Teachers Resource Force Blog

Quick ways to teach Character Education in schools

9/6/2019

Character Education is fundamentally important to teach our students so that they grow into respectful, honest and kind young people who make good decisions thus enabling them to reach their expanding potential in life, both academically and personally. If you want to learn more about the power of Character Education, check out the training area here.

While we know it's powerful and that we should teach it, the problem is that there is barely enough time in a day to cover all the curriculum we need to teach, right? How are we supposed to make time for teaching Character and building up classroom community as well?

Having grappled with this same dilemma myself, I have come up with a few tips for integrating Character into my curriculum, that can often be done in 5 minutes! Keep reading to learn more.

Quick ways to teach Character Education in schools | TeachersResourceForce.com

Tip 1: look for opportunities
When it comes to Character Education, it's not always necessary to teach is as an "add on" (although this is an effective way to go deep on a topic). Sometimes you can find opportunities to teach character in every day activities. For example, if you notice your students always give up when they find tasks hard, you can take that opportunity to drop a positive quote such as "you only fail when you give up" followed by a little pep talk! Just repeating these mantras and offering encouragement throughout the day can still have an impact on your students and can be done in a few minutes.

Tip 2: secret angels
One of my favourite things to do with students is to encourage them to be someone's "secret angel" for a week. This teaches them the power of acts of kindness, how amazing it feels to be a good person and how they can easily help make the world a better place, all while fostering a positive classroom community.

How it works is simple. Put every student's name on a piece of paper and call them up to pull a name out of a hat at random. They are now a secret angel for that person, and they person they selected must be kept a secret so as not to spoil the excitement.

All students have to do is make an effort to demonstrate acts of kindness for that person without making it too obvious. It could be smiling at them, holding a door open, lending them a pen, leaving notes in their locker etc. they can get as creative as they like with it!

At the end of the week students are to share who they think their secret angel is followed by a conversation about how it made both parties feel as the angel and the recipient! Every time I have done this, it has been on students' mind all week - it's all they talk about, always guessing who is their angel and of course, enjoying being treated so well by a classmate! It is especially powerful if these people don't often talk to each other, as new friendships can even blossom!

Give "secret angels" a go, watch your students be active and kind citizens and see how much joy it will bring to your classroom community each week!

Tip 3: quick morning meetings
Another easy and effective way of teaching Character Education is through short morning meeting activities. Some schools have home room / tutor / form time / advisory class which is a perfect opportunity to do this, but it can equally be the first few minutes of your lesson.

Take 5 minutes to show a quote related to a character trait you want to instil in your students and have some discussions around those quotes.

It can be hard thinking of discussion prompts beyond "what do you think this quote means", so to save you the time and stress, I have created a resource for you that does just that:

Character Education whiteboard morning meetings | TeachersResourceForce.com

Character Education journal morning meetings | TeachersResourceForce.com

This set of bundled resources includes a Digital Whiteboard option for you to display the quotes and prompts up on your wall where you can facilitate a classroom discussion. The other bundle is a set of printable journals with the same quotes and prompts to encourage your students to develop their writing skills while reflecting on character development. Or you can get the whole lot right here!

The character traits included in these bundles include: resilience, courage, compassion, self-confidence, respect, tolerance, honesty, self-respect, leadership and empathy. There are 200 quotes and 600 prompts, that's enough for every single school day of the year!

If you would like to get a free sample of digital whiteboard and printable journal morning meetings, you can download them here:

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Learning by rote: unfashionable, but very, very useful

17/5/2019

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This article has been written by guest post blogger, Bruce Greig, who offers some fantastic ways you can teach your students to learn rapidly!

Learning by rote has, to put it mildly, somewhat gone out of fashion since the days of rows of Victorian schoolchildren reciting their times tables in unison.

But there is no getting away from the fact that learning involves remembering information, and some types of information just have to be learnt by heart. The obvious examples are multiplication tables and foreign language vocabulary.

There are two techniques used by memory gurus which are almost never taught in schools: visualisation and spaced repetition. Visualisation might be touched on sometimes, like these kinds of aide-memoires:

Learning by rote: unfashionable, but very, very useful | TeachersResourceForce.com

(Source: http://forreadingaddicts.co.uk)

But schools don’t teach visualisation in the way that memory gurus use it. Few people realise how effective visualisation can be. Take the parlour game trick of memorising the order of a randomly shuffled pack of cards. Magician shuffles the cards, looks at them one at a time, then goes through the pack again, correctly predicting each card as it comes up. Impressive as it looks, anyone can do this with about an hour’s practice.

The technique is to imagine walking along a familiar route and at key places you mentally position some outrageous image representing each playing card. Young man ripping out his own heart while hanging from lamppost at the corner of your street: Jack of Hearts. Five workmen digging furiously to pull down the lamp post: five of spades. And so on. Try it with twenty cards, you’ll find it surprisingly easy.

Memorising a pack of cards is, of course, completely useless. But this trick illustrates how effective visualisation can be: imagining a powerful, even outrageous, image makes recall very easy.

Learners can do the same thing with foreign vocab and multiplication tables. The crucial step is to make the effort think up an image the very first time you are presented with the word to be remembered. Do this the first time, for every word, even if it takes thirty seconds or a minute to do. It is effortful, much more so than just reading or hearing the word and hoping to remember it. But that effort will be repaid many times over as the recall becomes easier and easier based on the image you have for that word.

Which brings us onto the second technique beloved of memory gurus but almost never found in the classroom: spaced repetition. This was originally a flashcard technique. You start with one pile of flashcards. As you review each card you judge how easy you found it to recall the answer. Easy cards you upgrade into a new pile, hard ones stay in the same pile. The next day, you only review your “hard” pile, ignoring the easy pile. You revisit the easy ones in, say, two days and again promote those you still find easy into a new pile, downgrade hard ones back to pile one, and keep the rest where they are.

Over time, you build up to having a pile of cards you need to review every day, another pile you only look at once a week, and so on, up to a pile which you might review once a year.

The fascinating insight of this technique is that you eventually get to the point where you review each card just around the time you are starting to forget it. You don’t waste any time reviewing cards that you still remember well. That is why it is so efficient: you only review the cards that you need to, you don’t spend any time on other cards.

I used this technique to learn good tourist-level Italian. Curious to rate my own ability I did an Italian GCSE past paper. I completed the paper to A* level, and found the paper far less intimidating that my French and Spanish GCSEs from years ago.

This after around a dozen hours of hours of study, rather than the many hundreds of hours of study I must have spent doing French and Spanish at school twenty-five years ago.

Spaced repetition is extremely effective, but there is a good reason that it isn’t commonly used in classrooms: it is completely impossible for a teacher to administer. The teacher cannot keep track of how well each child remembers every word in their foreign vocab list; or how well each child remembers every multiplication fact.

The only practical way to use this technique in a classroom is for every child to manage their own “piles” of cards. Either with real cards, and real boxes to place them in or (more practical) an app like Anki which recreates this exact technique on a screen. Some language learning apps like Memrise and Duolingo do use elements of spaced repetition, but in my experience a simple flashcard system, using spaced repetition (as Anki does) is all you need.

I’ve encouraged my daughter to use these techniques for her school Spanish, and it works very well. Are you a teacher who has used these techniques in your classroom? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

(About the author: Bruce Greig is an entrepreneur and school governor. He has a psychology degree from Oxford University. He served as CoG through two Ofsted inspections and four headteachers. He runs SchoolStaffSurveys.com in his spare time, after discovering how enlightening an anonymous staff survey can be and decided to make it easy for every school to run them.)

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Don't Stress The Test: help relieve stress for your students during testing season!

26/4/2019

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Testing season... We all know what it is like: the tension and anxiety can be felt in the air. We spend a lot of time worrying about our students - not only what results they will get, but more importantly how they're handling the stress.

What's worse, it's starting younger and younger; we've been hearing about children as young as 6 feeling stressed over exams and tests in recent years. It's extremely alarming. While we can't do much about our students having to sit these tests, we can do little things to help them ease their stresses.

In 2014, I began designing quote colouring pages to give to my students around exam / testing season and I found it had some really wonderful, positive effects on their emotional and mental wellbeing. Since then, my idea has boomed in popularity and I'm thrilled that more and more students around the world are benefiting! Here are some ways you can help your students to not stress the test:

Don't Stress The Test: help relieve stress for your students during testing season! @resourceforce #donstressthetest #testprep #mindfulcoloring #teachersresourceforce

HOW QUOTE COLOURING PAGES HELP:
So why colouring? It's an underrated activity that has lots of positive effects on the brain. You can learn all about it here: www.quotecolouringpages.com

There have been studies that prove that colouring is said to calm the amygdala, the part of the brain related to the fear/stress response, while stimulating the parts of the brain responsible for creativity and logic. Colouring also has intellectual benefits too! It utilises the frontal lobes of the brain which enhances focus and relaxation and can help with organisational and problem solving skills.

So it's definitely not just a "fluffy", "useless", "waste of time" activity. You really are helping your students by giving them opportunities to relax and colour in. What's even better, is that all these "don't stress the test" colouring pages I designed, are full of inspirational quotes that will motivate and encourage your students during testing season.

Don't stress the test | TeachersResourceForce.com

BEFORE AND AFTER TESTING:
They are incredibly easy to use and you have a wide range of pages and quotes to choose from. I have a whole stash photocopied and kept in my classroom for emergencies (they make especially great indoor recess / break time activities!).

You can take some time during your morning meetings, or add 10 minutes of relaxation time before a test where your students can colour these in with some calming music on in the background to help get them in the right frame of mind and ease that test stress.

They are also incredibly effective as post test activities for early finishers. It keeps students busy in a positive way, and the pages they colour in can be used as classroom decor to help motivate other students too!

INSPIRATIONAL CLASSROOM DECOR:
Once coloured in, you'll find these make superb classroom decor. Having these on display around your classroom make for inspirational encouragement during test taking, especially if you have to cover all your usual bulletin boards and classroom displays, which is pretty depressing..!

Some students have chosen to keep their posters on their desks as personal motivation; the mini colouring affirmations mentioned below are ideal for that!

And some schools have been decorating their corridors with the posters to help inspire the whole school community! Check out these testimonials from other teachers who use these pages (I love that one teacher has used this as a "celebration" too - what an amazing mindset!):

SCHOOL COMMUNITY:
These quote colouring pages can go beyond helping individual students with their stress: they can also help bring the whole school community together!

With testing, everyone is in the same boat and just knowing everyone has each others' back makes it that much easier for young people to deal with.

Check out some of the ways these teachers have spread the love using these "don't stress the test" colouring pages:

AFFIRMATIONS:
If you want to take it up a notch, I have also created these smaller versions that are affirmation specific. These are especially effective as they have quality questions at the back that help affirm the positive quote rather than just hope it will eventually be believed by osmosis! If you want to learn more about how that works, you can check out this article: Why affirmations haven't worked for you and the key step you're missing.

These mini quote colouring cards are ideal for when you have less time to colour them in, or if your students want to keep the finished cards in their wallets, pencil cases or visible on the desk while they're taking their tests!

I believe it takes a special teacher to ache for the stress their students are feeling and want to help in any way they can. The fact you are here reading this means you are one of those teachers.

Myself and thousands of other teachers who have used these "don't stress the test colouring pages", can agree that these are a positive step in the right direction in helping ease test stress. We cannot eradicate the tests yet, but we sure can show our students we care about them and are behind them all the way, cheering them on. Best of luck to your students this testing season and may the "Resource Force" be with them if you use these in your lessons too!

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