The British School of Paris has a Senior School’s Character Champions Team – a group of students that meet every week to help progress the school’s drive to embed Character Education into all of our activity.
Here, one of the students involved describes what the Champions team has been up to, and what Character Education means to her.
“In an exciting step towards holistic student development, the BSP announces the start of its Character Education programme. This initiative, led by Mr Manville and his team of Year 7 to Year 13 volunteers, aims to introduce a wider awareness of values such as empathy, honesty and respect within the school body.
The purpose of school centres not just around academics but also – alongside parents – in the shaping of young minds. School not only instills distinction between what is accepted as right or wrong, but aims also to nurture habits that encourage positive behaviour and decision making.
Over the past few weeks, Mr Manville has been directing this project amongst the Senior School teachers and staff, leading discussions towards integrating moral and ethical principles and reflection within lessons. The Character Education volunteers (two from each year group), meanwhile, have independently introduced the project to fellow students.
Currently, we are discussing the BSP’s core values – humanity, wisdom, courage and kindness – and ways to incorporate them as the centre of our project.
Looking forward, we will be tackling the first core value, “humanity”, and introducing it in the next school assembly as our theme for the next few weeks. Additionally, we will be actively brainstorming ways to make our project more visible throughout the school, and raising greater consciousness about our aims.
We invite you to stay on the lookout for developments in our Character Education project. With the support of parents, teachers, and the Headmaster, the Senior School is on its way to making the equipping of students with valuable life skills not just a finite project, but a new, fundamental part of the BSP’s mission.”
Here is how Character Education has been implemented into a recent French lesson…
The Year 9 French Special Objectives class had a lot of fun attempting to translate the school character values into French.
The class had recently been studying Maupassant short stories in which the reader is often left wondering what the implicit moral of the story might be. There are often several possible interpretations in literature, which is interesting, but can also be difficult.
In this context, it therefore seemed like an ideal opportunity to reflect on our explicit school values and to link these to our programme of study.
The seemingly simple exercise of translating key words turned into quite a challenge and generated a lot of animated discussions!
Although there was an initial questioning of the point of this activity (“What does Character Education have to do with French?” a pupil asked), the class quickly became involved and made some valuable contributions.
Translation of the word “Curiosity”, for instance, proved quite tricky: Louis pointed out that we probably needed to add “Curiosité d’esprit” in French, just to be sure everyone understood exactly what was meant as it could otherwise be misleading.
Interestingly, the word “Responsibility” was not straightforward to translate either; after some deliberation, Raphael suggested that we could say “Prise de responsabilité” in French in order to highlight the process of actually taking responsibility for your actions.
An interesting discussion also ensued about the true meaning of “Wisdom” and the various meanings of “La Sagesse” in French.
Two students also spent some time explaining the meaning of Empathy (Empathie) to the group, pointing out that it was not to be confused with Pity (La Pitié)!
Finally, when asked what they considered the most important value of all, the majority of the class voted for “Humanity” (Humanité), which they felt was essential to all our social interactions at school but also in life more generally.
