The skills for ‘Character Education’ are suitably broken up into 6 areas
- Self Awareness
- Team Workers
- Being Resilient
- Commitment
- Problem Solver
- Showing Empathy
These need to be taught and nurtured across all areas and ages. You may wish to view these as the ‘Learn to Live’ skills.
We recognise that these need to be seen alongside basic expectations for oracy because they are, in many ways, both the key to unlocking access to many of these areas of learning and also central to developing learners' ability to assimilate, enjoy, voice and reflect on their learning. The essence of these oracy expectations needs to pervade the climate of the classroom, teachers’ modelling and all areas of the curriculum and school life.
Six areas of character development
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. Self-awareness allows you to understand other people, how they perceive you, your attitude and your responses to them in the moment.
Team worker
Team workers work confidently with others, adapting to different contexts and taking responsibility for their own roles. They listen and consider others’ views. They also form collaborative relationships, resolve issues and reach agreed-upon outcomes.
Being resilient
A person with good resilience can bounce back more quickly and with less stress than someone with less developed resilience. Like any human skill, learning greater resilience is something that you can do at any age, from any background, no matter your education or family relationships.
Showing commitment
Commitment is a value; it means being dedicated, not quitting. To teach children the value of commitment, we must allow them to see that failure is okay. They need to learn to have a ‘stick-with-it’ attitude, and that commitment should be honoured, respected, and upheld. We must teach children to keep going when things get hard, stick it out, and persevere.
Being a problem solver
Children will face many challenges as they grow, whether starting school, joining a sporting team or going to their first sleepover. The ability to make decisions and solve problems develops as children learn to cope with daily challenges. Young children are not expected to sort through every issue independently and will likely require lots of guidance from the adults around them. The good news is that encouraging children to participate in problem-solving will help them develop this skill over time.
Showing empathy
Empathy is, at its simplest, awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people. It is a key element of Emotional Intelligence, the link between self and others, because it is how we understand what others are experiencing as if we were feeling it ourselves. When you have empathy, it means you can understand what a person is feeling at a given moment and understand why other people's actions made sense to them. Empathy helps us communicate our ideas in a way that makes sense to others and helps us understand others when they communicate with us.
