Profs Go for the Laughs to Help Raise Academic Achievement
Emphasize improv techniques and "No Joke Left Behind"
Press Contact: Gary Carr , Rising Moon Marketing & Public Relations, (925) 672-8717, carrpool@pacbell.net
San Francisco . May 1, 2005 . Mayday! Mayday! If humor is in trouble in the classroom, at least two academics are willing to make "April Fools" of themselves to help students learn. Ronald A. Berk, Ph.D., and Roz Trieber, M.S., specialize in teaching fellow teachers how to use humor to improve their students' capacities for learning.
Dr. Berk and Ms. Trieber recently gave presentations on humor as a tool for teaching at the 8 th Annual Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching at Towson University in Towson , Maryland . The conference opened on April 1.
Trieber, a health educator and creator of HumorFusion, taught a class on "Improv for Profs: Whose Class is it Anyway?" She dared a roomful of academic types to loosen up, wing it, and go for the laughs - all to enhance their students' abilities to solve problems.
"Improvisational theatre techniques can help teachers stimulate class discussion, encourage risk-taking, and improve critical thinking," Trieber says.
In a tag-team improv, participants in Trieber's class built a story on how television influences eating behaviors. The exercise helped them make discoveries about their own behavior. Playing TV-watchers, they found that, as the tension mounted on "Survivor," or the Red Sox reliever loaded the bases against the Yankees, they were cramming their mouths with popcorn or taking another helping of lasagna.
"They cracked each other up with stuff they may not have realized they learned in the classroom," Trieber said.
Dr. Berk presented a keynote address entitled "Humor as a Coping Strategy for the Stressors of Academe" and a workshop on "Top 10 Secret Tips for Successful Humor in the Classroom." Berk is a professor of biostatistics and measurement at the School of Nursing at the Johns Hopkins University . Aware that his field is not usually fraught with humor, Berk relies on laughter to help make his didactic points. One of his techniques is to sprinkle his lectures with parodies of TV programs, pop music, and Broadway shows. He even parodies himself by strewing strings of titles after his name, like DNA and CNN, to go with his Ph.D.
Dr. Berk extracted what he called "the ten essential humor ingredients that almost guarantee effective learning situations in the classroom." He listed them as
- Create a playful and safe class atmosphere
- Communicate your standard for appropriate in-class humor
- Use "previsualization" to view how your students will see your humor
- Engage your students in the humor
- Write, direct, and choreograph every word, graphic, gesture, inflection, etc.
- Test your humor on 1 or 2 colleagues and students before using it in class
- Practice your timing and enunciation
- Don't telegraph the punch
- Use a word rhyme dictionary for parodies of titles and TV programs and movies
- Use a microphone whenever possible
Dr. Berk has written eight books, including Professors are from Mars, Students are from Snickers . His goal is effective teaching, and his strategies for using humor as a teaching tool start with his syllabus, which always includes comic material.
He uses humorous descriptions and warnings on handout material and incorporates skits and dramatizations as part of every lesson. At exam time, review sessions often take the form of a "Jeopardy"-like quiz show.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Berk remains true to the mandate of "No Joke Left Behind," as he opens each class in the style of a good stand-up comedian.
Trieber and Berk have seen their students go on to use these techniques of improv and humor in their own classroom settings. Both are members of the Association of Applied and Therapeutic Humor, an international organization that advances the application of humor and laughter for their positive benefits.
Background of AATH
The Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor was founded in 1987 by a group of healthcare professionals. AATH is a non-profit professional organization that advances the understanding and application of humor and laughter for their positive benefits. AATH provides and disseminates information about applied and therapeutic humor through conferences, publications, a website, and networking to a community from a wide variety of clinical, corporate, and classroom settings. They include scholars, psychologists, counselors, allied healthcare practitioners, nurses, social workers, physicians, business executives, human resource managers, educators, clergy, hospital clowns, speakers, trainers, and others who incorporate humor in their life and work and are not necessarily served through other organizations. Further information can be found at www.aath.org .
AATH Contacts:
Karla Pollack, Executive Secretary, 5 Independence Way, Suite 300 , Princeton , NJ 08540-6627 . Phone 609-392-3800 , Fax 609-392-0244, staff@aath.org Web www.aath.org .
Allen Klein, AATH President, San Francisco , CA , (415) 431-1913, allenklein@aol.com , www.allenklein.com
Roz Trieber, AATH Member and former Board Member, Owings Mills, MD, (410) 998-9585, roztrieber@humorfusion.com , www.humorfusion.com .
Dr. Ronald A. Berk, AATH Member and former Board Member, Baltimore, MD, (410) 955-8212, rberk@son.jhmi.edu , www.aath.org/berkr.html
Press Contact:
Gary Carr , Rising Moon Marketing & Public Relations, Clayton , CA , (925) 672-8717, carrpool@pacbell.net
