Stress free environment in classroom: Impact of humor in student satisfaction

ABSTRACT

Sense of humor in the classroom is essential and healthy for students of all ages. It makes the classroom for the students more interesting. It helps in breaking the monotony and keeps students tuned in to the classroom. The aim of the paper is to find out the importance of humor in the classroom and its impact on student satisfaction. The student teacher relationship can be made valuable by the inputs of human emotions to create the connections and caring for the total fraternity. The student satisfaction depends on various variables but the value of humor impacting the classes creates the stress free environment for the better exchange and interaction. The aim is also to build the strategy for enhancing the better exchange through the healthy and humors interaction between the student and teacher

Keywords: humor, learning, student’s interest

Introduction:

The human life is colored with many shades of human emotions to design the fabric of exchange and understanding. The student and teachers have relationship with exists all through the life any stage of career because of the constant learning associated with the values of integration to grow in the development programs and also the traditional teaching done in class. The value of understanding impacts the student satisfaction to create the impact of development and growth. The teachers have to create the positive self –esteem for the students and project the and build an image through the experiences with different people and activities. The teachers should provide emotional support, reward competence, and promote self-esteem. The positive teacher-student relationships ahold is warm, close, & communicative colored with the humor to increase the understanding. The stress free environment created by the love and affection of getting connect makes the students feel loved and they will love in return. The students need the caring which is the deepest of all emotions. Caring is an activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to need, taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone.

The quality of teaching can be enhanced by the valuable inputs of human emotions to sustain the empathic and sensitive relationship created by the flexible and supportive environment. The humor and interaction creates the

-Understanding
-Encourager
-Stable
-Sensitive
-the ability to reduce anxiety
-the willingness to listen
-the rewarding of appropriate behaviors
-being a friend
-the appropriate use of positive and negative criticism

Our deepest hope for our children is that they will construct knowledge in school about themselves, their community, and the world that is robust, resilient, and creative…The theory continues: for children to develop trustworthy knowledge, they must learn in the context of trustworthy relationships.

Humor in the classroom

Humor in classroom helps increases student attention and involvement. Humor has a positive effect upon learning retention. Humor creates a stress free and social environment, making the class more comfortable and manageable. Humor gets discussions started faster and gets better response in Q&A sessions. Humor should be related to the material being covered in the class.

Humor should be woven into the material that students are learning. Which shows that humor need not to digress the lecture, but can be used to help learn the material being presented.

When using humor in the classroom, remain focused on the positive behavior. A light hearted approach can help establish an environment conducive to learning whereas. Negative comments can backfire resulting in frustration and reduced motivation.

Verbal and Nonverbal expression in humor

If a teacher says something intended as humor, with serious body language, chances are that students could perceive sarcasm. Moreover it can be difficult for foreign students to pick up on sarcasm and they may think teacher is serious. Using facial animations such as a smile and comfortable body language along with a relaxed voice convey the message what you’re saying is meant to be humorous.

Humor to relieve tension

Humor not only helps to promote an enhanced learning environment; but also in relieving tension in the classroom. Humor can be used to relieve tension, but approach is helpful only in the early stages; once the tension has had time to grow, humor may not be an effective technique. Work needs to be done at developing one’s ability to read the students’ frustration levels so that steps can be taken to defuse the situation early. If you can find the humorous side of a tense situation, then you will have a better chance at defusing it.

Technique of using humor in the classroom

Instead of targeting the student for humor, target yourself. Students may feel threatened if you target your students with your humor. The whole point of using humor is to make people more at ease and to make the classroom environment more amenable to learning. One should be cautious while making fun of religious beliefs, race, or gender, which may result in animosity and a more hostile learning environment. Also be very cautious while cracking jokes on yourself as it can lower the respect students have for you. Always ask yourself while putting humor in classroom, is it appropriate? Is it timely? Is it tasteful and is it even funny?

Dos and don’ts of humor in the classroom

Do’s

-Humour is not about taking lots of time to prepare jokes for the classroom, in fact it should be very spontaneous and related to the topic
-Humour in the classroom doesn’t mean that you should be a stand-up comedian.
-Humour doesn’t mean drastically change you to be funny in the classroom.
Don’ts
- It is very important to create a positive atmosphere in the classroom so that the students are not afraid to make mistakes.
- Encouraging them to bring jokes and cartoons or in fact encourage students to connect with others in order to make the environment light.
- To break the monotony, every week bring a different pointer for your board or PowerPoint presentations.
- Include a trivia question half way into a quiz or a text.

- Figure-3 Do’s and Don’ts while using humor in the classroom

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Use of Humor in learning

- Employing a sense of humor can lower blood pressure, improve blood circulation and energy and help alleviate job stress and burnout.
- Using humor in the classroom can increase the students’ attention span.
- Humor can diminish anxiety and reduce the threatening nature of the course by changing the tone of the instructional process.
- Your students may even arrive to your classroom earlier than usual.

Impact of humor in learning environment:

Figure-5 Value creation by humor

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Above figure shows the impact of humor in learning environment. It shows how the stress free environment increases the quality of education which creates the value in learning environment.

Emotional bonding and humor both can be used to make the classroom environment stress free, which enhances the interaction between teacher and students in the classroom. It also enhances the quality of exchange of information by connecting them well.

As the quality of teaching increases, it cultivates the ethics and respects for the teacher in the classroom which helps in creating the sustainable relation between them.

Literature Review

According to Morella in 2008- “Humor can foster analytic, critical, and divergent thinking; catching attention, it impacts

- increase retention of learned material
- relieve stress, build rapport between teacher and students
- build team spirit among classmates
- smooth potentially rough interactions
- promote risk taking
- and get shy and slow students involved in activities

The famous school in the state of California is Lettuce Amuse U, which has only comics as instructors and their humor allows students to relax, if students make mistakes, humorous reactions allow them to learn in a non-defensive manner.

According to Metcalf and Flexible , people visit a photo booth to take many pictures of their outlandishly distorted faces. And when a major problem arises, take out the photos, and think, “You are not just the problem you’re having; you’re this too.”

According to James Gordon of Brigham Young University “when students are having fun, the class time virtually flies by, and the 50 minutes of class seem like a mere 48”

According to Parker Palmer in 1998, Good teaching comes in myriad forms, but good teachers share one trait: they are truly present in the classroom, deeply engaged with their students and their subject. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students, so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves. The connections made by good teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts—the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self.

Wanzer and Frymier (1999) found that teachers with a high humor orientation had increased perceptions of learning taking place by students. Their study further revealed that high humor orientation students reported learning more with a high humor oriented teacher.

Haigh (1999) suggests the judicious use of humor can help teachers gain respect and classroom rapport.

Mallard 1999- found humor to be "a powerful strategy for diffusing tense situations

Kher and others (1999) suggest the use of humor in "dread courses" in college. They identify "dread courses" as those students avoid because of perceived difficulty, a previous negative experience, or the students' lack of confidence.

Korobkin 1989- suggested five uses of humor in instruction which included (1) promotion of a humanistic, laughter-filled learning environment

(2) Cultivation of group humor and group identification
(3) Promotion of self-discovery and risk taking
(4) Development of retention cues
(5) Release of anxiety and stress.

Ziv1976- studied the effects of using humor in the classroom and increased creativity in thinking. Ziv stated that using humor can contribute to the expressions of more divergent thinking.

Chee (2006) classified humor in teaching into four major categories:

1) Textual
2) Pictorial
3) Action/games
4) Verbal

Figure-1 Classification of humor

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Hativa (2001) classified humor in three main categories.

Figure-2 of Hativa’s classification of humor

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Objective of the study

The basic objective of the study is to analyze

· The student satisfaction created by the impact of humour in the students’ studding in the colleges of Jodhpur

· To determine the impact of humour on student development and satisfaction

· To frame the suggested strategy for providing the better education to the students

Research Methodology - The researcher contacted the respondents personally with well-prepared sequentially arranged questionnaire. The questionnaire prepared, was divided into two parts, of which part one was used to gather demographic details of the respondents studying in the various colleges of Jodhpur city.

Sampling Area - The study was conducted on the respondents i.e. the students studying in the colleges of Jodhpur city.

Population- All the students studying in the colleges of Jodhpur city

Sample size – The research focused on the participants who were willing to participate. Total 209 respondents filled the questionnaire.

Sampling Design – The sample was designed by the convenience based random sampling method.

Primary Data - Most of the data collected by the researcher was primary data through a structured questionnaire, which was operated on the samples of the students of schools in the city of Jodhpur.

Secondary data - The secondary information was collected from the published Sources such as Journals, Newspapers and Magazines and websites...

Research instruments - A summated rating scale format was used, with six choices per item ranging from "highly dissatisfied” to "highly satisfy ". In this all the questions were positively framed to study the impact of independent variable like age, gender and education on the dependent variable which is student satisfaction development.

Analysis of Data - All the data collected from the respondents was feuded and tabulated and the analysis was done through the software of SPSS version 16..

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Data analysis

ANNOVA analysis guidelines for one way ANOVAs:

Linearity and Non-Linearity Test by One Way ANOVAs:-

First of all it is necessary to use this test here and this test is given preference over vicariate correlation test because, we fear that our dimensions and demographic factor may bear a nonlinear relationship with Total consumer preferences and as we know to use the correlation coefficient correctly, a relationship between two variables must be approximately linear, when this assumption of linearity is violated, Pearson's product-moment coefficient of correlation or Spearman’s correlation coefficient will underestimate the strength of the relationship, that will ultimately result in completely wrong analysis. Therefore in our analysis we prefer to use One Way ANOVAs so as test both Linear as well as Non Linear Relationship. The dependent variable must be scale for accurate analysis. The independent variable cannot be Nominal. Therefore, the test cannot not be applied on Gender and education which are the part of Demographic variable

Now, if in the test for homogeneity of variance, if the significance value is more than 0.05 than simply One way anova table will be checked, if there the significant value is less than 0.05 then Tukey HSD Post-hoc comparison for individual group difference will be checked if it show significant value less than 0.05 than the individual group differs.

It is mandatory to look for test for homogeneity of variance only when the group is of nearly equal size. Welch test is more accurate than Brown-Forsythe test hence it would be given priority during analysis. For all those independent variables where homogeneity constraints was satisfied Tukey table for Post hoc comparison is shown and where robust estimates of Welch and Brown-Forsythe are looked, there Tamhane table for Post hoc comparison is shown (Monday, Klein, Lee, 2005).

Frequency Table

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Analysis –There are 54 students below the age group of 54

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Analysis – There are 101 female student and 108 male students

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There are 65 students who have the education of post graduate level

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There are 116 students who agree that communication is created by humor

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There are 108 students who agree that understanding is created by humor to enhance the satisfaction

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There are 111 students who agree that psychological health is created by humor to enhance the satisfaction

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There are 100 students who agree that friendly relations are created by humor to enhance the satisfaction

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There are 108 students who agree that participation is created by humor to enhance the satisfaction

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There are 104 students who agree that harmony is created by humor to enhance the satisfaction

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There are 114 students who agree that narration is created by humor to enhance the satisfaction

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There are 111 students who agree that respect is created by humor to enhance the satisfaction

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There are 121 students who agree that values are created by humor to enhance the satisfaction