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Teaching with HEART

One of the major purposes of schools as a social institution is to teach and perpetuate human values. Good values are key to communal solidarity and harmonious living among people.

People can disagree on values, depending on their age, culture, religion or nationality, as demonstrated by the current dispute in France. Shown above are Muslim women wearing various types of Islamic veils: a hijab, top left; a niqab, top right; a tchador, bottom left, and a burqa. A French parliament report called for a ban on Jan 26 on the full Islamic veil, saying Muslim women who wear them were mounting an ‘unacceptable’ challenge to French values. It is not yet clear if the hijab or the tchador will be considered as ‘full veil’ but the burqa and the niqab will most probably be. After six months of hearings, a panel of 32 lawmakers recommended a ban on the face-covering veil in all schools, hospitals, public transport and government offices, the broadest move yet to restrict Muslim dress in France. AFP

Although most values are universal and enduring, they are not always understood or acted upon in the same way by individual members of the society.

As such, values are often affected by personal experiences and current circumstances.

Common approaches

This poses a significant challenge to the teaching of values. In the past, values were taught as an isolated subject. More recently, educators employed a cross-curricular (integrative) approach to teaching values. In both cases, teachers teach values based on the assumption that everyone should understand and characterise the same set of values for the good of all.

While this should be the eventual goal of any values education programme or model, it does not address the need of individuals to take their own journey in discovering, understanding, and personalising the values being taught.

Need for new approach

In order to allow for the aforementioned levels of learning, one has to carefully consider the strategies utilised to teach them in the first place.

Lecturing or sharing stories that end with the question, "What moral lessons have we learned from this story?" is not effective because it does not allow for the active participation of students.

Values that are not personalised and applied in daily life do not contribute to moulding strong character.

Specific strategies

There are several methodologies to accomplish this task. Fortunately, the strategies are simple to use and could be applied to teach other subjects as well. An important characteristic of the methods presented here is that they all require students to actively and deliberately examine their own values system and commitment to the same thing before consolidating and/or adopting new ones.

Additionally, all these methods require the teacher to ask students to justify why they think a certain way. To achieve maximum benefit, every student must be given an equal opportunity to voice his or her beliefs and ideologies. Students must be encouraged to listen to each other during the sharing phase.

Voting

Students begin the voting exercise by agreeing or disagreeing with a given statement or question.

For example, "How many of you think each family should be limited to two children?" or "Should the government impose restrictions on the purchase of cars and increase public transportation infrastructure?" Whatever the response, the teacher must pose this essential follow-up question: "Why do you think so?"

Ranking

The ranking exercise presents three or more possible choices for participants to rearrange in their order of preference or priority.

For example: "If you had the opportunity to meet and talk to only one person in a crisis situation, who would that be? Your father, your mother, a teacher, or a friend? Rank them in order of preference: 1 for the most-preferred and 4 for the least-preferred person." Once again, the teacher must ask students to justify their responses.

Continuum

The continuum method presents two opposite choices or viewpoints. Respondents select that place on the continuum - between the choices - which most closely represents their personal views.

This could involve physical movement - the teacher could tell students to imagine a continuum (line) in front of the class and ask them to come forward to take their stand along the continuum.

For example, "Which parenting style do you think works best?" (The teacher presents Democratic Parenting on one point of the continuum and Permissive Parenting on another point of the continuum.)