The T.E.A.M. Approach to Teaching Character 579.4
I want my kids to be smart and successful, but I also want them to be good. I want them to be the kind of people other parents would like to see their kids marry. I want them to make sound values-based decisions that help them be safe and happy.
Like most parents, I spend lots of time trying to instill virtues like honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and kindness.
But building character is more complicated than teaching math or manners. It involves the heart as well as the head. The goal is to make good thoughts and conduct a matter of habit. I want my children to know what’s good, to want what’s good, and to do what’s good.
Effective character-building is captured in the acronym T.E.A.M. (teach, enforce, advocate, and model).
We teach character by promoting the values and developing the ethical virtues that make up a good person – trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. Kids should understand what each of these traits looks like.
We entrench these values by enforcing them, by backing up our rhetoric with appropriate consequences. What you allow, you encourage.
We passionately and relentlessly advocate our commitment to good character so our children have no doubt what we want for them and expect from them.
And we instill positive values by modeling the virtues we want to see in our children. This is done by how we deal with pressures, frustrations, fatigue, and other everyday actions, especially what we say and do when we think no one’s looking and we won’t get caught.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
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Comments
I have run a child care for 8 years. It is a veritable experimental lab on what these delicate little sponges are capable of absorbing! Do you have or have you ever thought of developing a curriculum or materials designed for early childhood development?
Posted by: LYnne Stetler | August 15, 2008 6:47 AM
Having taught human values education for more than 25 years, I fully agree with the T.E.A.M. approach and that building character is more than teaching math or manners. It is the skill of drawing out what is inherently good in everyone, helping children and young people and adults to recognize that good is a strength and encouraging the continual use that inherent goodness is a foundation and/or yardstick in all that they do.
In terms of early years, there is a lot of material/resources that already support character development through games, puppetry, animated stories, songs and arts/crafts.
A lot of the so-called curriculum around character-building (i.e. the activities used to teach) rely on the student having good language and cognition skills (e.g. connecting concepts, sequencing, etc.). I am interested in supporting children and young people who have language or cognition difficulties. Yes, as teachers, we can model and that is the most powerful means of education, but what if a child cannot connect the concept of kindness to the act? What if a pupil is visually impaired and cannot see what is being modeled? Yes, they can hear, but what if the child has multi-sensory impairment (MSI) or is on the autistic spectrum? With the number of special-needs children on the rise in the UK at about 7% per year, this has become my mission. So any thoughts/suggestions and advice in this area would be most appreciated.
Cheers
Anita (UK)
Posted by: Anita Devi | September 17, 2009 12:50 AM