New Lesson Plans Enhance Three R's; Character-building increasingly is becoming part of the curriculum in U.S. schools as educators strive to mold both the hearts and minds of American young people

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 30, 2003

High schools that have made a positive difference in intellectual and ethical development have used work-based learning programs and learning while doing community-service programs, says Lickona. They've also experimented with leadership training, peer mediation, cooperative learning, participatory student government and character-centered extracurricular programs, all underlining the students' shared sense of community and the fourth and fifth R's respect and responsibility.

This comprehensive, broad, all-of-life approach is shared by colleges that concentrate on character education, such as the aforementioned Bridgewater College and the College of the Ozarks.

At Bridgewater all 1,400 students must keep what's called a Personal Development Portfolio (PDP) during their four years at the school. It's not a daily journal of the random thoughts and enthusiasms every student has, but "an ongoing, evolving process," Dean of Students Bob Andersen tells Insight, that causes each student to focus on his or her development in four areas: intellectual discovery and imagination, emotional and physical wellness, ethical and spiritual development, and citizenship and community responsibility.

Freshmen take a three-credit course that guides them on keeping the portfolio. It includes readings such as physicist

Richard Feynman's "Meaning of It All" and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." The PDP, says Andersen, is like the portfolio an artist keeps of the work he wants to show the world and be identified with, a record of his efforts to hone his craft, a visible display of his progress. The course also helps students learn to ask the "right questions" about the growth they must register in the portfolio. They attend a "Service Learning Fair" that offers opportunities for community work and write a five- to eight-page "Personal Reflective Essay."

All four years they discuss their portfolio at regular intervals with their faculty advisers. To graduate, their PDP must meet with faculty approval and, if students haven't grown in the four areas during their stay at Bridgewater, they don't graduate.

The purpose, explains Anderson, "is to have students seek out experiences and reflect on them," and to see themselves moving from the young and incomplete adults who arrived on campus into mature adults of strong character, intellectual probity and with a strong sense of community responsibility. Bridgewater's portfolio program is unusual and fairly new, dating from 1995.

At few colleges is character education so naturally ingrained in everyday campus life as at the College of the Ozarks, whose students number between 1,400 and 1,500. All students at the college work at campus jobs 15 hours a week, with 40-hour weeks over "holidays" such as Christmas and Easter. Many also hold additional jobs at the nearby tourist center of Branson, Mo. "Here you don't see students lying around on the ground working on their tans or throwing Frisbees," Ozarks Director of Public Relations Camille Howell tells Insight. "Here work is a continuing factor of life."