“Getting drunk is just like feeling sleepy! It is harmless and nothing special,” said a 14 year-old girl.

“It is funny when people get drunk because they will say stupid things and act funny!” said a 13 year-old boy.

It is a concerning issue for binge drinking. Surveys and studies reveal that there is an increasing percentage of kids who are under 14 years old who engage in binge drinking. In fact, binge drinking could be the causes of many fatal accidents such as drunk driving and negative health effects such as damage in the central nervous system. Apparently these children need to wake up.

Despite the emergency for educating the children to stay away from binge drinking, it is always a headache for teachers and parents to persuade the kids not to do anything new when they are in their age of curiosity. We were children once and we know that children love to explore. Seeing this as such a critical issue, recently there was a teacher who used special approaches in trying to convey the message that “alcohol is actually harmful” to her high school students. Her basic approach was to attach emotions to this piece of information in order to change the kids’ behaviour. With the use of videos, she showed them how binge drinking could be fatal. Also, she let the students wear a pair of special goggles, illustrating how binge drinking could affect their ability to see and act negatively.

Visit the following link for more details:

http://www.weau.com/news/headlines/Teacher_uses_emotion_to_persuade_against_binge_drinking_134363883.html

Although this method has not been scientifically I would say that this is very likely to be an effective approach in persuading the students from what I learned in my COHR 404 class because the approaches entail the following characteristics:

Authority

In the eyes of the students, the teacher is an expert of everything. When the teacher lectures to them about binge drinking, the students tend to assume that she has already done sufficient research and that she is knowledgeable about this issue. Therefore, the students would be more willing to listen to what the teacher says.

Social proof

In the classroom setting, there are other students. When the teacher asks a particular student whether she thinks a drunk person could drive a car safely, the student would look at other students for cues on how to think, feel and act. When other students are all shaking their head, saying that it is impossible to drive safely, that particular student will very likely to say that it is not safe due to peer pressure.

Consistency

Through educating the whole class together, the students make their commitments active, public and voluntary. As long as the teacher makes a student truly believe that binge drinking is harmful to him/her, after the student makes the commitment in front of the classmates, he/she will be very likely align with his/her commitment.

The key to persuasion: Emotions attached

The most effective approach the teacher used here, in fact, is that she attached emotions to this piece of information – binge drinking is dangerous. The teacher did this by putting the students in different emotion-provoking situations. For example, the teacher let students wear goggles, showing her how her vision would be impaired. Then the teacher asked the student if she will let a drunk person drive the teacher home. This actually put the student into a situation in which she will think that she does not want the teacher has any danger.

Sometimes, persuading people is not an easy task. What would you do if you are a teacher and want to persuade students not to have excessive drinking?