6 ways to teach personal development in schools

Personal development is FINALLY making its way into more UK schools, especially since Ofsted's most recent updates where they announced this will be a new focus for inspections. Character Education has been around globally for a while, but it's more important than ever that we all do our best to bring this into our classroom if we haven't already - not because of inspections, but because our students need it.

If you're new to teaching character education or personal development, it can be overwhelming at first to know where to start. So hopefully this article will give you some ideas for how you can easily implement this fundamental quality into your day.

If you've never heard of Personal Development or Character Education, you can firstcheck out this article which explains all you need know about it and why your students need it.

Once you're clear on what it is and why you want to teach it, here are some simple ways you can implement personal development into your classroom, or across the whole school:

1. The easiest way I found to begin with, is by slotting a short activity into your mornings: those first few minutes of the day when everyone is settling in are ideal. (You might call it tutor time / morning meeting / home room / form time / advisory period etc. - there are so many names for this!)

I've created a brand new website especially for this time of the day, called character365.com.

Character365 is very simple to use and completely free! Every Monday a new discussion prompt or activity automatically appears. Every prompt revolves around making students think about their character and work on their personal development to ensure they are always striving to be their best. Because the prompt is up for a whole week, you can choose a specific day to do these activities or come back and review the same topic a few times during the week to check on progress and keep the focus at the forefront of your students' mind. Make sure you check it at least once a week as you won't be able to go back to old prompts or forward to new ones!

2. Another option for your mornings if you'd rather have something new each day, are these character themed morning meeting digital PowerPoints and printable journals. There are 10 different characteristics, one for each month of the year: resilience, respect, courage, compassion, tolerance, empathy, self-respect, leadership, honesty and self-esteem:

You can use either the PowerPoints on their own for class / peer discussions or thePrintable Journals on their own for written activities for your students, or of course you could combine the two for maximum impact! They're such an easy and effective way of having the right conversations about these topics and having a different theme each month will really help your students hone in and focus on building that one characteristic at a time.
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3. If you're fortunate enough to be issued specific curriculum time for personal development, then you can teach whole lessons, perhaps in PSHE or some advisory lessons which are a bit longer. These Character Education resources are different than the previous as they include detailed guided PowerPoints along with printable activities and task cards, which are ideal for complete lessons. Again, these come in all 10 characteristics and they are self guided so you don't need to be an expert or a counsellor to deliver them, but please do seek guidance with your school if you are worried about delivering any topic!

4. You could also go the extra curricular route and start a club - even better if it's a student leadership club led by older students who could mentor the younger ones. The club could have a specific topic they would like to focus on, perhaps as individuals but also in including the whole school. For example a "Character Club" might want to encourage the whole school to be more kind to one another and they might lead an activity such as leaving notes of kindness in peoples' lockers or on their chairs and encouraging others to do the same. I'm sure your students would be able to come up with even more fun ideas in a brainstorming session!

5. Another useful way of impacting the whole school in a short space of time is through whole school assemblies. You can get the message across to the whole student body on a regular basis. Ideally you'd want to follow up with the things shared, perhaps in lessons or in future assemblies as character isn't a one-stop-shop you can hit once. It needs to be addressed, practised, reviewed and practised some more on a continual basis!

6. Finally, you could get some inspiring quotes up on display in classrooms and on walls in the corridors. While quotes are inspiring, they are only effective if you refer to them often and make them relevant to your students and their experiences. For example a quote on resilience will be great to refer to if your students are wanting to give up on some class work - you could point to the quote and use it to help inspire them to keep going!

When it comes to personal development, something is better than nothing! We just want to encourage our students to develop the characteristics to be the best they can be. 

If you would like to help support your students with developing resilience, give them these free resilience colouring affirmations: