ABSTRACT
The third of the QTS Professional Values and Practice Standards requires teachers both to demonstrate and to promote the ‘positive values, attitudes and behaviour that they expect from their pupils’.
The word ‘promote’ is particularly important. Possessing certain professional values and attitudes is one thing; making them part of the ‘fabric’ of classroom practice, which is what promoting them involves, is quite another. However thoroughly teachers can claim to hold any proposed values at a purely personal level, what counts most in their professional practice is the extent to which they can successfully apply them in their work so that positive attitudes and dispositions inform and influence the ways that pupils work and learn. This means creating classrooms in which pupils themselves assimilate the desired values, and exhibit them in their own behaviour and approaches to their learning. It is through the course of a teacher’s interactions with pupils, mainly in classroom teaching and learning (though also, of course, in interactions with them outside formal lessons), that a teacher both shows that he or she demonstrates these characteristics, and promotes them among pupils.
