Giving Voice to the Impacts of Values Education The Final Report of ...

actions. Interestingly, teachers in the cluster
self-disclosed instances of personal challenge or
insecurity to students as a way of introducing
values-based discussions in the classrooms.
Students responded to these examples and saw
the stories as evidence of the trust teachers placed
in them, and as models of strong and resilient
behaviours. One student relayed a story his
teacher had told the class and linked it to personal
learning about courage and confidence:
My teacher…was at university for five years so she
could become a teacher. It was, I believe, one week
from graduation…but she was…really nervous and
she was saying, ‘I can’t do this’, and her friends
were saying, ‘But you went through five years
of university and we know you can do this’, and
then she got most of her confidence back and she
became a teacher…
When asked why this story was significant for
him, the student clarified that:
In the future I want to go in the army and she told
us all, whatever we want to become, we may have
to go to university, and so she gave us really good
confidence and told us how we could really do it.
Another student reflected on the power of a
teacher story acting as a signpost for courage in
the students’ life:
There was a teacher [name withheld] and [when]
she was about probably 18 and she was about
to get her driver’s licence but she was not quite
confident. One of her friends died in a car crash so
she thought it might be bad for her, so when the
years went past she thought to herself I can do
this, I can do this now and that’s how she got her
driver’s licence.
Another student reflected on the classroom
environment prior to the values interventions:
Well I think it’s good to like listen to each other
more…because we were a bit disrespectful in a way
[before the values education project]. At the start
of the year we didn’t know each other that well
and I think we’ve learnt a lot…I suppose [respect
is] important to me because I like it when people
listen…when they’re listening to me and respect
what I think.
Across the cluster, students, teachers and parents
reported improved classroom ambience as a
result of sustained values teaching. There are
also instances of improved personal wellbeing
resulting from the work. As one student put it:
Well at the beginning of the year there’s this boy in
my class. He gets upset really easily and now that
we’re learning about kindness he’s calming down a
lot and we’re all helping him to calm down. When
he gets mad he just tells the teacher, ‘Can I please
go outside and get a drink and come back in after’
Well, there was this person being really mean to
him so we all started helping him and he went and
got a drink and calmed down really, really quickly.
When asked what ‘respect’ felt like to her, one
student offered:
Respect feels like being kind and considerate to me,
and to me it looks like build ups… A build up is how
instead of like leaving someone out, like excluding
them, you can go to them and ask them come play
with us, if you’ve got nobody to play with, using
build ups.
One teacher reflected on the paradigm shift in her
teaching as a result of the purposeful introduction
of parental involvement in the classroom:
…upwards of half my class are of an Indigenous
background and my values program has
deliberately included as many parents as I can…
I’ve had six parents come and visit…to put into
the program and give their views on the program
itself and to get their input, and I think I’ve, I feel
like I’ve made a paradigm shift in my teaching in
a sense that I didn’t always deliberately include
parents in my program. You might try and include
them in some peripheral thing you’re doing, some
fun activity or some other small thing, but I didn’t
always deliberately include them…Deliberately
making that choice…it’s valuing the kids’
backgrounds that bit more.
Another teacher commented on how individual
students were able to examine their fears and
Section 3: Accounts of the VASP cluster projects
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