Teaching Character through Instruction, Reflection & Modeling

Teaching character is an important aspect of CASE. It’s in our name: Character and Skills Education. But how does one teach character? Learning character isn’t like learning geometry or state capitals. There’s no formulas or lists to memorize, and even if you knew everything about character--whatever that would mean--it wouldn’t mean that you had any.

Site Coordinator,Benjamin Reese, helps students with a no-bake cookie making exercise. Such activities provide the perfect context to emphasize the value of the week.

Even though “teaching character” can seem insubstantial and idealistic, it’s not just a name for our programs. It’s something we do. It’s not just something we hope will happen, it’s something that we ensure is happening. I’d like to tell you how. Although character education can happen at multiple levels, I’ll break up our approach into three major strategies: instruction, reflection, and modeling.

The first strategy is instruction. This happens at the beginning of every day when we review the “value of the week.” These are values like kindness, honesty, teamwork, and consideration. The students learn the name of the character trait, and they learn a basic definition. It’s a short segment, it might not seem like much, but it makes a big difference. Youth need a language to talk about character. We often don’t pay much attention to what we don’t have a name for. I remember when I learned the name of a certain tree, the yellow poplar, and I was amazed that they were all around me. I just didn’t have a name for them, so I never paid them much attention. By giving them a name for a certain character trait, students start noticing things they didn’t before. This noticing leads to the next strategy, reflection.

When students get a chance to reflect on an activity through the lens of character, they often get a chance to appreciate how important certain character traits were to their experience.

Reflection gets students talking about an activity, but not with the language they’re accustomed to, “it was boring,” “it was fun,” etc. Instead, they get to reflect on the activity through the lens of character. We might ask, “When did you see someone be considerate during this activity?” These times of reflection do a couple of things: It helps students be better observers of people’s character, rather than looking at, say, their external appearance or the event itself. But more importantly, it lets them observe how important a factor character is in their experience of life. After doing a baking activity, we had students notice all the times where “teamwork” could be identified. After naming a few notable moments of teamwork, I saw it dawn on them that it was their cooperation that had made their experience enjoyable, not just the activity itself.

In this activity, students learned how to engage in conversation by writing down a series of questions that they could ask someone they just met. These kinds of activities can be ways for students to practice the character trait, like consideration, that they are learning that week.

This also works for when they have bad experiences. If an activity becomes frustrating, reflection can help redirect their focus on the real problem. It wasn’t that the activity was frustrating, or that they just didn’t like the person they were with, it was because there had been some breakdown in how they behaved. This is important because character is something that can be changed, and by reflection, students come to realize that character is a controllable factor in how they go through life, and it’s the most important one in shaping their experience.

We also help them reflect by offering feedback in the language of character. Instead of, “great job on that assignment,” we can say, “You really showed perseverance in finishing that assignment.” It’s a small change in language, but it can make a big difference. Through instruction and reflection, the student learns to identify and appreciate the importance of character.

Students work together to walk in a straight line while keeping the balloons between them. These kinds of activities provide an experience that can be followed by a time of reflection, where students note how certain character traits were important to the success or failure of their team.

Instruction and reflection are for nothing if it isn’t backed by modeling. This can be a challenge when you’re working with high-energy youth, but it’s important that all our leaders demonstrate the character that we espouse. When I was out sick for a week, I was glad that many students told my second lead that they missed my “positivity,” a character trait that we had taught them. When they learn to speak the language of character, it’s important that they see the most powerful example of that character in their teachers.

Thanks to how our organization trains and staffs our workers, I am confident that we are able to deliver on this final and most important piece in our overall strategy of teaching character. Of course, the true test of any strategy is its fruit, and I am thankful that I have had a chance to witness the often astounding growth in our students. From planning to implementation to evaluation, “character education” is more than just a part of our name. It’s a part of what we do every day.

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C.A.S.E. is a program of the Nashville After Zone Alliance. The Nashville After Zone Alliance is a network of coordinated after school programming for Metro’s middle-school students. NAZA is a partnership among the Nashville Public Library, MNPS, and other existing youth-serving groups. It is modeled on successful efforts in other cities and is organized around geographically-defined zones.