The Character Conundrum

How to Develop Confidence, Independence and Resilience in the Classroom

Matt Lloyd-Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351745574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Character Conundrum is a practical guide for developing confidence, independence and resilience in primary and secondary classrooms. Tackling the hotly-contested question of what role schools can play in developing 'character', the book untangles the big debates in this area and outlines how teachers can support their pupils to develop the skills and mindsets that will help them to thrive academically.

Based on a combination of ground-level investigations and academic research, the book offers a simple, evidence-based approach that can be implemented at every level of school life. The key to this approach is being deliberate and consistent: knowing which mindsets, skills and habits you're trying to develop, and planning the details of your classroom culture, relationships, routines and instruction so that they align and combine to address your aims. When you do this, the author contends, seemingly minor changes to your practice can have a major effect on pupils. The book contains a step-by-step guide to bringing this approach to life in your classroom, including a framework of pupil outcomes, a flowchart of teacher actions, classroom case studies and a wealth of tried-and-tested strategies from primary and secondary schools across the UK.

A lack of confidence, independence and resilience is a major barrier to learning for many pupils and dilutes other efforts that schools make to support them. The Character Conundrum argues that teachers can help pupils develop these characteristics in any school context and illustrates how they can do so within and through their day to day teaching. Written with passion and clarity, it will be essential reading for primary and secondary teachers, as well as policy makers with an interest in 'character', grit and resilience, and any education professionals committed to giving students greater ownership of their learning and setting them up to succeed.

1
Our aims for pupils

Word problems

Given the clear consensus that certain basic mindsets and skills underpin academic success, and that they are in short supply for many young people, it’s surprising how little agreement there is around what to call this set of aims and how to talk about them. Read around the subject and you encounter an impressive variety of competing, seemingly interchangeable, labels: non-cognitive skills, non-cognitive factors, non-academic skills, soft skills, life skills, success skills, social and emotional skills, performance virtues, academic tenacity, character traits, character skills, character strengths, and often just character. Of all of them, ‘character’ and ‘non-cognitive skills’ lead the pack, and yet neither of these two, nor any of the others, quite work. In this area, the terminology itself is a conundrum, more often clouding than clarifying meaning, and perhaps this is why there are so many terms in circulation, and why fresh alternatives are constantly being coined.

Does it matter which words we use? We get the gist, and perhaps the imprecisions of ‘character’ and ‘non-cognitive skills’ are preferable to semantic nit-picking. And yet, there are real problems with some of this language, problems that impede and distort our communication. As the critic Raymond Williams put it, many concepts cannot ‘really be thought through, and some of them […] cannot even be focused on unless we are conscious of the words as elements of the problems.’¹

Perhaps the big villain here is ‘character’, with its overtones of Victorian sturdiness and stiff upper lips. ‘The trouble is character sounds very moralistic’, says Professor James Heckman. ‘It sounds like we’re running a Sunday School.’² Nevertheless, Heckman suggests we stick with it, as do Richard Reeves and Joanna Venator, authors with Kimberly Howard of the 2014 report, ‘The Character Factor.’ ‘Don’t back away from using the term character, which is the clearest overall label: just be specific what you mean when you talk about it.’³Their desire to cling to the term is understandable, but unfortunately the word is tinged with the upper-class values of a different age – an uncomfortable resonance in discussions about the education of children from the poorest backgrounds today. This resonance is all the more unfortunate because it occasionally leads to the mistaken assumption that academics and policymakers are accusing the poorest young people of lacking character and grittiness in a more general sense, and to retorts that growing up in adversity gives a person far more character than sitting in a comfortable office. Distracting arguments of this kind are one consequence of inapt terminology.

An even more serious issue with the word character is the air of immutability it communicates. The general impression that the word ‘character’ conveys is that you’ve got it or you haven’t. Heckman suggests the term ‘character skills’ (as opposed to traits) to suggest malleability. Reeves and Venator suggest ‘character strengths’. But these modifiers don’t sufficiently distance us from the idea that your character is something you’re born with, or from the idea that character refers to a person’s whole personality, not a specific subset of mindsets and skills. Given the broader meaning of the term character in general parlance, it’s understandable that some people become wary when they hear talk of ‘character development’ in schools and imagine something closer to brain washing than confidence building. All in all, then, ‘character’ provokes an array of unhelpful associations and leads us down a variety of argumentative cul de sacs. We’re not talking about meddling with the essence of someone’s being or imposing upper-class values on working-class children; we’re talking about helping young people develop a range of basic skills and mindsets, which are essential for their success in school and beyond. The word character does not communicate this simply or clearly enough.

‘Non-cognitive skills’, ostensibly more neat and scientific, is not much better. Many psychologists have rubbished the term, describing it as nonsensical at best and dangerously misleading at worst. The University of Chicago literature review puts it like this:

[W]e find “noncognitive” to be an unfortunate word. It reinforces a false dichotomy between what comes to be perceived as weightier, more academic “cognitive” factors and what by comparison becomes perceived as a separate category of fluffier “noncognitive” or “soft” skills. As others have pointed out, contrasting cognitive and noncognitive factors can be confusing because “few aspects of human behavior are devoid of cognition” […] How could one’s study skills, for example, not be part of a cognitive process?⁴

There is simply no such thing as a ‘non-cognitive skill’; all of our skills are the product of cognition. And, as such, this term encourages unhelpful ways of talking to pupils about how they think and learn, and encourages teachers to fence off the acquisition of academic knowledge from the acquisition of the skills and mindsets that underpin academic learning. For Reeves, Venator and Howard, the problem is the breadth and unspecificity of this term: ‘The problem is that it is too broad, lumping together a very wide range of skills, traits and attributes – from stable aspects of personality through to everyday social skills.’⁵

And so, both ‘character’ and ‘non-cognitive skills’, the two most common labels for these skills and mindsets, have serious flaws. For this reason, people working on this area tend either to use them with caveats, or to invent new terms of their own. Neither approach is ideal and it may be time to call off the search for a single overarching label. Instead, I’d propose naming the specific outcomes we’re interested in: confidence, independence and resilience. Although these are still umbrella terms, they are more focused and transparent than most of the designations listed above.

Value judgements

Before defining confidence, independence and resilience and diving into our aims for pupils in more detail, it’s worth pausing to consider how they fit within the broader spectrum of aims we might have for a young person’s education. One of the chief criticisms of the character and non-cognitive skills debate is how narrow, mechanistic, even self-centred, outcomes like confidence, independence and resilience can seem. Don’t we want to foster good citizens with strong values? Why aren’t we talking about gratitude, generosity, humility and compassion as well?

In a review of David Brooks’s 2015 book The Road to Character, Rowan Williams made an impassioned case against ‘the bland managerialism that is replacing discussion about the core values of our educational system’. We may wish young people to have self-control and resilience, Williams continues, but our vision for young people should not be ‘a style of living that accepts limits and deferrals’ but rather ‘the kind of vision that makes sense of limits and deferrals, that would make struggle and frustration worthwhile.’ In other words, unless we support pupils to consider what is worth struggling for in life, rather than simply teaching them how to persevere and be self-controlled, our educational philosophy risks becoming ‘functionalist and reductive’. ‘“Character” without solidarity, and so without compassion and a principled universal perspective on human dignity,’ Williams concludes, ‘can be yet another stalking horse for self-regard and self-protection.’⁶

These are wise words and it’s true that the qualities most often discussed in the current conversations about character and non-cognitive skills tend to be functional and performance-related: skills and mindsets that underpin individual effort and perseverance, rather than moral values or virtues that involve looking outward. There are, however, good reasons for the narrowness of this discussion. The first is that a lack of certain functional mindsets, skills and habits is preventing many pupils from learning successfully; we urgently need to understand this area better and ensure that all pupils can approach learning and life with confidence, independence and resilience. A second reason is that focusing on these non-negotiable mindsets and skills doesn’t negate the importance of other qualities and values, or suggest that schools don’t have an important responsibility in that regard too. Needless to say, decency, generosity, humility and gratitude will shape the way in which more functional skills and mindsets are employed.

This book is specifically focused on how to support pupils, especially pupils from the poorest backgrounds, to overcome a particular, and particularly pervasive, barrier to learning. But the book’s tight scope should not be read as a statement that these are the only personal qualities that matter for young people. Bigger questions of values, citizenship and a life well lived should be at the heart of every child’s education, defined and debated by families, schools and communities together.

Confidence, independence and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Cast list
• Introduction
• This book at a glance
• 1 Our aims for pupils
• 2 Developing confidence, independence and resilience in the classroom
• 3 Case study: Lian, year 2
• 4 Case study: Kayleigh, year 9 French
• 5 Knowing where you’re going
• 6 Creating the right conditions
• 7 Building new habits
• 8 Learning from other phases and subjects
• 9 Exploring the evidence
• Conclusion
• Further reading
• Index
• Acknowledgements