MindShift – Katrina Schwartz
Educators of all ages, from kindergarten through college, are quickly realizing that academic skills aren’t enough to ensure student success. Increasingly educators and district leaders are trying to incorporate non-cognitive skills into the school day that they hope will help students develop the inner fortitude and confidence to push through personal and learning challenges. But even as character development programs have become more popular, there hasn’t been much consensus on which character strengths lead to the best long term results.
In a small scale study conducted in the Boston Area, Boston University Education Professor Scott Seider tried to determine which character strengths correlate with student success and examined how different approaches to character development impacted students. The results of his study are part of his book Character Compass: How Powerful School Culture Can Point Students Towards Success. Seider studied three charter schools within 10 miles of one another, all serving mostly children of color, and all performing well on standardized tests. The schools were similar in terms of structure, demographics and academic achievement, but each school chose to define and focus on character development in different ways.
Seider chose the schools for their similarities and because their character development programs fell into three categories: civic character, moral character, and performance character. He defines civic character as the strengths students need to be informed and compassionate citizens of the world. Moral character on the other hand is more connected to an individual’s ability to engage in ethical relationships with other people. And finally, Seider defines performance character as the skills students need to maximize achievement.
Seider gave students at all three schools a character survey at the beginning of the school year and again at the end with questions meant to measure empathy, integrity (strengths he defines as moral character), perseverance, daring/courage (which he defines as performance character), social responsibility and school connectedness (which he defines as ethical character). He compared GPAs and number of demerits as a way of assessing conduct. He also interviewed 15 students at each school about their experiences and spent between 15-20 days observing at each school.
MORAL CHARACTER
Boston Preparatory Charter School focused on moral character. “When I say moral character, I’m talking about an individual’s ability to engage in ethical relationships with other individuals,” Seider said as he explained the study and its results at a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. Boston Prep focused on qualities like courage, compassion, integrity, perseverance and respect primarily through an ethics class students took every year from sixth grade through senior year of high school. In sixth grade students explored the idea of integrity and how it relates to telling the truth. In seventh grade they focused on responsibility for one’s actions, and in eighth grade they discussed how to stay true to oneself and the concept of authenticity.
Seider sat in on one 8th grade discussion about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to political office in California. “Students were thinking through what it means to be true to yourself and connecting it to things inside and outside of school,” Seider said.
At the high school level, students read Plato’s social contract theory and discussed how it interacts with personal integrity. When Seider visited students were comparing the lives of Muhammad Ali and Pat Tillman, wrestling with the moral question of what to do when personal opinion doesn’t line up with the social contract.
“At the end of the year the students showed a higher level of commitment to integrity than students at the other two schools,” Seider said. And, at the high school level students seemed to feel more empathy. “Ethics class seemed to be slowing them down a little bit and had them thinking more about the decision they were making,” Seider said. That doesn’t mean students always made the right decision, but at least they were thinking about it.
PERFORMANCE CHARACTER
At Roxbury Charter Preparatory, a middle school, the focus is on performance character and qualities that help students maximize achievement. School leaders focus on things like grit, perseverance, and self-control primarily through discussion and practice during an advisory period. The school emphasized how effort leads to results with school wide competitions like a digits of pi memorization contest and a public speaking extravaganza where every student works to present a speech or poem to the student body.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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