Abstract
The Boston University Wheelock Center for Character and Social Responsibility (CCSR) and the Montrose School LifeCompass Intitute (LCI), hosted a networked improvement community of educational leadership programs to support their efforts to understand character education more deeply, and to incorporate it purposefully and effectively into their coursework. With generous support from the Kern Family Foundation, a variety of institutional leaders met both in-person and online over the course of 18 months, building their respective organizations’ systemic capacities to integrate and assess character education, and to graduate future educational leaders who will be prepared to effectively shape school cultures and improve student outcomes by making character education a purposeful part of their leadership and theory of change. The focus of this special issue is to share the content of this training, and to present a summary of the programs and innovations developed by this community of learners.
As part of the training, Karen Bohlin articulated how a Practical Wisdom Framework (PWF) can help school leaders create and sustain formative institutions. She points out in this framework that leaders are continually faced with complex and competing choices; the PWF provides a roadmap to help leaders balance justice and fairness with mercy and compassion as they create and nurture sustainable educational systems that serve the developmental needs of youth and the professional needs of adults.
Tenelle Porter looked at the broader purpose of assessment in education, with a focus on 5 important questions: Who are you trying to help? What is the intervention? How will you measure effects? When will you measure effects? To what will you compare the results? This paper highlights the importance of grounding one’s work in evidence that can be used to drive continual improvement.
Tyler VanderWeele takes us a step further to focus on the importance of having a valid empirical approach to the assessment of character, which, in turn, can guide the development of programming that supports the formation of character and promotion of virtue that both facilitate human flourishing.
Robert McGrath identifies the need to develop articulate definitions of character education to guide the development and evaluation of effective programs. He encourages us to prioritize a focus on the shaping of the participant’s identity over the teaching skills of the educator.
David Walker grounds the discussion of character education within a neo-Kohlbergian and Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective, and reports on the results of a 3-year study of character education in Great Britain and the United States.
Marvin Berkowitz articulates the common challenges to the implementation and assessment of effective character education programs. He emphasizes that, if one wants to build a sustainable and constantly improving program, it is just as important to evaluate and understand the process of implementing a program as it is to evaluate the outcomes of the program.
Ariel Tichnor-Wagner facilitated the networked improvement community (NIC). In this research-practice partnership, there were practical outcomes, communitarian outcomes, and research outcomes. The development of curriculum and assessment tools were practical outcomes; the opportunity to learn how others were solving similar problems, using that information to improve one’s own programming, as well as giving and receiving support in accomplishing difficult goals, were all communitarian outcomes; and the publication of the collective narrative and findings of this NIC were research outcomes. This case study represents the value of structured collaboration and the challenge of system change.
This special issue of the Journal of Education has several valuable uses. One is that it serves as an introduction to how to develop and implement character education programs. The second is that it provides guidelines for program evaluation. The third is that it gives case examples of programs that have been implemented in diverse settings to serve a variety of participants.