Skills you learn from Religious Studies (Year 9)

Religious Studies builds careful argument, ethical reasoning, and the ability to engage seriously with worldviews different from your own - skills that show up in almost every career. This lesson plan will help you to show Year 9 students the skills Religious Studies builds.

This lesson is designed to be delivered in 30 minutes as a teacher-led classroom activity.

This activity supports the following frameworks:

  • Gatsby Benchmark 4

This activity is suitable for Year 9 and features careers linked to the following subjects:

  • Religious Studies

This is one of three lesson plans for teachers introducing Religious Studies to Year 9 students:

These lesson plans will help you show students how Religious Studies connects to their future careers.

We recommend using this lesson plan at the end of the autumn term. By this point students will have had time to bump into the kinds of questions Religious Studies asks - through PSHE, English, History, the news, or their own conversations. Recognising those skills helps students see Religious Studies as more than a content-heavy subject, and sets them up for GCSE choices in the spring.

Learning objectives

  • Students will understand that Religious Studies builds a broad range of transferable skills.
  • Students will be able to name 2-3 skills they recognise from questions they've already wrestled with, and give examples.

Before the lesson

  • You will need a computer connected to the internet and a classroom screen.
  • Open the What can you do with Religious Studies? page and have it ready on the screen.
  • Review the Skills that Religious Studies builds section and think of teaching examples for each one - ethical questions from the news, a moral dilemma from a novel they're reading in English, a debate that's come up in PSHE or History.

During the lesson

1. What big questions have we wrestled with? (5 mins)

  • Ask students to call out big questions or ethical dilemmas they've come across this year - in PSHE, English, History, Science, the news, or their own thinking. Things like should we eat animals?, is it ever right to break the law?, how should we treat people we strongly disagree with?, what makes a life well lived?
  • Write the suggestions on the board and highlight any patterns.

2. Skills that Religious Studies builds (15 mins)

  • Bring up the What can you do with Religious Studies? page on the classroom screen.
  • Review the contents of the page with students so that they understand what it covers.
  • Scroll to the Skills that Religious Studies builds section and work through each skill in turn.
    • Ask students which question from the board involved that skill - building an argument and weighing the counter-argument, representing a view they don't share, sitting with genuine uncertainty, or adjusting how they say something for a different audience.
    • Share your own teaching examples if students are stuck.

3. Making it personal (10 mins)

  • Ask students to pick 2-3 skills from the list they feel they've used when thinking or talking about a big question.
  • Go round the class, asking each student to name one skill and give an example of when they used it.
  • Close by reminding students that these are valuable skills for work and life, not just for exams.

After the lesson