Monday 1 August 2016

When Ha ha leads to Aha!: the role of humour in group learning

I have been reading a bit about the role of humour in group learning, and it seems that there is a fair bit of evidence that funny tutors and amusing lectures have a positive impact on the students and their learning.


Humour can help students to feel more relaxed, reducing anxiety, decreasing stress, and improving self-esteem and motivation (Berk, 1998). It creates a positive emotional and social environment which means that students are less likely to be thinking about themselves and more likely to be able to concentrate on the topic (Glenn, 2002) and humour has been described as something which can reduce the 'psychological distance' - either between the lecturer and the students or between the students (Kahn, 1989). I was talking in my last blog post about how important it is to create a connection between the students and the lecturer, and humour seems to be one effective way to do this.

It even has an impact on your body which can help, improving your breathing and circulation, lowering your blood pressure and your pulse, and releasing quantities of oxygen and happy hormones into your blood stream.
 
This has all been shown to have a clear impact on learning, with students who have funny tutors turning up to lectures more often, learning more (Civikly, 1986; Garner, 2006), remembering more (Hill, 1988) being more interested in the topic (Dodge and Rossett, 1982) and being more likely to exhibit creative thinking (Ziv, 1988). 

Taken together, that's quite impressive. Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that it's such a powerful teaching tool that humour should be used by all teachers, most of the time (Bruner, 2002).

There seems to be some evidence (Rhem, 1998) that for it to be most effective in an academic setting, the humour needs to be specific, targeted and appropriate to the subject matter, and there is some research which has highlighted that funny tutors use quite a lot of self-depricating humour, turning the joke on themselves. Humour is used in a slightly different way in adult learning. With adult students, positive humour is often initiated by students as well as tutors, and the tutors' jokes are intended to show that they identify with their students, showing them as people rather than them as lecturers (Salisbury and Murcott, 1992).

Now, this all needs to come with a bit of a warning. The studies in general have simply asked people to rate how funny a session or tutor was on a scale, but of course what constitutes 'funny' is subjective, and context and culture specific. I don't think the authors are suggesting that we all start our lectures with a series of 'Did you hear the one about...' type jokes, and humour can have the effect of alientating and offending. 

As someone who teaches, and someone who teaches career coaches to teach, I find this all really interesting, but I'm not sure what I should do with it. Should I be teaching my students to be funnier? Is 'being funny' something which you can learn? Or is it just too easy to get it wrong and therefore too risky to try? One of the papers I've listed below (Decker, 2007) argues for teaching to be more 'playful'. I wonder if this is a concept which works better for me than trying to be funny?

References

Berk, R. A., & Nanda, J. P. (1998). Effects of jocular instructional methods on attitudes, anxiety, and achievement in statistics courses. Humor, 11, 383-410.
Bruner, R. F. (2002). Transforming thought: the role of humor in teaching. Available at SSRN 298761
Decker, E. (2007). Q. What’s funny about teaching? A. Not enough! Arguing for a comic pedagogy. Educational Insights, 11(3), 2-12.
Dodge, B. J., & Rossett, A. (1982). Heuristics for humor in instruction. Performance & Instruction, 21(4), 11-32.
Garner, R. L. (2006). Humor in pedagogy: How ha-ha can lead to aha!. College Teaching, 54(1), 177-180.
Glenn, R. (2002). Brain research: Practical applications for the classroom. Teaching for Excellence, 21(6), 1-2.
Kahn, W. A. (1989). Toward a sense of organizational humor: Implications for organizational diagnosis and change. The Journal of applied behavioral science, 25(1), 45-63.
Salisbury, J., & Murcott, A. (1992). Pleasing the students: teachers' orientaton to classroom life in adult education. The Sociological Review, 40(3), 561-575.
Thomas, A. B., & Al-Maskati, H. (1997). I suppose you think that's funny! The role of humour in corporate learning events. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 8(4), 519-538.
Ziv, A. (1988). Teaching and learning with humor: Experiment and replication. The Journal of Experimental Education, 57(1), 4-15.