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The pros of using humor in the college classroom I gathered 114 completed questionnaires from my students, and the results of their answers to my first eight items are below. I also included an item that asked, “Is it possible to have fun and learn at the same time?” and a final item designed to investigate my students’ reactions to instructors whose attempts to be humorous in the classroom are unsuccessful and how these failures affected their learning and the atmosphere of their classes.
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I asked the students in my three introductory psychology classes - which were populated with an approximately equal mix of male and female, 18-19 year-old, first-time, full-time students - how an instructor’s use of humor in the classroom affected: If they were, perhaps they would be more likely to see these qualities as characteristic of effective (i.e., master) teachers and do their best to emulate them. After some careful thought, I decided that one possible reason why faculty give humor - and the rapport that humor can produce - such low ratings is that they may be unaware of the positive thoughts, emotions and behaviors these qualities can elicit from their students. These findings puzzled me for several years, but an invitation from a colleague in our Communications Studies Department to participate in one of their symposia on the topic of humor in the classroom provided me with the incentive I needed to gather some data to help me overcome my puzzlement. The difference was even greater for happy/positive/humorous qualities/behaviors, with 49 percent of students selecting it as a most important quality of master teachers as compared to only 6 percent of the faculty. 35), while only 7 percent of faculty did so. Forty-seven percent of the students in their study rated rapport as “one of the 10 qualities/behaviors that are most important to master teaching at the college and university level” (p. (2002) compared the ratings that students and faculty gave to rapport and the happy/positive/humorous behaviors that produce it, they discovered that these two groups differed widely. 2), and that examples of this quality are “never or seldom telling a funny story or joke, being serious all the time, and not smiling or acting jovially around students” (p. The most recent work from this group (Busler, Kirk, Keeley & Buskist, 2017) has also revealed that lacking a sense of humor is a quality that students perceive to be “reflective of poor teaching” (p. Specific examples of teacher behaviors that promote student enjoyment of learning include teachers telling jokes and funny stories laughing along with students and using relevant, interesting and light-hearted personal examples to highlight important points.
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They also found that students report they not only learn a great deal from humorous teachers, but they also enjoy the process of learning from them (Buskist, Sikorski, Buckley & Saville, 2002). Humor can also lead to the establishment of student-teacher rapport, which is another characteristic of master teachers. In fact, Bill Buskist and his posse of prolific protégés from Auburn University - who have studied and identified the characteristics of excellent (i.e., master) teachers for the past 20 years - have indicated that possessing and exhibiting a good sense of humor is one of these characteristics. We all know that teaching is serious (i.e., important) business, but teachers do not have to be serious (i.e., humorless) to be effective. McKeachie and Svinicki (2006) summed up these positive consequences of humor quite succinctly when they said that transmitting knowledge through informal methods such as humor can produce and sustain interest and deep learning in students. The creation of a common psychological bond between students and faculty.The creation of a positive social and emotional learning environment.A reduction of anxiety and stress in dealing with difficult material.The use of humor in the college classroom has been researched extensively (see Segrist & Hupp, 2015 who summarized 41 years of literature on humor in the college classroom) and has been shown to have many benefits for students (Banas, Dunbar, Rodriguez & Liu, 2011 Garner, 2006 Huss & Estep, 2016 Pollio, 2002), some of which are: