Tag: character

Key Qualities of Teammates: Focused, Hardworking and Fun too

Today we reconstituted our small groups for science. One student was late getting their name into the bowl so did not get randomly assigned to a group, so I deviated a little from our standard procedure and asked him which group he thought would be the best for him. Not which group he most wanted to be in, but which group he could be most effective — and learn the most — in. But, as a means of following up on all of our discussion at Heifer about what makes a community, before I gave him the chance to answer I asked the entire class to identify what qualities they thought they brought to their groups, and then, separately, I asked them what qualities the would like their teammates to have.

Qualities students would like to see in other people in their working groups.
Figure 1. Qualities students would like to see in other people in their science working groups.

I got a number of interesting answers to the question about what they thought their qualities were. I know how hard it is to self-assess sometimes so I required that they could only put positive qualities, and allowed them to ask their peers for an external perspective.

My favorite response was from one girl who asked her friend sitting next to her what her positive qualities were, and the friend responded, “bossiness”. She thought about that for a second, then nodded and said, “that sounds about right.” When I asked them both why they thought “bossiness” was a positive quality they explained that the one girl was good at taking charge when necessary, and telling everyone what to do. I couldn’t argue with that description, because I’d observed it in their previous group work. The key part though was the “when necessary”, because while she does take charge, she’s very good at managing her group: giving everyone the opportunity for input while still being decisive. Instead of bossiness, I’d probably have used the term “leadership”.

After they had the time to compile their list of qualities they wanted to see in teammates, we compiled a list on the whiteboard (see Figure 1). Perhaps it’s just that they know what I want to hear, but it was quite nice to see that the top two characteristics were:

  • focused, and
  • hardworking.

“Smart” and “fun” were the next most popular on the list, but after some discussion I/we decided to drop the “smart” since their criteria for smart was just having a basic level of intellectual competence, and it was somewhat less important than the other major qualities listed.

Of the remaining three major qualities that they’d like to see in teammates — focused, hardworking, and fun — I asked them each to pick the one they were going to focus on developing over the next month of group work. I asked a couple of the students who chose “fun” to reconsider since it was already one of their current areas of strength.

I then let them pick a second quality to work on from the full list, and had them write their two chosen qualities down somewhere prominent, because we’ll be checking in with them regularly over the course of the next month to see what specific things they’re doing to work on them, and how their efforts are going.

Then I let the student choose his group.

The discussion took the entire class period, and we did not get much “science” done, but if it can get students to be a bit more focused on their work it would be well worth the time.

The Ingredients of “Character”

Some key performance-character strengths:

zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.

— Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? in The New York Times’ Education Issue

Paul Tough’s thought provoking article is a great overview of some of the recent research on character, and discusses a few attempts to instill character building into school.

Levin [co-founder of the KIPP network of charter schools ] noticed that … the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.

— Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

Much of the work on character is based on the universal character characteristics identified in the book Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Peterson and Seligman, 2004) and the research of Angela Duckworth (her research page is a good place to find copies of her publications).

Duckworth’s Grit Scale, seems to be a remarkably good predictor of GPA, and perhaps more interestingly, corresponded inversely to the number of hours of television students watched: “gritter” students did better in school and watched less TV.

Among adolescents, the Grit–S [short Grit Scale] longitudinally predicted GPA and, inversely, hours watching television. Among cadets at the United States Military Academy, West Point, the Grit–S predicted retention.

— Duckworth and Quinn (2009): Development and Validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit–S)

The grit survey would probably be a useful addition to the Personal World curriculum.

One interesting application discussed in the article is at the KIPP middle schools in NYC. There they issue a Character Report Card and integrate discussion of character into all the classes: a language class might talk about how much self control the protagonist in a novel has and how that works out for them.

I’d be extremely reluctant to have to grade my students on twenty four character traits. While it might be a useful rubric to have and discuss and build on students’ positive self-conceptions, I fear that it might also significantly reinforce the negative conceptions as well.

Imbuing a language of character as a subtext of the curriculum seems like a great idea however.

Performance vs. Moral Character

One important critique of much of this work is that it focuses on “performance” character, the character traits that predict high achievement, rather than “moral” character which focuses on the ability to work well with others.

These two perspectives on the same character traits need careful attention. From a performance perspective, social intelligence, can be seen as a way of getting ahead – something that is somewhat manipulative, but from a moral perspective, social intelligence is intrinsically beneficial to the person and the society around them.

And perhaps this is the biggest problem with performance-character. It is extrinsically motivated: do this and you will get this reward. The intrinsic nature of moral-character seems much more in line with a progressive approach to teaching. Certainly, much care should be taken in how we think about and include character building in education.

The Character Education Partnership has a number of lesson plans and best practices for all grade levels, that focus more on moral character.

Giving Students the Opportunity to Fail

Finally, Tough talks about the fact that students need the time and space to explore, try difficult things, and to fail, in order to really build character.

The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure, and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.

— Dominic Randolph (2011) in Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? in The New York Times’ Education Issue

This is tied into the central theme of the movie Race To Nowhere and the book The Price of Privilege, that argue that, for many affluent students, the stress of excessively high academic expectations are having some seriously negative effects.

People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)

(hat tip to Ms. D. for the link to the article)

Character Amid the Ruins

People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.

— Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960 (quote via The Quote Garden.)

The character of an individual, and even of a people, is best identified in periods of adversity. That was one of the things that came up when my students discussed ethics, morality and poverty. With all the talk of how the Japanese people are reacting to last week’s earthquake, with a relative lack of looting and criminality, it is worth visiting Jesse Walker’s article in Reason last year that really looked at how people really respond to disasters. It turns out, that from Haiti to New Orleans to San Fransisco in 1906, people are much more restrained and disciplined than we’re lead to imagine.

Walker reviews Rebecca Solnit’s book “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster” which points out the “little utopias” that arise in disaster hit communities.

Walker also points out the incongruity between our expectations and actual observations:

It isn’t unusual for a TV reporter to get his facts wrong. It’s rarer for the images that accompany his dispatch to flagrantly contradict what he says. But on January 21, broadcasting in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, CNN correspondent Ivan Watson fretted about “chaotic crowds” as the camera showed people who were calm and patient. When Watson announced that we were watching a “chaotic scramble” onto a rescue ship, this was illustrated by a group of refugees carefully, methodically passing a baby onto the boat.

–Walker (2010): Disaster Utopianism on Reason.com