The Benets of Brain Breaks
Humour
Students feel they belong in school when teachers express involvement and warmth and using humour can be an
eective way to facilitate this.
A number of our brain breaks utilise aliative humour, which involves joking around and laughing with others or
telling amusing stories in an eort to enhance relationships. This form of humour is positively correlated with high
self-esteem, cheerfulness and psychological wellbeing, and negatively correlated with anxiety and depression.
Using humour in the classroom is an important way to produce a healthy classroom climate and to help teachers
to connect with their students, which is essential for student learning and enjoyment. As such, the use of humour
in educational settings can also be an eective classroom management tool, fostering student engagement,
improving motivation, and encouraging on-task behaviours and academic success.
Our ability to think is highly dependent on our emotional state. This means eliciting positive emotions through
enjoyable activities, games and humour can have a positive impact on student learning. In addition, humour helps
teachers to deal with the inherent stressors of the profession.
Research in the eld of psychology suggests that, for many adolescents, humour can serve as a coping style or a
defence strategy to ease psychological distress and improve wellbeing. Therefore, using humour in the classroom
as a coping mechanism may help students to handle feelings of stress. In addition, humour has been shown to
have a measurable positive impact on one’s physical health.
We hope that the following ideas support your use of brain breaks while teaching remotely. For additional brain
breaks resources, please see our online shop and our PEEC website.
References
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Brunzell, T. Stokes, H. & Waters, L. (2016). Trauma-Informed Positive Education: Using Positive Psychology to Strengthen Vulnerable Students. Contemporary School Psychology, 20(1), 63–83.
Erickson, S. J. & Feldstein, S. W. (2007). Adolescent humour and its relationship to coping, defence strategies, psychological distress, and well-being. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 37(3), 255-271.
Frenzel, A. C., Becker-Kurz, B., Pekrun, R., Goetz, T. & Lüdtke, O. (2018). Emotion transmission in the classroom revisited: A reciprocal eects model of teacher and student enjoyment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(5),
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Lovorn, M. (2009). Three easy ways to bring humour into the social studies classroom. The Leader, 23(1), 15–16, 20–21.
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