Knowledge
Schools have finally realised what it takes for a student to be highly successful in life
Schools across the globe are sitting up and taking notice that there is something more that needs to be taught to children to ensure their success in life. Character – comprising of skills like grit, self control etc. However it is still not clear how to instill these qualities in children.
Did you know that schools in Japan have made it mandatory for children to clean toilets and other areas of the school right from the age of 7? Do you think that the school is justified in making the children do such a humbling job? As it turns out, Japanese schools may have a lead on schools across the world in incorporating one crucial thing in the curriculum that the rest of the world is waking up to now – Character.
While schools across the world have been taking pride in providing a rounded curriculum to their students incorporating core subjects along with exposure to a range of extra-curricular, they have been missing out on this important link called character.
But what is character?
In simple words, character is a combination of personal qualities like grit, determination, self-control, conscientiousness and optimism. Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP, a US charter school network, has understood the importance of character for a long time. According to him the combination of academics and character the “double helix” of education. “There isn’t a moment in school where these two things aren’t happening together,” he said. “But we have come to see them separately.”
He cites an example: Let’s say your child gets to a hard part while reading a book. What does he do? Close the book? Give up? Does he use “academic” strategies to figure out the words and meaning?
Of course academics play a role—if he can’t decode the words, he won’t get far. But as you would have noticed he also needs character skills, like self-regulation, grit, and optimism.
Although KIPP schools have been issuing “character growth cards” which measure children on 7 qualities and multiple behaviors, from self-control, gratitude and grit, using the growth cards to figure out how to instill grit or optimism has proven quit a challenge.
In fact so convinced is Levin about this approach that he approached Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a MacArthur Genius, and Dominic Randolph, head of Riverdale Country Day School, to apply scientific methods to character research.
The Character Lab is currently running 5 projects to see which interventions work best, including one called “gratitude as a trigger for self-improvement in adolescents” and another to pique curiosity. This way character development could have a solid basis of implementation.
Duckworth is uniquely positioned to be a part of this team. As a teacher, she noticed that her smartest kids weren’t the most successful, and her less academically-able students often excelled. It left her wondering. As part of her PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she studied adults and kids in challenging situations. Which traits predict which cadets survive at West Point? Which kids wins high-stakes spelling bees? Which at-risk kids graduate from high school?
Consistently, the answer wasn’t those with the highest IQ, or the best physical health, or even the most social intelligence. It was grit. “Passion plus perseverance for long-term goals,”
Why this sudden interest in Character
Although, character education is not new the renewed interest is due to fresh research which points to the importance of character qualities. Hence we find countries and schools scrambling to incorporate the findings into curricula.
In 2011, Joseph A. Durlak along with 3 other researchers published the results of a meta-analysis of 213 school-based social and emotional learning skills (SEL). SEL, or “soft skills” is another way of describing a skill set that purely academic and includes self-awareness, self-management, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
The research observed 270,000 kindergarten through high school students. Compared to control groups, students taught SEL skills demonstrated an 11 percentile-point gain in academic achievement. Perhaps more importantly, they also showed an improvement in getting along, feeling engaged at school, and managing relationships better.
In 2015, the OECD published “Skills for Social Progress: the Power of Social and Emotional Skills.” It was the result of 3 years of painstaking research, and looked at longitudinal data from around the world on cognitive and non-cognitive skills.
“While everyone acknowledges the importance of social and emotional skills, there is often insufficient awareness of ‘what works’ to enhance these skills and efforts made to measure and foster them,” the researchers wrote.
In conclusion it said skills measured by literacy, academic achievement tests, and grades—can have a particularly strong correlation on higher education attendance and employment. On the other hand, raising levels of social and emotional skills—such as perseverance, self-esteem, and sociability—can have particularly strong effects on staying in college, being healthier, being bullied less, and in general feeling more happy.
The question is how to teach those.
Curriculum Design matters
Schleicher spends a lot of time in schools around the world, and has for many years. He feels that when a countries place emphasis on character development through the education system, it makes a big difference.
“In East Asian countries, there’s greater recognition for the importance in schools of character development,” he said. “They see education as being about values, not just about getting a job.”
Culture certainly plays a role: For instance, in some Asian families, getting poor grades is simply unthinkable. In Korea, children do so much homework that the police have to raid tutoring centers at night to get kids to go home.
In Singapore, teachers don’t start out with “What do I teach to my students?” he said. They ask, “What are the behaviors I want to achieve?” In Japan, if a child is arrested, the police call the teacher before the parent. In China, if a student is absent, teachers work hard to track that child down, eventually turning up in a student’s home or a parent’s workplace. He is quick to note that US teachers are less able to do this because they teach for more hours than their Asian counterparts
Measurement problems
With increasing research across the world that character is important, schools in US are gearing up to find ways to test it. The parameters planned to be tested are self-control and conscientiousness. While this may be a progressive move, it is being frowned upon by Levin who thinks that the character test may actually be used to weed out students rather than helping them build on their strengths, “We believe that you should improve the way character is discussed and measured in schools,” he said. “We don’t think you should use it to evaluate kids, teachers or schools.”
There is another inherent problem in administering character tests, they are highly subjective and are majorly influenced by the country specific culture. For example – Some assessments ask students to rate themselves on their preparedness for class, or whether they are hard workers. These things are highly subjective. When tests like these are administered to the Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese they rated themselves lowest on conscientiousness, perhaps a reflection of culture more than preparedness.
As the evidence accumulates in favor of teaching for character and academics, schools will have to be prepared for teaching more than advanced algebra.
Schleicher says, “Everywhere you look, there is a perfect mismatch between university graduates who can’t find a job and employers saying they can’t find the people with the skills they need,” he said. When he examined this more closely, the problem was not just a gap in STEM skills, or income inequality. “The skills mismatch is about the character dimension.”