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How to set about planning values teaching into your lessons

Now you want to start planning some values interventions into your teaching.

How do you set about it? The following is a set of guidelines to help you. There are also some specific lesson-plans that you can refer to, in order to see how some actual lessons have been set up. You will also be referred to some of these at specific places in the guidelines given below.

Two Key Points
  • Values are already present in the curriculum
  • Values can be communicated in the classroom in three main ways
"How to" Guidelines
Eight simple elements to be effective

Two key points:

 The values are generally already present in the curriculum - this means simply making explicit what is often implicit   
Our experience has been that the curriculum is full of opportunities to include values interventions, regardless of the subject you teach. Good teachers will be including some aspects of this in their work already. The purpose of planning interventions is to make the values more explicit, where they are already implicit in the scheme of work, in lesson planning, and in the process of teaching. Teaching values is not necessarily about teaching about different things, but about teaching in a different way.
 Values can be communicated in the classroom in three main ways - through content, process, and application.
The content of the lesson can be used to draw out a particular value. In this case it is the specific subject matter which can be used as a vehicle for emphasising the value. This may well be subject matter that you were going to use anyway, or it may be necessary to extend the "normal" work a little in order to provide the necessary material. E.g. in a science lesson about blood , the resource used in the lesson goes beyond what is immediately required by the national curriculum in order to specifically refer to a racially sensitive situation that produces an emotional response, and hence discussion concerned with racial issues. In language lessons it was sometimes necessary to come out of the target language in order to discuss aspects of the values more fully.

In many cases it is the actual process of the lesson that can be used to create the necessary interaction with the value in question. E.g. in a Geography lesson, running a simulated public inquiry, the importance of valuing others is brought out during the public meeting, where pupils have to listen carefully to each other and ask questions appropriately.

In many subjects the content of the curriculum is applied to other aspects of life. For example Technology is used or applied in almost all aspects of life.

The "How to" Guidelines

The following guide shows an effective route to help you to plan and deliver values within your subject. There are 8 elements:

 Awareness of your own school's values
Each school will have its own set of values. You need to be fully aware of these before you start. These might already be expressed within a 'Mission Statement', school rules or your school may have a fully worked out policy on values. If your school does not have a clear set of values this is the first stage that needs to be addressed with whole school involvement.

Further information about this process is available from EducareM. The involvement of the whole school is illustrated by steps one and two of the 6 step Management Process diagram here.

Some possible values might include:

  • Fairness/justice
  • Looking after possessions/environment/stewardship
  • Respect for others/ valuing others
  • Faith in God
  • Valuing ourselves/doing our best
  • Service to others
  • Forgiveness
  • Trust

Once your school community has a clear position on the values that it thinks are important, they will need to be available in words which pupils (and staff!) can understand. It is vitally important that the school community as a whole can support the values which have been chosen. This is so that the values used in your teaching can legitimately be described as your own values. Once they have been established you can start planning to include them in your Schemes of Work.
 Schemes of Work
As indicated earlier, it is likely that schemes of work will naturally have places in which values can be included. The more you look, and become familiar with teaching values, the more opportunities you will find. A diagram shows how the school's values interact with SOW's within the NC.

Most Schemes of work will include cross-curricular strands, eg. Citizenship, ICT, PHSE. Values can be incorporated in the same way, by including this as an aspect of what is already taught.

Look at your scheme of work for each year group and identify places where one or more of the school's values could be included in your lesson(s). Decide how you want to play this. Values could be covered in different subjects, or once by each subject in each year or on a few places in the year, depending how appropriate you feel it is. It would be difficult and time consuming to try to cover too many interventions at once.
 Using your Imagination
Now begin to use your imagination to identify appropriate ways for inclusion of the values. Where do values naturally occur? Where are values naturally encountered in this SOW?

When you know how many and which values you will look to include in your part of the syllabus or scheme of work you can identify which particular lessons you want to use to deliver the values. Look for lessons that will lend themselves to opening up questions, thought or activities that have a potential for an effective encounter with one of the school's values.
 Develop ideas & strategies for inclusion
Decide whether you will be including the value as a process, content or application within the lesson. Look at some of the ideas and lessons that have already been tried in your subject. Visit the web to look for material which might be useful. You may well be able to use or modify material which has already been published, e.g. Charis materials which are resources promoting moral and spiritual development in English, French, German, Science and Mathematics.

Most importantly, do not overlook material that you already use. Very often a values lesson is more a matter of using the same material in a different way, rather than necessarily starting completely from scratch. For example, it is impossible to study North American Indians without discussing issues of fairness, or the to consider fossil fuels without understanding the effects of their use on the environment.
 Learning objectives
You will now need to decide on the learning objectives for your lesson. Obviously these will need to include objectives for the subject as well as for the values intervention. You will need to be particularly clear about the values objectives since these will, initially at least, be comparatively unfamiliar. Which values are you using? How do you want to get these values across? Do not be over adventurous in the first instance. Usually only one or possibly two values should be tackled in one lesson initially. It is best to be specific in your choice of values and try to stick as for as possible to your choice. You will inevitably find that the values overlap with one another, and you may well find that discussion in the classroom leads you into areas that you were not expecting. This should be fine as long as you start from a clear vantage pointYou will also need to decide how explicit you want to be with the pupils about the values. We found that it was most effective to be very open about the values, explaining to the pupils at the beginning of the lesson which value was being tackled.
 Lesson Plan Design
The examples given here are clearly only one layout for planning lessons and are designed to stand alone. You will want to write plans which form a part of your schemes of work. You may well want to indicate how the lesson links in with other similar themes such as SMSC, PHSE etc.
 Implementing your lesson
Now its time to get on and do it. As with any new approach, you may not feel that you are fully prepared for what is going to happen, but you will find that it is very rewarding. If possible have someone observe a values lesson. It is usually worth the extra stress of having another teacher in the room to get useful feedback about how the lesson went.
 Recording and assessment (evaluate lesson/series of lessons)
review11 & 12 & unpack. Poss. include specific objective egs in 7.
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