturation of students, both socially and cognitively.

Overall, the students showed better relationships with their teachers, increased participation in classes and increased focus and mindfulness. For the teachers, they were able to prioritise values , a change in their orientation for how they were designing classes and an increased collaboration among the teachers.

Challenges and Failures

Stakeholder investment - In the initial phase of the project, it was a challenge to create stakeholder buy-in for a curriculum that was not to be graded but took away instructional hours.

Teacher Capacity Building - The Happiness Curriculum was a novel intervention. This meant that while the teachers had the onus of carrying the curriculum to the students, they themselves needed to be trained. Training for a curriculum such as this can not be confined to training hours. It is difficult to gauge the teacher to student transmission loss.

Covid - The onset of the pandemic led to school closures which halted the implementation of the curriculum.

Evaluation/Assessment - As with all behavioural interventions, it has been difficult to create tools to assess and evaluate the impact of the curriculum. Self-assessment surveys lead to social desirability bias and situational questions require anchoring and intricate contextualisation.

Conditions for Success

The curriculum is a long term sustained effort to reform school education and requires immense support and willingness of the political leadership.

Successful implementation of the curriculum first and foremost requires clarity of purpose and motivated leadership because it is an intervention that will reap the most benefits in the long-run and hence a sustained effort is required.

It is also essential to have human resources with relevant expertise in social emotional learning, content design, capacity building, and contextualisation of content.

Additionally, it is crucial that a happiness class is conducted everyday and hence allocation of instructional hours for regular Happiness classes is necessary.

It is important to incorporate stakeholder feedback on design and implementation. It is strongly recommended that stakeholder input be collected through surveys and focus group discussions at regular intervals

Replication

The success of the curriculum has motivated the Action Committee for Unaided Recognised Private Schools in Delhi to reach out the Delhi Government for assistance in replicating the curriculum in their schools. As of now, 200 private schools in Delhi have voluntarily implemented the curriculum.

The Happiness Curriculum has also informed the Uttarakhand state government’s SEL curriculum development. Anandam Pathyacharya is an SEL curriculum for classes Nursery to VIII that has been rolled out across 20,000 schools in the state.

Lessons Learned

The pandemic led to prolonged school closures across the globe. Students returning to school need to feel ready and confident to learn again. Therefore, an integral part of bridging the learning gap is to create emotionally safe and joyful spaces for students. The Happiness Curriculum has allowed us to address this issue.
The content creation for a curriculum like this is a very rigorous and time-consuming process. It needs multiple rounds of review from various experts with different perspectives. Each lesson and each question serves a specific purpose. The sanctity of the content determines what the students learn and imbibe.
Teacher capacity building for a novel curriculum such as Happiness Curriculum is an equally important and continuous aspect of the implementation of the curriculum in the schools. It is paramount that while the teachers assist the students in their journey of self-reflection and growth, the teachers are assisted too.

Anything Else?

The curriculum was launched by HH the Dalai Lama.
In 2021, the Happiness Curriculum was recognized by WISE Awards 2021 in partnership with Dream a Dream for Educational Innovative Project in Qatar.
The Happiness Curriculum has gained recognition for being a pioneering step from leaders both national and international. Some of the more notable have been:
Netherlands King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima visited the Happiness class in Delhi in October 2019 as did the former First Lady of the USA, Melania Trump, who found the curriculum inspiring in February 2020
The former Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi, proposed that judicial academies across India have happiness classes.

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