Any teacher will tell you that one of the hardest things about being a teacher is keeping students engaged. So one of the most important methods in order to keep students engaged is using Humor. Imagine yourself attending a seminar or a speech and the public speaker starts his speech with a joke to gets everyone's attention, so a good laugh at the beginning helps bring an audience together.
The same can be applied at the classroom, besides getting everyone's attention, humor provides a healthy learning environment, It's an ice breaker. Humor helps students to become fully engaged. But you have to be careful because sometimes humor also be a misfire, you might think this is funny but others may not. So humor must be constructive, so take care where to place jokes within the context of the material being presented. More over we as teachers we have to be careful of the following, we have to avoid hurtful humor (don't be demanding of others), lose your fear of embarrassment in order to draw shyer students out of their shell, don't be afraid to act out concepts and content. This is might sound wired for a teacher but its very helpful to cloud humor in the classroom, do a little dance when the ring of musical cell phone disrupts the class, and use humor in tests and quizzes were it helps decreasing test anxiety.
Humor can help reduce student-anxiety, also humor should be very well thought out.
It is very helpful for the teacher to use humor in the class since this will help her get the students more engaged and also will create a good environment in the class. The teacher will become a friend for the students and they will love her and wait her sessions. But the teacher should know the correct time to have humor in her class.
ReplyDeleteevery person has a sense of humor but different individuals may have different levels of humor, this also applies to students and to teachers. This is why teachers although must use humor but with the right doses that suit different personalities because some students might interpret humor and jokes in an unintended way, in this case the teacher is not using humor to break ice, rather to form ice walls between her and the students.
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