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

weekend to draft the new units of work. The units
were then made accessible to all staff via the
Catholic Education Office Online Learning Centre.
Alongside this curriculum development aspect of
the project, most schools in the cluster adopted
a whole school approach to explicitly teach all
or some of the nine values from the National
Framework. The strategies they employed to teach
the values included defining and describing each
of the values using Y charts (looks like, sounds like,
feels like) displaying the values in pictures; text
and photos around the school and in newsletters
to parents; enacting a ‘value of the week’; and
dedicating specific class and homework activities
to values education.
This explicit teaching of values and use of a
shared values language led to a number of
positive impacts in the cluster schools. One
teacher in a school with a predominantly
Indigenous population described how students
had benefited from concentrating on just two
values – respect and responsibility – and how
exploring the meaning of these two values
allowed students to ‘own’ their behaviours,
leading to improved relationships and behaviours:
What we’re finding is the children have a much
greater awareness of where they have gone wrong
or where their mate might have gone wrong, and
they can verbalise it now which is great because
before they would have just got angry and hit
each other.
Another teacher reflected on the power of the
nine core values when they are used by teachers
in a consistent and coherent way to reward
student behaviour and engage student interest:
Children have been noticeably attentive during
Monday morning exclamations of each value
and during awards ceremonies for children being
rewarded for utilising the values. They appear
to show genuine interest in what value is going
to be delineated next, and related to what were
otherwise confusing concepts because they have
been put into the context of the school.
Echoing a key finding in both Stages 1 and 2 of
the VEGPSP, parents commented on what their
children brought home from school-based values
education approaches. They noted that once
values are explicitly established within a school,
the whole school community ‘implicitly model
values and explicitly foster the modelling of
values’ (Curriculum Corporation 2008, p 11). One
parent commented on discussions around the
family dinner table, where children conducted a
dialogue around the relative merits of ‘random
acts of kindness’:
But the other really good thing that’s come about
in my mind is that at dinner we’ve talked about
who’s got the [values] award and what they got
it for, and they pass a value judgement on, ‘Well
I don’t think it was that big a deal, just opening a
rubbish bin lid’…But then you can say, ‘How do you
think it made the other person feel though’ So it’s
actually given us an opportunity to explore and
we’ve also had a bit of a thing where they’ve said
‘I was a bit disappointed because I did something
really good and I wasn’t noticed’. And so we’ve had
a chance at home to talk about the intrinsic value
of doing something kind for people…not just for
what they get out of it, but how it should make
you feel to help somebody out.
While Kids Matter and Bounce Back! literature
has been issue specific, eg bullying, anger,
sadness etc, the nine core values have been farreaching
and versatile in their application…The
succinct description of each value has facilitated
teachers talking the talk of values education and
highlighting children who are walking the walk
in using those values much better than before.
84 Giving Voice to the Impacts of Values Education: The Final Report of the Values in Action Schools Project