WORDS Michael McVeigh

Young people need to learn more than how to read, write and do sums.

Recess has just finished, and the Grade Five students from St Charles Borromeo Primary School are sitting in a circle with their teacher. ‘Tell me something that made you go “wow”’, she says.

The students pass a ball around the circle, each of them getting a turn to speak. One boy mentions the first time he saw the MCG, another talks about winning a football game.

The teacher continues the conversation by asking them to talk about a time when they experienced caring. Again, the ball is passed around the circle, though this time not all the students have to speak. The stories become more personal, with students talking about times when they had sick relatives or pets, or when their parents have looked after them.

It might seem a long way from learning how to read and write, but values circles have become part of standard practice for schools taking a values-based approach to learning. In the past, many saw schools as solely a place for passing on knowledge. But over the last ten years, schools have been challenged to broaden the way they think about education.

In 2003, the Australian Government released its Values Education Study Report, looking at the role schools play in shaping the values and behaviour of young people. One of the outcomes of that report was to select specific clusters of schools to continue to refine the way values education is practiced and implemented.

St Charles Borromeo Primary School is among a number of Catholic schools in Melbourne’s east that came together five years ago with the idea of becoming values-based schools. They are the only cluster of schools in Australia to have been part of the two stages of the Values Education Good Practice Schools Project (VGPS), as well as the current Values in Action Schools Project (VASP).

Sue Cahill, the Student Wellbeing Coordinator at St Charles Borromeo, is the coordinator of the cluster. ‘Often the throwaway line is because we’re a Catholic school we do values’, she says. ‘The trouble is, as identified by all of us in the project, we do talk it all the time but often we don’t walk it.’

In the first stage, which went for around ten months, students from each of the six schools explored where values were being seen, heard and lived in their family, school and wider community. They also highlighted places where they weren’t being seen. The second stage went for nearly 20 months and involved looking at what the students had identified and building that into the policy, ethos and culture of the school. The third stage began this year and will focus on the relationship between teacher and student.

Cahill says it has been important that the students themselves led the way.

‘We learnt you can’t come from above and enforce it’, she says. ‘When they own it, we know then that it’s going to be something that they’re going to grow with, that they’re going to stand up for, and that they believe in.’

Cahill says the schools have identified 12 values which underpin everything they do. These are: respect, responsibility, honesty, caring, determination, assertiveness, friendliness, tolerance, courage, confidence, kindness, and consideration. The schools have integrated these values into the RE curriculum. Students model behaviours and situations through role plays, picture books, art and music. However, the values education extends to the rest of the curriculum as well.

‘The terms themselves will be used in maths, reading and writing’, says Cahill. ‘It has become a language. We don’t even realize we’re using it, it just is something that we do here, now.’

In this context, sharing stories in the values circle is a way of helping children better understand how values are lived out in their lives. It helps students understand what words like trust, companionship, love, and respect actually mean.

‘If I’m working with a child in grade two and I say what I’m hearing is that someone didn’t respect someone in that little confrontation, they know what that means’, says Cahill. ‘Because they’ve role-played it, and they’ve drawn it, and they’ve written about it.’

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