Teachers' Notes for Teaching Positive Tolerance

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INTRODUCTION

This unit - currently 2 lessons - is an attempt to focus students’ minds on their own behaviour and inter-personal relationships within school.

It tries to get to the nub of what Positive Tolerance / iRespect is all about. The lessons link with the KS3 and KS4 Active Citizenship record sheets and are an important route to our central aim of establishing tolerant attitudes and behaviour among young people. You may also wish to use the Citizenship Review and Goal Setting sheet for an end of term/year review with individual students.

THE LESSONS
( on BEING NASTY TO PEOPLE AND BEING NICE TO PEOPLE)

• Lesson 1 - To understand the concept of Positive Tolerance.
• Lesson 2 - To apply the concept of Positive Tolerance.
• Extension options - Case studies: Terrance Roberts and Walter Tull.

The Plenary discussion from lesson 1 gets to the crux of the issue - a positively tolerant school is:

"A school that accepts and VALUES differences rather than a school where students poke fun at people who are different. This is not an easy thing for many students and we accept that many will not be able to change overnight – but we will reassure them that we will help them make our schools places of POSITIVE TOLERANCE. That is, schools where we VALUE DIFFERENCE and EMBRACE DIVERSITY. Schools where students become involved in the creation of a more tolerant world through ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP."

We know this is ambitious but hope the material on the iRespect site will help stimulate student understanding of the importance of these issues. We hope you can find time to send us your feedback so we can continue, with your help, to improve these lessons.