Goals and Objectives :: Goal B :: Instructional Strategies

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Strategies for supporting positive attitudes and discouraging negative attitudes include the following:

• cross-age teaching, which engages older students, who understand and demonstrate positive norms, to teach younger students, who admire them and in many cases afford older peers more credibility than they do adults
• peer opinion leaders, who can be trained in content in order to affect other students
• a schoolwide assessment of positive and negative norms so students can acknowledge that many of their peers hold positive norms and so students can identify and begin to change negative norms
• testimonials from people who have succeeded by following drug-free and violence-free norms
• listing alternatives to behaviors that support negative norms

Teaching students about norms works best when students enter into a partnership with each other and with school adults to constantly reinforce the encouragement of positive norms and the discouragement of negative ones.

Other instructional strategies involving attitude and behavior change include the following:

• Affective teaching methods comprise several components:
  Receiving requires students to become aware by listening, observing, and describing.
  Responding asks students to discuss, argue, and agree or disagree to identify desired attitudes. Further responding could involve reading, writing, and telling about changing attitudes.
  Valuing requires students to consider what was received, use the information to make decisions, and
  prioritize and value it by appreciating, choosing, justifying, and demonstrating the changed attitudes and behaviors.
• Analogies are used to build a bridge from the known to abstract concepts.
• Interviews can be conducted with successful people, who are asked to describe the attributes of positive attitudes and to share an instance when negative attitudes led to nonproductive behavior. (See "Red Flag #2".)
• Guided discussion is moderately structured with the teacher leading students toward predetermined high-level thinking and promotion of understanding of important concepts, ideas, values, problems, or issues. The teacher may probe some responses to provide clarification and to extend students' thinking. (See "Red Flag #3".)
• Reflective discussion is least structured and has the potential for generating the most interaction among students. Students must have a solid understanding of the subject matter and be required to evaluate information, opinions, and ideas leading to positive attitudes and the application of these attitudes. Students solve problems, clarify values, explore issues, and defend positions. The teacher guides, advises, and keeps students directed toward the established goals, as well as serving as a resource. (See "Red Flag #4".)