Is Humour a Feature of Instructional Quality?

Abstract Teacher humour is found an effective tool associated with different dimensions of instructional quality. However, its significance as a teaching characteristic has not been systematically investigated, in particular from a qualitative approach. Therefore, we conducted a qualitative study to investigate how teacher humour ranks relative to other teaching characteristics from teacher and student perspectives. The participants were 40 high school English teachers (Mage: 39.47, Mexperience:10.68, female 63%) in Germany and 989 ninth-grade students at high schools (Mage: 14.23, SD = 0.5, female 53%). Teachers completed a paper-and-pencil qualitative questionnaire, while the students’ data was collected online. Both groups answered two identical open-ended questions and one unique open question per group. Our results show that teacher humour is considered a salient characteristic of instructional quality from teacher and student perspectives, and is associated with various dimensions of instruction. However, the role of humour in instruction is seen differently by teachers and students, especially compared to features of prioritised instructional quality. In addition, the most and least important characteristics of instructional quality were identified in comparison to teacher humour. We conclude that teacher humour functions as both a distinct feature of instructional quality and a potential contributor to various features and dimensions of instructional quality as a multidimensional construct.