Can we bring JOY back into the classroom?

Last year was a difficult year for our teachers due to lots of issues with online testing and off and on again testing dates in which the testing was finally cancelled because the company putting out the test could not follow through on what was needed.  Needless to say we did a lot of work for nothing!  I started to think about what was happening in education today and feel that testing has gotten so important that we are forgetting the simple pleasure of being a student and the joy that school should be for teachers as well as students.  JOY is a simple word meaning a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.  We all know that it is not possible to have great pleasure and happiness everyday and if we look to the biblical meaning of joy it is really about the assurance that God is in control of all the details in our life and He gives us the confidence to know that everything will be alright and our part is to praise Him in everything we do.  So, to go back to the classroom when I talk about Joy in the classroom I am talking about lessons that are creative and fun, that push kids to be curious and to hopefully help them to want to learn, even when what they are learning is difficult and not fun!  We have spent so much time worrying about testing, preparing for testing, looking at data, and then taking the test, that we have sucked all the joy out of the classroom!  My hope is that as we embark on this new year that we will put JOY back into the classroom and create learners who are curious and excited everyday to come to school to see what a new day brings.  In order to do this I have to honor the needs of my teachers and give them the opportunity to not feel burdened with testing and to have the freedom to try new things and to feel okay with failure and know that failure is the best way to learn, to bring more technology into the classroom, to collaborate with their co-workers and create great lessons to share and use throughout the building and to just be a teacher and enjoy it!  I could go on and on about this subject because I feel we have strayed so far from the path of good teaching that we are creating kids who really don't know how to learn, ask questions, etc. but who know how to bubble in the circle beside a correct answer on a test.  I feel that at our school we have really worked hard to not become those people who "teach to the test", but there is always that nagging thought at the back of our mind that we may not score as high as other schools that "teach to the test".  I have come to the conclusion that if we teach our students to be critical thinkers and evoke curiosity through well planned intentional lessons that our students will do well on any test that is given to them.  I hope that our state government will one day remove testing from a teacher's evaluation scores so that we could take the focus off of testing and shift it to the real focus, our students.