Using Humor as a Learning Tool

Students Create Positive Memory Connections with Humorous Lessons

May 2, 2009

In the current culture of frequent testing, students are required to remember significant amounts of information. This pressure to remember tends to cause many students to become stressed, which makes it physically more difficult for them to remember the information. One way to overcome the physical reactions to stress is to replace it with humor. Providing humorous connections to lessons helps students remember even when stressed.

How Laughing Helps Students Remember Lessons

Humor leads to laughter and laughing releases a chemical called Dopamine. Dopamine is considered part of the brain's reward system and leads to a reduction in stress. Making humorous connections to new material in a lesson causes a student's body to physically react in a positive manner. Since the students are then relaxed and happy, they are more likely to retain the information. The more they experience learning in a positive way the more relaxed they will be in a testing situation.

Connecting humor with learning is also a great way to engage students. Humans tend to remember something funny, whether a joke or a humorous situation. Bringing in funny points about history, connections to strange events or even turning facts and figures into rhymes, riddles and silly verses can engage students and even encourage their creativity.

Ideas for Including Humor in the Classroom

Humor can be included in lessons almost anywhere, from introduction to final assessment. It can range from physical to visual or verbal; demonstrating pressure changes by showing an egg being pulled into a bottle, a cartoon of Ben Franklin flying a kite in a storm, limericks or riddles of important information. It also does not need to be confined to the teacher's imagination.

Mary Kay Morrison encourages the use of humor to engage students and facilitate learning. She suggests reducing stress on tests by including silly questions such as, “who is your favorite teacher?” She also recommends getting students involved through activities where they create assessment questions in the form of riddles, the best of which can then be used on the upcoming exam. But she also cautions to beware of hurtful humor that rises from stress or fear since it might seem funny initially but will lead to disengagement and an unhealthy emotional classroom environment.

Using humor as a learning tool can engage students and lead to positive memory connections. This in turn aides in stress reduction and enables students to relax during and perform better on tests. Creating humorous learning situations can be extended to include students' creativity and imaginations while creating a positive classroom environment.

M. Smith M.A., E. Jaffe-Gill, J. Segal Ph.D."Understanding Stress". December 2008.

M.K. Morrison. Using Humor to Maximize Learning. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education. 2008.

The copyright of the article Using Humor as a Learning Tool in Teaching Strategies/Mentorship is owned by Tammy Andrew. Permission to republish Using Humor as a Learning Tool in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Oct 4, 2009 2:20 PM

Guest :

I do agree that humor is a great ideal or method to be use in a classroom to help students feel free.As we read from the article that humor leads to laughter and laughing releases stress.In my own little understanding i am a student who like to sit in a class with a DRAMATIC instructor.He or she should be able to GENERATE more ideal of how to have control over the classroom. I like to learn in a environment that all student should have ACCESS to create their own STRATEGIES of how to study. I do like to learn in a school where the ADMINISTRATION will have complete POLICY that all students will be able to make education their major PRIORITY. And there should be a REGULATION that will help students be able to carry on a complete Comprehension of what they are learning. Government should keep MONITORING the security system in that environment.