positive education for the future
it aims at the promotion of a core set of
universally acknowledged (cosmopolitan)
virtues and values.
Key Principles
• Character is educable and its progress can
be measured holistically, not only through
self-reports but also more objective
research methods.
• Character is important: it contributes to
human and societal flourishing.
• Character is largely caught through rolemodelling and emotional contagion:
school culture and ethos are therefore
essential.
• Character should also be taught: direct
teaching of character provides the
rationale, language and tools to use in
developing character elsewhere in and
out of school.
• Character is the foundation for improved
attainment, better behaviour and
increased employability.
• Character should be developed in
partnership with parents, employers and
other community organisations.
• Character education is about fairness
and each child has a right to character
development.
• Character education empowers students
and is liberating.
• Character demonstrates a readiness to
learn from others.
• Character promotes democratic
citizenship.
The Research Project
Given our underpinning philosophy we
wanted to access more than the pupil’s
own descriptions of their characters. We
decided that the best way to achieve this was
by taking data from a number of different
sources. This triangulation approach applies
most to our work in secondary schools where
we are gathering data about Year 10 pupils
from three sources: moral dilemmas; selfreporting; and teacher reports. Our moral
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dilemmas target the three virtues of honesty,
courage and self-discipline with each being
measured by one dilemma or story. Pupils
are invited to choose from a list of options
about what the protagonist in the dilemma
or story ought to do and then they must
choose which reasons for acting are best and
worst from another list of options. The idea
is that the story draws them into the three
situations and that they respond in a way
that engages at least their moral reasoning
and probably a lot more such as the kind
of moral action they are inclined to take in
real situations. These results are compared
against the pupils’ responses to a “Values-InAction” survey measuring their self-reported
character strengths, especially the same
three qualities measured by our dilemmas.
Additionally, teachers of the same pupils are
asked to report the virtues they notice most
and least among the same pupils surveyed,
though of course there are no reports on
individual pupils.
All sorts of different comparisons are possible
from this design, especially between how the
pupils rate themselves, how they respond to
moral dilemmas and what the teacher’s think
of them as a group in regard to the specific
virtues. Additionally, because we have used
or adapted already existing measures for
our dilemmas and self-reporting, it will be
possible to make important international
comparisons with existing data banks. All
these kinds of variations can be checked too
against different types of school, different
geographical dynamics and in relation to the
ways that teachers tell us they are developing
character (or not) in their schools.
In primary schools, we are mostly interested
in talking to teachers about how they
develop children’s characters. This involves
asking about the following themes (the
same themes apply also to interviews with
secondary school teachers):
• their role in developing character in
children;
• their sense of autonomy to develop
children morally;