755: A Toolbox for Humor in Management Education – From Award Winning Instructors and Top Comedy Schools (14113)

This highly successful PDW, than won the last years’s best PDW award from the MED division, will be offered in Chicago again, as humor in the classroom provides a broad diversity of positive effects. It helps to motivate students and supports a positive relationship between them and educators. When integrated into course design, humor increases students’ understanding of the topic, improves learning outcomes, and positively impacts their creativity, critical thinking and ability to deal with ambiguity. In this PDW we will present a well-founded, modular toolbox with established effectiveness that can be used in different teaching contexts and does not require extensive training and initiate a dialogue about its usage based on first-hand experiences. It supports you in in utilizing humor in your teaching strategies, courses, and exercises by introducing the basic functions of humor, by illustrating how it can be successfully applied, and by providing effective tools. If accepted, this PDW will feature a distinguished guest from one of the top comedy schools – the ‘The Upright Citizens Brigade’ or ‘The Second City’. Their insights will be enriched by practical cases of using humor as a teaching and learning tool successfully implemented at business schools in the U.S. and Europe. In an interactive exercise, session participants will gain insights into how to effectively utilize humor in their teaching strategies while avoiding possible negative effects.