I Wish My Teacher Knew

by Kyle Schwartz

  My hometown, Antofagasta, Chile, is a city trapped in a narrow line in between the desolate Atacama Desert and the Pacific Ocean. Our dusty city is filled with hard-working, honest people who are just as stoic as they are generous. It is also filled with a legacy of inequality left by decades of unjust practices in our educational system. In Chile, our schools are capable of providing students with a world-class education, yet we also have extremely high rates of segregation across social classes.

  In 2011, the disparity could be ignored no longer. As one reporter put it, there was an overwhelming “perception that Chile’s education system is grossly unfair—that it gives rich students access to some of the best schooling in Latin America while dumping poor pupils in shabby, underfunded state schools.” So, when I saw university students marching and protesting against this inequity in the streets, I knew I could not stand by and watch other people fight for my right to an education.

  My fellow classmates and I began organizing and marching in the streets as well. Though our education was nearly complete, we stood with conviction and demanded that future generations receive a quality education regardless of how rich or how poor their parents might be.

  Then, after much debate, a group of classmates and I made the difficult decision to occupy the school. We knew that it meant lessons would be temporarily stopped for students, but in the end we knew that by closing down the school, our cries for change would be heard.

  The occupation of our school was not a scene out of a spy movie. Student representatives even discussed our plans in advance with the director of the school. At night, some of my classmates went to the school and wove heavy chains around the doors and clasped them shut with padlocks. During the nights, about thirty students, including me, slept at the school. Each day, hundreds of students arrived on school grounds to attend meetings and help the cause.

  At times university students came to teach us about the economic and political pressures that caused the inequality our schools had been experiencing. They taught us about a citizen’s role in a democracy and made sure that we all understood the rights and responsibilities of this role. Other times we found creative ways to make our voices heard. Some of my classmates choreographed and performed dances in the central plaza to show our unity. Other times we discussed our dreams for our future and the future of our country.

  When the protest started, most of our teachers were critical. Some thought that we were wasting our time, that we had conflated ideas of the impact high school students could make. Others denounced us for halting the education of the younger students. We listened to their criticism and negotiated an arrangement to continue the occupation of the school while allowing space for younger students to attend their classes.

  This compromise earned us respect and support from most of our teachers. Some even marched with us. It was my history teacher who encouraged me the most. He urged me to face issues of inequality head-on. He told me it would take courage to change the educational realities for future generations, a sentiment I will carry with me always.

  In the end most of our demands were not met, but this does not mean we failed. We have not yet given up the fight. This whole experience taught me more than any of my school lessons could have. I took this opportunity to apply my academic skills to a worthy cause. I learned how to have meaningful dialogue, how to express my opinions, and how to listen critically to others. Most of all, I learned that a democracy requires action and sacrifice.

  I believe in the power of a voice. I believe in change and I believe in people. That is why, in just a few months, I will graduate from university and become a public school teacher. In this way, my fight for a better education for every child has just begun.

  Currently, there is no clear consensus on the impact formal character education programs have on student academics or student behavior. The Institute of Education Sciences, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Division of Violence Prevention in the National Center for Injury Prevention collaborated to write a 656-page report evaluating the impact of seven social and character development programs (SACD) over the course of three years. The report “did not yield evidence that the seven SACD programs improved student outcomes.”

  Another publication from Fresno State University reports: “Our research suggests that school goals and activities that are associated with good character education programs are also associated with academic achievement. Thus our results argue for maintaining a rich curriculum with support for all aspects of student development and growth.” And a 2013 article in the Atlantic stated: “Schools that teach character education report higher academic performance, improved attendance, reduced violence, fewer disciplinary issues, reduction in substance abuse, and less vandalism.”

  Character education should not be seen as a magical intervention that solves learning and behavior problems. Nor should we justify teaching our students to be positive members of society based on the ability to improve test scores.

  As a teacher I strive to model positive character traits and cultivate a supportive culture because it is the right thing to do. My students will grow up to become members of my community, and I want to live in society with people who are caring, hard-working, and resilient. As a state and federal character education advocate Linda McKay says, “I think it’s absolutely one of the most critical pieces for education, particularly in high-risk schools; if we don’t focus on creating a climate for learning and a classroom culture where students and faculty feel cared for and respected, we won’t get to the academics.”

  Character: An Academic Priority

  There is much discussion on how teaching character can predict future success in a student or lead to a student meeting a long-term goal like graduation from high school. This is all true, but we must also look at a more immediate benefit of teaching character education. As a third-grade teacher, it is not possible to teach my students academic content standards if I do not also develop an understanding of character strength, ethics, and values.

  Pure and simple, in order to read my students I need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of personal character. After all, the purpose of literature is to reflect humanity back on ourselves, to teach us lessons about our society and ourselves. In Colorado, our schools have adopted the Common Core State Standards, a move toward more rigorous instruction, which I wholeheartedly champion. We may think these standards are purely academic, but on a closer look, we see that knowledge that comes from character development runs throughout. Of the nine English Language Arts standards for reading literature in third grade, I see direct connections to character education in five.

  For example, my third-grade students need to describe the “traits, motivations, or feelings” of characters. In order to achieve that goal, my students first need to have knowledge of, and a vocabulary surrounding, character traits. When I cultivate a shared understanding of courage, determination, and honesty in my classroom, I teach not just the dictionary definition of those particular words. I also help develop the conceptual knowledge and an ability to describe a character in a story, or a person in their lives. Another key standard for my third-grade students is to “determine the central message, lesson, or moral” of a text. I help my students build that skill by intentionally discussing how people, both in real life and in books, overcome hardships and use strategies to solve problems.

  More rigorous standards have made developing empathy an academic requirement. My students need to understand that authors, like all people, have beliefs and attitudes. They need to recognize textual evidence that denotes an author’s feelings and opinions. When students are able to empathize, that meets another standard: to “distinguish their own point of view from that of the narrator or those of the characters.”

  I think of a guided reading lesson I recently taught. In order to understand the book, my students needed to read and decode the text, but they also needed to decipher that the main character’s actions were driven by j
ealousy and her motivation was to be accepted by her peers. Students discussed this and wrote an essay explaining how the author explored the themes of jealousy and friendship. They could not have done this if they were not able to empathize and analyze the integrity of the characters in the story.

  In My Classroom

  Luke Morlin, Sixth-Grade Teacher

  Our school can only be described as value-driven. Our six core values of respect, responsibility, integrity, courage, curiosity, and doing your best are embedded into everything we do as teachers and as students. We never waste an opportunity to teach character. It is in the books we select, the questions we ask, and even in the vocabulary we highlight. But this year I gained a whole new appreciation for how character education impacts our students.

  In the first few weeks of school, teaching my students brought on a new challenge. The students in my homeroom were more diverse than ever before. They were from widely differing economic and cultural backgrounds, had varying levels of academic preparedness, and in addition there was a new level of neurodiversity I had not experienced before.

  Our school had just opened a new center-based program to serve students who were impacted by autism, and three of these students were assigned to my homeroom class. As a school, our goal was to fully include these new students into our community and support them in doing rigorous academic work. Achieving this goal was challenging.

  These three students had varied experiences with authentic inclusion in elementary school. They were adjusting to learning in general education classrooms like mine, and I was still developing my ability to support them in the unique ways they needed. Due to this, a variety of different social behaviors were displayed in my classroom. One student in particular, Aiden, coped with his new environment by rolling on the floor, running around the room, and making loud noises at inappropriate times. Honestly, I was worried. I wanted Aiden to get the support he needed but I was also concerned that these behaviors would tear the classroom culture apart.

  To respond, I made a renewed effort to focus on teaching character strengths. We explicitly taught lessons on the meaning and necessity for equity and inclusion in our school. We read texts like Wonder by R. J. Palacio, a beautiful book with a strong message of tolerance and empathy.

  A major part of my approach was identifying students who could become leaders and model empathy and support for students like Aiden. I saw tremendous potential in Jamie. From day one, Jamie had shown an exceptional ability to encourage his peers, once even raising his hand to declare, “Mr. Morin, I think before we start this competition we should all decide to show respect and tell the other team they did a good job, no matter what.” Each time Jamie displayed strong character like this, I made a special effort to use his actions as an example for the class.

  As the year continued, I saw notable improvements in my homeroom class’s behavior. They were adjusting to the rigors of middle school and acting more cohesively, but it seemed that there was still a barrier holding students like Aiden back from participating fully in our community.

  One day something amazing happened. Our class was ending the day with our usual routine. Students formed a circle of blue plastic chairs, and one by one students gave each other “shout-outs,” where they acknowledged hard work or kindness they had observed from their classmates. Aiden, however, was on the floor in the back of the classroom, unwilling or unable to participate. Then Jamie made an announcement: “I would like to give Aiden a shout-out.”

  I seized this opportunity to engage Aiden and called to him, “Aiden there is a shout-out for you.” I was a little surprised when Aiden stood up, walked over to the group, and sat in a chair that had been waiting for him. Jamie told the whole class that he was proud of Aiden for doing his best on his math work. Aiden took this information in and then bluntly asked, “Does anyone else have a shout-out for me?” I eyed my students, wondering what this group of eleven- and twelve-year-olds would do. After a short silence, hands shot up. A chorus of compliments followed. From that day on, Aiden’s experience began to change at school. He increased the amount of time he was on task and was able to take more control over his disruptive behaviors.

  I was proud of my students. By including Aiden and encouraging him, they had taken ownership over the character traits I desperately wanted to instill. But it did not end there. As the year went on, my students’ strength of character was working in deep ways that I was not even aware of.

  I noticed one particular student beginning to struggle in school. Jiro was a diligent student, but lately he had seemed reserved and withdrawn. I could hardly blame him. As one of the few Muslim students in our school, the year, which had been filled with heated and discriminatory rhetoric from the media and pop culture, had been difficult for him.

  I made a point to check in with Jiro often. I wanted him to know that he had someone who would listen to his concerns and act as an ally for him. One day, Jiro opened up to me about the way some students had looked at him that made him feel uncomfortable. I asked Jiro if there were any students in our class who made him feel more secure. I never expected his response.

  Jiro told me that of all the students in our class, the one who had helped him the most was Aiden. Apparently one day, unsolicited, Aiden had walked over to Jiro and in the candid way that only Aiden could, said, “I want to tell you I know you’re not a terrorist.”

  “That really meant a lot to me,” Jiro explained. “I judged Aiden when I first met him, because he is different. But now I realize he is just a person. And I’m just a person. We are just people. That helps.”

  I had focused my efforts on getting the other students to make Aiden feel a part of our community, and in the end this empathy and respect resulted in Aiden being uniquely capable of making Jiro feel included. To me, that is the power of teaching our students to have strong values. In the best cases, the students themselves take the values over and demonstrate them in ways a teacher cannot dictate or imagine. You can’t measure or quantify this. It will not show up on a test result, but the evidence of strong character will be present in our community. After all, isn’t that the purpose of education?

  Character education and reading comprehension go hand in hand. The complex act of reading requires students to engage with characters in a book in the same way they interact with people in real life. At every level, students must be able to notice the character traits present or absent in the text. They must take note of thoughts and actions that imply a character’s emotions in order to make inferences about the character’s underlying motivations. These skills are developed when we intentionally develop a child’s emotional intelligence alongside their academic abilities. Quite frankly, character education is an academic priority not just for success in the future, but for success every day in my classroom.

  Integrated Character

  We teachers cannot spend a few minutes a day talking to our students about respect or integrity and think it is going to make a meaningful impact on them. Character education should not be merely a scheduled event; rather, character needs to be woven into every part of our school day.

  Good character needs to be part of our school culture and modeled in the way we treat our students and colleagues. This was a lesson learned from the Partnerships in Character Education State Pilot Projects. It was found that “collectively, the states reported that implementation must include the entire school community and be integrated throughout the entire school curriculum and culture.”

  Possibly the most vocal leader in integrating character education into public schools is David Levin, cofounder of KIPP Charter Schools. David’s unlikely collaboration with psychology professor Martin Seligman, professor Angela Duckworth, known for her work studying grit, and private school headmaster Dominic Randolph was profiled in a 2011 New York Times Magazine article. It described how the team worked to develop a comprehensive character education program that focused on a “set of strengths that were, according to the research, especially
likely to predict life satisfaction and high achievement.”

  Levin emphasizes a strategy in his schools where teachers explicitly discuss character during lessons. For example, English classes discuss the character strengths and weaknesses of the protagonists in the novels that the class is reading. This helps students recognize their own strengths and weaknesses.

  This is a great example of how character education is not just another thing that teachers need to find a way to fit into our already busy day; it is something that should be woven purposefully throughout our day, a sentiment echoed by many.

  Timothy Rusnak, a former professor and principal of Ben Franklin High, one of the highest-ranked schools in Louisiana, has stated that “students’ attention should be focused on the ethical dimensions of stories, the moral aspects of history, and applying the moral of a story to the student’s own life.” Bob Chase, the former president of the National Education Association (NEA), said, “We must make an explicit commitment to formal character education. We must integrate character education into the fabric of the curriculum and into extracurricular activities. We must train teachers in character education—both pre-service and in-service. And we must consciously set about creating a moral climate within our schools.”

  Making the decision to integrate character education consciously is important. The act of learning itself requires a strong character. Curiosity, perseverance, and resiliency are all requirements to acquiring knowledge. Take the time to be deliberate about character in each lesson, whether it is calling out specific character traits from a story or simply closing a lesson with a reflection on how well the school community’s values were demonstrated.