Autumn 2006

The big picture - in education

Whole school values education programs: another key to quality teaching?

Curriculum Corporation is currently managing a number of values education projects for the Commonwealth Department of Science, Education and Training as part of the Department’s Quality Teaching Program. Ron Toomey manages the research components of those projects. Here he explores what that research seems to be saying about quality teaching.

Current knowledge about quality teaching

Research already tells us much about quality teaching. It tells us that when our students start to improve, particular things usually contribute to their improvement. For instance, students achieve more when teachers employ systematic teaching procedures. Results also improve when more time is spent working with small groups throughout the day and when teachers run more orderly classrooms.

Not surprisingly, when more students are ‘on task’ and actively engaged in learning, improvement follows. Keeping students interested also usually means they will improve. However, as we know from our personal experience, accomplishing such things is not sufficient in itself to guarantee student improvement. There must also be some other ‘chemistry’ at work.

One of the teachers at West Kiddlington Primary School in the UK, a school against which some of the Values Education Curriculum and Professional Learning Resources Project schools are being benchmarked as part of the research program, saw this clearly when he said:

Children are not simply empty vessels that can be filled up. The academic work is important—that’s how schools are assessed—but we have to be concerned with the whole child. I believe you can only see effective teaching when everything is in place, when the children are happy and motivated, behaving themselves, and there is a positive relationship with the teacher. You need to have the children all working, but none of them frightened. They need to feel that what they are doing has a purpose! It’s very complex.

Many of the schools involved with the Commonwealth’s values education initiatives seem to be getting ‘everything … in place’. While the research program is yet to run its full course, it is very tempting to speculate, on the basis of what we have seen and heard so far, that the reason for this is the way those schools are putting values at the centre of their work. This affects learning and teaching.

Values at the centre of the curriculum

In some schools, values have been made centrepieces of the curriculum. A special time during the week is set aside for students to discuss the meaning of the values and undertake projects, such as community service, to put the values into practice. Furthermore, the values are often sprinkled throughout the formal curriculum. For instance, texts are discussed from moral and ethical standpoints. In art classes, works that put a moral point of view are interpreted and used to inspire artwork by the pupils.

All of this is often done while the whole school adheres to a code of behaviour, collectively negotiated at the outset of the year, that draws on the values in the national framework. Moreover, the values that are the focus of the curriculum have been ‘home grown’ through discussion with the school community about the agreed code of desirable conduct. Thus, the school, the learning and the teaching becomes saturated in the values.

By putting values at the centre of the curriculum, schools establish ideal conditions for learning. As the values become common practice, they have a positive effect on learning. Giving respect, for example, requires that one listen carefully to what the other person is saying. Practising care and compassion might involve helping someone with a learning task. Showing respect and care for people can lead to them developing greater self-respect. Having greater self-respect helps one to do one’s best. When you think about it, such synergies are boundless. Such an environment must surely enhance learning.

Approaches to teaching and learning

In implementing their values program, schools often adopt a student-centred, but teacher-guided, approach. Practically, and said very simply, this means that teachers identify the general terrain for teaching and learning. They do so because they are better placed to know where to commence, but they then allow their pupils to take the lead.

The terrain is the set of values that has been broadly agreed on by the school community and which is to be explored by the pupils. The notion of exploration carries quite a particular meaning for these schools. It involves a continuous process of trying to put the agreed values into practice, commonly called action research. When teachers step back and let pupils lead, they show respect for those pupils and their contributions.

Students say they feel affirmed and motivated by this. They develop a real appreciation of the values through the interpersonal interactions that occur in the classroom. And, as these interactions are formed by applications of the values, when added to the other opportunities to put values into practice, the school begins to live out the values in the national framework.

In such a process, students acquire, as distinct from being given, what Terry Lovat calls ‘intellectual depth’. (See Lovat’s article on page 9.) This is not facile or shallow learning but rather more complicated thinking— perceptiveness, analysis, evaluation, intuition and the like—all those things brought to mind when we describe someone as sharp or bright.

During our research, we have had numerous accounts of such ‘intellectual depth’. For instance, a visitor to one of the schools said she ‘was blown away’ by the quality of the thinking and discussion she saw during her visit:

They were talking about the data they had gathered through their surveys about what values were and weren’t evident in their school community. Understanding the values themselves was no light matter, but they were also talking in quite sophisticated ways—some even using categories like quantitative and qualitative to sort their data. And these were Grades 4 and 5.

Teachers also comment about how their pupils acquire unfettered communication skills. By respecting the right of others to speak, they learn to listen more attentively. They become able to talk about the process of exploration, how they engage it, what outcomes flow from it, what they learn, how it was learnt and related issues. They say that their growing capacity to do this is accompanied by a confidence in, and a commitment to, the process of exploration and working with others.

They also develop a capacity to reflect. They can think back to some event, interpersonal episode or personally confronting experience, consider the impact it had and plan how to make things work better next time. In so doing, they become better self-managers. In the process, their self-knowledge is improved.

Endnote

For many of the teachers involved in these projects, quality teaching is not so much about keeping students ‘on task’, teaching in orderly ways, keeping them interested and the like. Rather, it is more about putting values at the centre of the curriculum so that students gradually put them into practice; and so they develop more positive images of themselves and forge stronger and more positive interpersonal relationships within the school community. Then, they do not have to be kept ‘on task’ or made interested. These things come naturally, because the students, teachers and others in the school community feel part of a quality teaching enterprise.

Find out more about the initiatives mentioned in this article by visiting www.valueseducation.edu.au/values/

Ron Toomey is an adjunct professor within the Centre of Lifelong Learning at the Australian Catholic University.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au