PRIMED for Character Education

Six Design Principles for School Improvement

Marvin W Berkowitz

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351030243
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

Winner of the 2023 Outstanding Book Award from AERA's Moral Development and Education SIG! In PRIMED for Character Education, renowned character educator Marvin W Berkowitz boils down decades of research on evidence-based practices and thought-provoking field experience into a clear set of principles that leaders, administrators, and teacher-leaders can implement to help students thrive.The author's original six-component framework offers a comprehensive guide to shaping purposeful learning environments, healthy relationships, core values and virtues, role models, empowerment, and long-term development in any PreK-12 school or district.This engaging and heartfelt book features tips for practice, anecdotes from award-winning schools, and straightforward tenets from moral education, social-emotional learning, and positive psychology.

Part I

Mapping the Terrain of Character Education

1

To the Point

A book should have a purpose. This book actually has more than one purpose. This book will be about kids, schools, families, human goodness, life’s lessons, adult culture, and much more. It will even include aphorisms for life, humor and jokes, magic and fairy dust, passion and humility, and pedagogical faith. We are going to cover a lot of turf.

But the most important and unifying purpose of the book is to shed light on how we can build a better world by understanding, committing to, and acting upon what is most effective in nurturing the flourishing of human goodness, especially in kids.

To do so, we will have to explore what we mean by human goodness, why it is important to nurture its development, and most centrally for this book, how we can best do that. We will be focusing on the knowing, the being, and doing of character and character education, as we shall see something that is often depicted as the head, heart, and hand of character. We will support the knowing (the head) of what we mean by character and its development and education. We will emphasize the ways we have to be (the heart) with each other and especially students to optimally nurture the flourishing of character. And we will emphasize what we have to do (the hand) as character educators.

To do all this, this book first examines what we mean by character, human goodness, and its development and flourishing. It is necessary to get some level of shared understanding about the central concepts of the book before we venture too far in exploring them and how we can practically make them happen.

Then the book will focus mostly on six big ideas. These ideas are Design Principles for how to nurture the development of human goodness, as well as other parts of human growth and academic learning. I use the acronym PRIMED as a memory aid for them, and I have limited it to just six big ideas to make it more manageable and memorable.

It was a surprise to me that this model has found its way to the core of most of my work with educators. They say they find it helpful and meaningful, and I find it a great way to help them understand what is really most fundamental, not just in character education but in education in general. Furthermore, I have discovered the synergy between such principles for educators and for parents in nurturing the flourishing of goodness in kids (and in people in general, for that matter). Happily, research confirms that what works in families works in schools—and vice versa. The Six Design Principles of PRIMED, which are essential fundamental principles with evidence-based practices, are as follows: Prioritizing character in the school; intentionally building healthy Relationships among all stakeholders; using Intrinsic motivators so students Internalize the core values of the school; Modeling the character you want students to develop; Empowering all stakeholders to be co-owners and co-authors of the journey; and taking a long-term Developmental perspective on the character goals and methods in the school.

As we move through each of the six PRIMED principles, we will take a deep dive into why each one is important, and, even more important, what each looks like in educational practice. Effective practice, grounded in deep understanding, is the heart of this book. My intent is to provide many concrete examples of effective practice, usually from exemplary practitioners who have been there and done it. Through these examples of the six PRIMED principles in action, I hope to inspire and equip educators to begin the daunting journey—or continue that journey if you’re already on it!—of personal, professional, and pedagogical transformation.

To Be or Not to Be

For Shakespeare, this was about living or dying, but for PRIMED, it is about how to live. How to be.

Although this book is about good educational practice, it is much more than an educational manual. It is also a set of guidelines for personal transformation. Many years ago, I realized that effectively supporting the flourishing of human goodness in schools (or families, or anywhere for that matter) is first of all a matter of “being” and then a matter of doing. Parker Palmer emphasized that what we do must flow from our inner core, in other words our character. That character, that “being,” not only guides our practice; it is part of our practice. Our doing comes from who we are, our being. Who we are directly impacts those around us.

In my character-focused work with schools, parents, and communities, I find myself saying more and more often, “Character education is a way of being.” My friend and colleague Charles Elbot, co-author of Building an intentional school culture and an exemplary character educator and educational leader, heard me say that and observed that this is a very Buddhist perspective (Charles is a Buddhist). Charles also pointed me to a set of wonderful quotes from Parker Palmer about “being,” quotes worth sharing with you here. In an interview with L.J. Rittenhouse, Palmer said, “Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do” and “Education at its best calls us to make an inner journey, not only so we can live better lives, but also to have greater life-giving impact on the world around us.” He also has said, “We all know that what will transform education is not another theory, another book, or another formula but educators who are willing to seek a transformed way of being in the world.” Therefore, this “one more book” will be a success only if it helps educators transform their ways of being. This new way of being, coupled with deeper knowing, leads to a new way of doing. All too often, people want to jump right to new ways of doing. They do this by asking for methods, curricula, lesson plans, and programs for character education. In essence, they skip right past the critical task of changing oneself as an educator, that is, of transforming one’s way of being as foundational to effectively doing.

There is an intimate connection between being and doing to be sure. Aristotle argued that transforming habits (doing) early in life creates the foundation for the later development of virtues (being).

Confucius had a somewhat different but clearly related idea about the relation of being and doing. Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, in their book The Path, argue, “We must become aware that breaking from our normal ways of being is what makes it possible to develop different sides of ourselves.” This is the path to seeing ourselves “as malleable” (having a growth mindset about ourselves). Confucius even offers a strategy for doing this. We need to be self-reflective and see our current patterns of behavior (especially very minor ones) and then actively work to change those simple patterns by creating better “rituals.” In fact, goodness for Confucius was how we be and do with others. According to Puett and Gross-Loh,

Confucian goodness is not something you can define in the abstract. It’s the ability to respond well to others; the development of the sensibility that enables you to behave in ways that are good for those around you and draw out their own better sides.

What a great definition of character education! Character education is how we be with others and then what we do as a consequence, in order to nurture the flourishing of their human goodness. Ideally, our inner character informs our outward living, and our outward living both represents and reciprocally transforms our inner being.

Finally, as a Catholic friend pointed out, this emphasis on who we are “on the inside” as the wellspring of what we do on the outside is also fundamental to the Judeo-Christian view of the human person. Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, writes: “You don’t become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something.” In the Gospels, Jesus reserved his harshest words for those religious leaders of his day whose pious external actions were done to impress and lord it over others, not out of love of God or neighbor. Christ likened these religious hypocrites to cups that were clean on the outside but filthy on the inside. By contrast, acts of true goodness and holiness come from “the store of goodness” within a person.

All of this is about more than teaching kids in schools. It is a path for living. My friend and colleague Mike Park is the founder of WeBe Schools—a character education program that relies heavily on PRIMED—and is now also the CEO of CharacterPlus, a character education professional development organization in St. Louis Missouri. He has said that he uses PRIMED as a daily meditation for personal improvement, which is much more than I ever envisioned for it.

So the point here is not to artificially separate “being” and “doing” but to call attention to their relationship. As we’ll see throughout the book, that relationship is bidirectional and dynamic. Our being—who we are on the inside, our hearts and minds, our character—clearly affects our doing. Our doing, in turn, has the potential to transform our being. Character education interventions can capitalize on this bidirectional interaction. Give self-centered teenagers real responsibilities in a face-to-face service learning project where they can see and feel how they are making a difference in the life of a needy child or a vulnerable senior citizen and that experience can, for those teens, change their sense of efficacy, sense of purpose, and moral identity—the very core of their being.

Because character education is first a way of being and then a way of doing—of living our lives—becoming an effective character educator entails changing our way of being, that is, changing who we are and how we engage the world, especially our schools and the kids and adults within them. So, let us look at two metaphors for education and character development and how they fit or do not fit with this notion of education as a way of doing that flows from being and is built upon deep knowing.

Mechanistic vs. Organismic Metaphors

Often we do not pay close enough attention to what comes out of our mouths. Sometimes our words misrepresent (knowingly or not) how we really think and/or how we tend to act. Other times those words reveal how we think about things whether we are aware of it or not. We will come back to the former problem later.

Now I will focus on a specific contrast in how we can talk about and think about children, human development, and education, whether for character or for anything else. I use the notions of organic vs. mechanical concepts, metaphors, and terminology. So much of what we say and do in education is framed in terms of mechanics. We teach. We transfer knowledge. We control behavior. We manage classrooms. We engineer school change. And so on.

Instead, I want to hear us talking about and enacting more organic processes. We should nurture learning and development. We should foster understanding and human flourishing. We should educate for character. Humans are organic entities. Organic wholes, not machines. Human learning and development are better seen through an organic framework and not a mechanical one.

Nor are kids isolated beings. They are embedded in all sorts of interacting social systems: Families, classrooms, grade levels, friendships, peer reference groups, clubs, teams, youth organizations, faith communities, etc. We need to understand these organic systems to which they belong and how those social ecologies function if we want to maximize their power to support the flourishing of human goodness in children, along with their academic learning. When a kid is not “working” right, we cannot simply find the defective part and replace it. We have to look at the totality of that young person’s nature and life circumstances and find ways to add nourishment that are likely to lead to a better organic dynamic.

When my son was struggling in adolescence, I realized that what my wife and I were doing was assuming that there was a mechanical “fix.” I acted as if there was a large wall covered with an array of knobs, levers, buttons, and dials, each representing some mechanical act we could do, such as changing what we say, creating contingencies for his behavior, teaching him, etc. As a consequence, our job as parents became trying every one and every possible combination of them, believing that eventually we would stumble on the right mechanical solution—flip the right combination of switches while turning the right combination of dials and pushing the right buttons—and all my son’s challenges would immediately be solved. What worked was discovering that there was no such quick fix. He had to grow and take at least shared ownership of his challenges. This was part of a complex family (and extra-familiar) dynamic. An organic one. We had to continue to love him. We had to let him know we were there for him. We had to set limits and enforce them. We had to listen. We had to be patient. He had to mature.

There was no mechanical fix, but there was an organic one, because he is not a machine.

Schools make the mechanical mistake all the time. They look for a set of lessons, a curriculum, an assembly on bullying or some other special event that will “teach” character. As we will discover later, this is not how character develops.

Design Thinking

Paul Houston, former Executive Director of the American Association for School Administrators, once said, “Schools are perfectly designed for the results we are getting. If we don’t like the results, we need to redesign schools.” You can simply swap out the word classrooms for the word schools. The gist of this is that, if we want to redesign schools or classrooms, we have to first redesign ourselves … our way of being. As David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and author, wrote, “Social transformation follows personal transformation.” It means looking in the mirror and figuring out how you have to be different; and then strategically working to make it happen. That is both daunting and difficult to do. My hope is that this book will help.

One way of helping with that self-design challenge is to provide you with a set of aphorisms that I have found to be not only useful but also critical to overcoming the many challenges of becoming an effective agent for nurturing the flourishing of goodness in kids. In a sense, you have already encountered one. Understanding that character educatio...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part I Mapping the Terrain of Character Education
• Part II PRIMED Principle 1 : Prioritization
• Part III PRIMED Principle 2: Relationships
• Part IV PRIMED Principle 3: Intrinsic Motivation (Internalization)
• Part V PRIMED Principle 4: Modeling
• Part VI PRIMED Principle 5: Empowerment
• Part VII PRIMED Principle 6: Developmental Pedagogy
• Part VIII Final Thoughts