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