Rules for Using Humor in the Classroom

Following are some rules about using humor in the classroom from eHow.com.
The full article will be found by clicking here

1.Know your audience. Middle school students, highschoolers and even 19-year-old college students do not have the same sense of humor as their teachers and professors. Think about what they will find amusing and keep an ear open to what kind of jokes, cracks, remarks and anecdotes show up in your students' conversations.

2.Use humor at appropriate times.This means finding the right balance of instruction and joking. Don't let your whole class become an hour long comedy routine. Use humor to keep your students alert and engaged, not as a way to gain popularity. Also, using humor appropriately in the classroom means watching out for inappropriate material. Steer clear of off-color jokes and be sensitive to the cultural backgrounds of all of your students.

3.Encourage humor among your students. Let them know that it is OK to cut loose and joke around occasionally. The benefits of a happy, smiling classroom outweigh the time lost on humorous tangents. Group projects are a great place for them to use humor, as long as they cover the assigned material as well.

4.Don't try too hard to jazz up the material you are teaching. Sometimes, things like geometry and physics are going to bore students. This is OK. Don't try to compensate by delivering the material in a humorous package, like a funny song. Use humor to create a positive classroom environment, but don't let it obscure the material when it's time to really teach.

5.Don't exclude anyone. Stay away from "in jokes" between you and a few students. The whole class should feel included in the humor, not just a few popular, outgoing students or the class clowns.

Labels: encouragement, humor

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Using Humor Effectively

This is an exerpt from an article at Education Blog Romow, on teaching youth that has some good points for teaching adults. For as I always say, an adult is just a kid in a bigger, older body. To read the full article go here: http://www.romow.com/education-blog/using-humor-effectively-as-a-teacher/

"Another key to humor being effective as a teacher is to make sure it is not at the expense of other students. If you can only get a laugh while making a student look bad, then you should not be trying. Humor should always be easy for the students to laugh at. If you are being laughed at, you are succeeding. This means they are listening, and that is a good thing. Do not be afraid to be the butt of the joke. Your students will love you for it."

When Experience is Not the Best Teacher

More from the LERN article, "Your Experience in Teaching."

•Listen to your inner voice about how you might teach. Try some of what at first sounds outrageous - you’ll likely be surprised at how successful a seemingly outrageous idea turns out to be.

•Take a risk. You’ll feel better; your students will enjoy it. Don’t worry that no one has tried the teaching approach you have in mind before, or you can’t find any research about it. Try it anyway. Your idea just might set a new direction for teaching adults.

•Most of the time don’t share your new idea about teaching with a fellow teacher until you’ve tried it with your students. You’ll too often hear, “Stay with what you know, it’s safer.”

•Watch what other people do — techniques speakers use to engage an audience, strategies discussion leaders employ to involve people and so on. Borrow the ideas and try them out in your classrooms.

•Accept failure as a stepping stone to success. Unless you fail occasionally, you aren’t trying anything new.
Experience can be a wonderful and important teacher, particularly if we learn how to reflect on and understand what we have experienced. But experience can also be a block to change because it imprints in our minds particular ways of doing things. As teachers of adults, we must learn to recognize when experience is a good and proper teacher, and when it blocks our learning.