In the everyday educational process, teachers meet very often the lack of students’ motivation and bad concentration in the classroom. Students are not fully engaged due to uninteresting lessons and too many facts and information to learn and memorize.
Teachers have a big challenge to fight students’ boredom in the classroom caused by mentioned problems. Despite the teachers’ multifunctional skills and knowledge, many of them lack abilities to motivate students and still use old-fashioned methods of teaching. They have a fear of changes in teaching and those who are willing to do some innovations in the class usually have difficulties in finding information sources with good practices.
These growing concerns provided the motivation to develop and implement this project, introducing a new dimension into teaching activity, that would relax and delight all the intervenients: teachers and students (ISCED 2: 12-15yo).
The mentioned target group will acquire the following knowledge and skills:
1 - Teachers
- Researching skills, analytical skills,
- ICT skills,
- Improve teaching competences in order to be able to determine the functions and the place of the humour in the teaching as a means of achieving optimal communication, develop new ideas and sources with funny contents,
- Humorous examples available at one place, adjustable to the lessons and the students, used as a tool to stimulate creativity, motivation and stress relief
In addition, Teachers will use our project for (benefits summed byMcKeachie and Svinicki (2006)):
- An increase in class attendance
- An increase in test performance.
- An increase in interest in learning.
- The creation of a positive social and emotional learning environment.
- The creation of a common psychological bond between students and the teacher.
2 - Students
- Drama and soft skills (use of humorous content, demonstration and transformation of the voice, movement) for active involvement in teaching.
- Ability to use drama techniques and soft skills when presenting comical content in class.
- Strengthening emotional and creative-critical thinking;
Also, students will be using our project results to be able to:
- improve academic performance
- increase critical and divergent thinking.
- reduce anxiety and stress when dealing with difficult material.
The main aim of this project is to improve the socio-emotional climate in the classroom since it is endangered by low concentration, bad motivation and boredom of students due to the
teachers’ lack of abilities and knowledge to motivate students, uninteresting contents and lessons, old-fashioned teaching methods and slow educational reforms.
In order to reach this aim, the following results will be produced:
- Manual of Good Practices - how to use humour in the classroom
- HUMOUR Training - Training for teachers
- Guide for students on the improvement of social and transversal skills using humour
- Online bite-size learning education resource
HUMOUR project will be distributed among 6 partners from 5 different countries. We planned a total of 300 students to participate in the project implementation. In addition, a total of
10 teachers/country promoters will participate in training activities and 30 teachers will be involved in the project development and implementation of project results and outcomes.
Start: 2020
Leading organization: Фондация „Европейски център за иновации, образование, наука и култура“ Габрово, България
Partners:
SMART IDEA Slovenia
Turk Egitim-Sen Turkey
JumpIN Hub - Associação para a Inovação e Empreendedorismo Portugal
JU OS "Stari Ilijas" Bosnia and Herzegovina
Svetovanje in pomoč pri poslovnih storitvah,Slovenia
