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Thoughts for our first meeting: what set of skills and concepts can unify our curriculum?

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What is the Teacher's Role in the Classroom? (YT Video)

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National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

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What is the Teacher's Role in the Classroom?

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What if the Secret to Success is Failure?

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What if the Secret to Success is Failure?

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Randolph has been pondering throughout his 23-year career as an educator the question of whether and how schools should impart good character. It has often felt like a lonely quest, but it has led him in some interesting directions. In the winter of 2005, Randolph read "Learned Optimism," a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement. Randolph found the book intriguing, and he arranged a meeting with the author. As it happened, on the morning that Randolph made the trip to Philadelphia, Seligman had scheduled a separate meeting with David Levin, the co-founder of the KIPP network of charter schools and the superintendent of the KIPP schools in New York City. Seligman decided he might as well combine the two meetings, and he invited Christopher Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who was also visiting Penn that day, to join him and Randolph and Levin in his office for a freewheeling discussion of psychology and schooling.

Levin had also spent many years trying to figure out how to provide lessons in character to his students, who were almost all black or Latino and from low-income families. At the first KIPP school, in Houston, he and his co-founder, Michael Feinberg, filled the walls with slogans like "Work Hard" and "Be Nice" and "There Are No Shortcuts," and they developed a system of rewards and demerits designed to train their students not only in fractions and algebra but also in perseverance and empathy. Like Randolph, Levin went to Seligman's office expecting to talk about optimism. But Seligman surprised them both by pulling out a new and very different book, which he and Peterson had just finished: "Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification," a scholarly, 800-page tome that weighed in at three and a half pounds. It was intended, according to the authors, as a "manual of the sanities," an attempt to inaugurate what they described as a "science of good character."

It was, in other words, exactly what Randolph and Levin had been looking for, separately, even if neither of them had quite known it. Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.

In most societies, Seligman and Peterson wrote, these strengths were considered to have a moral valence, and in many cases they overlapped with religious laws and strictures. But their true importance did not come from their relationship to any system of ethics or moral laws but from their practical benefit: cultivating these strengths represented a reliable path to "the good life," a life that was not just happy but also meaningful and fulfilling.

Six years after that first meeting, Levin and Randolph are trying to put this conception of character into action in their schools. In the process, they have found themselves wrestling with questions that have long confounded not just educators but anyone trying to nurture a thriving child or simply live a good life. What is good character? Is it really something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience? Which qualities matter most for a child trying to negotiate his way to a successful and autonomous adulthood? And are the answers to those questions the same in Harlem and in Riverdale?

Levin had believed in the importance of character since KIPP's inception. But on the day of his trip to see Seligman, he was feeling a new urgency about the subject. Six years earlier, in 1999, the first group of students to enter KIPP Academy middle school, which Levin founded and ran in the South Bronx, triumphed on the eighth-grade citywide achievement test, graduating with the highest scores in the Bronx and the fifth-highest in all of New York City. Every morning of middle school they passed a giant sign in the stairwell reminding them of their mission: "Climb the Mountain to College." And as they left KIPP for high school, they seemed poised to do just that: not only did they have outstanding academic results, but most of them also won admission to highly selective private and Catholic schools, often with full scholarships.

But as Levin told me when we spoke last fall, for many students in that first cohort, things didn't go as planned. "We thought, O.K., our first class was the fifth-highest-performing class in all of New York City," Levin said. "We got 90 percent into private and parochial schools. It's all going to be solved. But it wasn't." Almost every member of the cohort did make it through high school, and more than 80 percent of them enrolled in college. But then the mountain grew steeper, and every few weeks, it seemed, Levin got word of another student who decided to drop out. According to a report that KIPP issued last spring, only 33 percent of students who graduated from a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college. That rate is considerably better than the 8 percent of children from low-income families who currently complete college nationwide, and it even beats the average national rate of college completion for all income groups, which is 31 percent. But it still falls well short of KIPP's stated goal: that 75 percent of KIPP alumni will graduate from a four-year college, and 100 percent will be prepared for a stable career.

As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class. Those skills weren't enough on their own to earn students a B.A., Levin knew. But for young people without the benefit of a lot of family resources, without the kind of safety net that their wealthier peers enjoyed, they seemed an indispensable part of making it to graduation day.

What appealed to Levin about the list of character strengths that Seligman and Peterson compiled was that it was presented not as a finger-wagging guilt trip about good values and appropriate behavior but as a recipe for a successful and happy life. He was wary of the idea that KIPP's aim was to instill in its students "middle-class values," as though well-off kids had some depth of character that low-income students lacked. "The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach," he told me, "is it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment."

Still, neither Levin nor Dominic Randolph had a clear vision of how to turn an 800-page psychology text into a practical program. After that first meeting in Seligman's office, Levin and Randolph kept in touch, calling and e-mailing, swapping articles and Web links, and they soon discovered that they shared a lot of ideas and interests, despite the very different school environments in which they worked. They decided to join forces, to try to tackle the mysteries of character together, and they turned for help to Angela Duckworth, who at the time was a graduate student in Seligman's department (she is now an assistant professor). Duckworth came to Penn in 2002 at the age of 32, after working for a decade as a teacher and a charter-school consultant. When she applied to the Ph.D. program at Penn, she wrote in her application essay that her experiences in schools had given her "a distinctly different view of school reform" than the one she started out with in her 20s. "The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves," she wrote. "Here's why: learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying - but it is also often daunting, exhausting and sometimes discouraging. . . . To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect."

Duckworth's early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students' grade-point averages than their I.Q.'s. But while self-control seemed to be a critical ingredient in attaining basic success, Duckworth came to feel it wasn't as relevant when it came to outstanding achievement. People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word "grit."

She developed a test to measure grit, which she called the Grit Scale. It is a deceptively simple test, in that it requires you to rate yourself on just 12 questions, from "I finish whatever I begin" to "I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one." It takes about three minutes to complete, and it relies entirely on self-report - and yet when Duckworth took it out into the field, she found it was remarkably predictive of success. At Penn, high grit ratings allowed students with relatively low college-board scores to nonetheless achieve high G.P.A.'s. Duckworth and her collaborators gave their grit test to more than 1,200 freshman cadets as they entered West Point and embarked on the grueling summer training course known as Beast Barracks. The military has developed its own complex evaluation, called the Whole Candidate Score, to judge incoming cadets and predict which of them will survive the demands of West Point; it includes academic grades, a gauge of physical fitness and a Leadership Potential Score. But at the end of Beast Barracks, the more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted and which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth's 12-item grit questionnaire.

Levin and Randolph asked Duckworth to use the new methods and tools she was developing to help them investigate the question of character at KIPP and Riverdale, and she and a handful of Penn graduate students began making regular treks from Philadelphia to New York. The first question Duckworth addressed, again, was the relative importance of I.Q. and self-control. She and her team of researchers gave middle-school students at Riverdale and KIPP a variety of psychological and I.Q. tests. They found that at both schools, I.Q. was the better predictor of scores on statewide achievement tests, but measures of self-control were more reliable indicators of report-card grades.

Duckworth's research convinced Levin and Randolph that they should try to foster self-control and grit in their students. Yet those didn't seem like the only character strengths that mattered. The full list of 24, on the other hand, felt too unwieldy. So they asked Peterson if he could narrow the list down to a more manageable handful, and he identified a set of strengths that were, according to his research, especially likely to predict life satisfaction and high achievement. After a few small adjustments (Levin and Randolph opted to drop love in favor of curiosity), they settled on a final list: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.

Over the course of the next year and a half, Duckworth worked with Levin and Randolph to turn the list of seven strengths into a two-page evaluation, a questionnaire that could be completed by teachers or parents, or by students themselves. For each strength, teachers suggested a variety of "indicators," much like the questions Duckworth asked people to respond to on her grit questionnaire, and she road-tested several dozen of them at Riverdale and KIPP. She eventually settled on the 24 most statistically reliable ones, from "This student is eager to explore new things" (an indicator of curiosity) to "This student believes that effort will improve his or her future" (optimism).

For Levin, the next step was clear. Wouldn't it be cool, he mused, if each student graduated from school with not only a G.P.A. but also a C.P.A., for character-point average? If you were a college-admissions director or a corporate human-resources manager selecting entry-level employees, wouldn't you like to know which ones scored highest in grit or optimism or zest? And if you were a parent of a KIPP student, wouldn't you want to know how your son or daughter stacked up next to the rest of the class in character as well as in reading ability? As soon as he got the final list of indicators from Duckworth and Peterson, Levin started working to turn it into a specific, concise assessment that he could hand out to students and parents at KIPP's New York City schools twice a year: the first-ever character report card.

Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. "I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character," he explained to me one afternoon. "With my school's specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you're going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don't want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that's where we ended up."

Still, he did think that the inventory Duckworth and Peterson developed could be a useful tool in communicating with students about character. And so he has been taking what one Riverdale teacher described as a "viral approach" to spreading the idea of this new method of assessing character throughout the Riverdale community. He talks about character at parent nights, asks pointed questions in staff meetings, connects like-minded members of his faculty and instructs them to come up with new programs. Last winter, Riverdale students in the fifth and sixth grades took the 24-indicator survey, and their teachers rated them as well. The results were discussed by teachers and administrators, but they weren't shared with students or parents, and they certainly weren't labeled a "report card."

As I spent time at Riverdale last year, it became apparent to me that the debate over character at the school wasn't just about how best to evaluate and improve students' character. It went deeper, to the question of what "character" really meant. When Randolph arrived at Riverdale, the school already had in place a character-education program, of a sort. Called CARE, for Children Aware of Riverdale Ethics, the program was adopted in 1989 in the lower school, which at Riverdale means prekindergarten through fifth grade. It is a blueprint for niceness, mandating that students "Treat everyone with respect" and "Be aware of other people's feelings and find ways to help those whose feelings have been hurt." Posters in the hallway remind students of the virtues related to CARE ("Practice Good Manners . . . Avoid Gossiping . . . Help Others"). In the lower school, many teachers describe it as a proud and essential part of what makes Riverdale the school that it is.

When I asked Randolph last winter about CARE, he was diplomatic. "I see the character strengths as CARE 2.0," he explained. "I'd basically like to take all of this new character language and say that we're in the next generation of CARE."

In fact, though, the character-strength approach of Seligman and Peterson isn't an expansion of programs like CARE; if anything, it is a repudiation of them. In 2008, a national organization called the Character Education Partnership published a paper that divided character education into two categories: programs that develop "moral character," which embodies ethical values like fairness, generosity and integrity; and those that address "performance character," which includes values like effort, diligence and perseverance. The CARE program falls firmly on the "moral character" side of the divide, while the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin have chosen for their schools lean much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence and curiosity aren't particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi.

The two teachers Randolph has chosen to oversee the school's character initiative are K.C. Cohen, the guidance counselor for the middle and upper schools, and Karen Fierst, a learning specialist in the lower school. Cohen is friendly and thoughtful, in her mid-30s, a graduate of Fieldston, the private school just down the road from Riverdale. She is intensely interested in character development, and like Randolph, she is worried about the character of Riverdale students. But she is not yet entirely convinced by the seven character strengths that Riverdale has ostensibly chosen. "When I think of good character, I think: Are you fair? Are you honest in dealings with other people? Are you a cheater?" she told me. "I don't think so much about: Are you tenacious? Are you a hard worker? I think, Are you a good person?"

Cohen's vision of character is much closer to "moral character" than "performance character," and so far, that vision remains the dominant one at Riverdale. When I spent a day at the school in March, sitting in on a variety of classes and meetings, messages about behavior and values permeated the day, but those messages stayed almost entirely in the moral dimension. It was a hectic day at the middle school - it was pajama day, plus there was a morning assembly, and then on top of that, the kids in French class who were going on the two-week trip to Bordeaux for spring break had to leave early in order to make their overnight flight to Paris. The topic for the assembly was heroes, and a half-dozen students stood up in front of their classmates - about 350 kids, in all - and each made a brief presentation about a particular hero he or she had chosen: Ruby Nell Bridges, the African-American girl who was part of the first group to integrate the schools in New Orleans in 1960; Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor whose self-immolation helped spark the recent revolt in that country; the actor and activist Paul Robeson.

In the assembly, in classes and in conversations with different students, I heard a lot of talk about values and ethics, and the values that were emphasized tended to be social values: inclusion, tolerance, diversity. (I heard a lot more about black history at Riverdale than I did at the KIPP schools I visited.) One eighth-grade girl I asked about character said that for her and her friends, the biggest issue was inclusion - who was invited to whose bat mitzvah; who was being shunned on Facebook. Character, as far as I could tell, was being defined at Riverdale mostly in terms of helping other people - or at least not hurting their feelings.

Randolph told me that he had concerns about a character program that comprised only those kind of nice-guy values. "The danger with character is if you just revert to these general terms - respect, honesty, tolerance - it seems really vague," he said. "If I stand in front of the kids and just say, 'It's really important for you to respect each other,' I think they glaze over. But if you say, 'Well, actually you need to exhibit self-control,' or you explain the value of social intelligence - this will help you collaborate more effectively - then it seems a bit more tangible."

When I spoke to Karen Fierst, the teacher who was overseeing the character project for the Riverdale lower school, she said she was worried that it would be a challenge to convince the students and their parents that there was anything in the 24 character strengths that might actually benefit them. For KIPP kids, she said, the notion that character could help them get through college was a powerful lure, one that would motivate them to take the strengths seriously. For kids at Riverdale, though, there was little doubt that they would graduate from college. "It will just happen," Fierst explained. "It happened to every generation in their family before them. And so it's harder to get them to invest in this idea. For KIPP students, learning these strengths is partly about trying to demystify what makes other people successful - kind of like, 'We're letting you in on the secret of what successful people are like.' But kids here already live in a successful community. They're not depending on their teachers to give them the information on how to be successful."

At KIPP Infinity middle school, which occupies one floor of a school on West 133rd Street, across from the M.T.A.'s giant Manhattanville bus depot, report-card night last winter fell on a cold Thursday at the beginning of February. Report-card night is always a big deal at KIPP schools - parents are strongly urged to attend, and at Infinity, almost all of them do - but this particular evening carried an extra level of anxiety for both the administrators and the parents, because students were receiving their very first character report cards, and no one knew quite what to expect.

Logistically, the character report card had been a challenge to pull off. Teachers at all four KIPP middle schools in New York City had to grade every one of their students, on a scale of 1 to 5, on every one of the 24 character indicators, and more than a few of them found the process a little daunting. And now that report-card night had arrived, they had an even bigger challenge: explaining to parents just how those precise figures, rounded to the second decimal place, summed up their children's character. I sat for a while with Mike Witter, a 31-year-old eighth-grade English teacher, as he talked through the character report card with Faith Flemister and her son Juaquin Bennett, a tall, hefty eighth grader in a gray hooded sweatshirt.

"For the past few years we've been working on a project to create a clearer picture for parents about the character of your child," Witter explained to Flemister. "The categories that we ended up putting together represent qualities that have been studied and determined to be indicators of success. They mean you're more likely to go to college. More likely to find a good job. Even surprising things, like they mean you're more likely to get married, or more likely to have a family. So we think these are really important."

Flemister nodded, and Witter began to work his way down the scores on Juaquin's character report card, starting with the good news: every teacher had scored him as a perfect 5 on "Is polite to adults and peers," and he did almost as well on "Keeps temper in check." They were both indicators for interpersonal self-control.

"I can tell this is a real strength for you," Witter said, turning to Juaquin. "This kind of self-control is something you've developed incredibly well. So that makes me think we need to start looking at: What's something we can target? And the first thing that jumps out at me is this." Witter pulled out a green felt-tip marker and circled one indicator on Juaquin's report card. " 'Pays attention and resists distraction,' " Witter read aloud, an indicator for academic self-control. "That's a little lower than some of the other numbers. Why do you think that is?"

"I talk too much in class," Juaquin said, a little sheepishly, looking down at his black sneakers. "I sometimes stare off into space and don't pay attention."

The three of them talked over a few strategies to help Juaquin focus more in class, and by the end of the 15-minute conversation, Flemister seemed convinced by the new approach. "The strong points are not a surprise," she said to Witter as he got up to talk to another family. "That's just the type of person Juaquin is. But it's good how you pinpoint what he can do to make things easier on himself. Then maybe his grades will pick up."

A month later, I returned to KIPP to visit Witter's classroom. By that point in the school year, character language had permeated Infinity. Kids wore T-shirts with the slogan "Infinite Character" and Seligman's 24 character strengths listed on the back. The walls were covered with signs that read "Got self-control?" and "I actively participate!" (one indicator for zest). There was a bulletin board in the hallway topped with the words "Character Counts," where students filled out and posted "Spotted!" cards when they saw a fellow student performing actions that demonstrate character. (Jasmine R. cited William N. for zest: "William was in math class and he raised his hand for every problem.")

I came to Witter's class to observe something that Levin was calling "dual-purpose instruction," the practice of deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson. Levin wanted math teachers to use the strengths in word problems; he explained that history teachers could use them to orient a class discussion about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. And when I arrived in Witter's class at 7:45 on a Thursday morning in March, he was leading a discussion about Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart." Above Witter's head, at the front of the class, the seven character strengths were stenciled in four-inch-high letters, white on blue, from optimism to social intelligence. He asked his students to rank Okonkwo, the protagonist, on his various character strengths. There was a lot of back and forth, but in the end, most students agreed that Okonkwo rated highest on grit and lowest on self-control. Then a student named Yantzee raised his hand. "Can't a trait backfire at you?" he asked.

"Sure, a trait can backfire," Witter said. "Too much grit, like Okonkwo, you start to lose your ability to have empathy for other people. If you're so gritty that you don't understand why everyone's complaining about how hard things are, because nothing's hard for you, because you're Mr. Grit, then you're going to have a hard time being kind. Even love - being too loving might make you the kind of person who can get played." There was a ripple of knowing laughter from the students. "So, yes, character is something you have to be careful about. Character strengths can become character weaknesses."

Though the seven character strengths aren't included in every lesson at KIPP, they do make it into most conversations about discipline. One day last winter, I was speaking with Sayuri Stabrowski, a 30-year-old seventh-and-eighth-grade reading teacher at KIPP Infinity, and she mentioned that she caught a girl chewing gum in her class earlier that day. "She denied it," Stabrowski told me. "She said, 'No, I'm not, I'm chewing my tongue.' " Stabrowski rolled her eyes as she told me the story. "I said, 'O.K. fine.' Then later in the class, I saw her chewing again, and I said: 'You're chewing gum! I see you.' She said, 'No, I'm not, see?' and she moved the gum over in her mouth in this really obvious way, and we all saw what she was doing. Now, a couple of years ago, I probably would have blown my top and screamed. But this time, I was able to say: 'Gosh, not only were you chewing gum, which is kind of minor, but you lied to me twice. That's a real disappointment. What does that say about your character?' And she was just devastated."

Stabrowski was worried that the girl, who often struggled with her behavior, might have a mini-meltdown - a "baby attack," in KIPP jargon - in the middle of the class, but in fact, the girl spit out her gum and sat through the rest of the class and then afterward came up to her teacher with tears in her eyes. "We had a long conversation," Stabrowski told me. "She said: 'I'm trying so hard to just grow up. But nothing ever changes!' And I said: 'Do you know what does change? You didn't have a baby attack in front of the other kids, and two weeks ago, you would have.' "

To Tom Brunzell, who as the dean of students at KIPP Infinity oversaw the implementation of the character report card, what is going on in character conversations like that one isn't academic instruction at all, or even discipline; it's therapy. Specifically, it's a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy, the very practical, nuts-and-bolts psychological technique that provides the theoretical underpinning for the whole positive psychology field. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., involves using the conscious mind to understand and overcome unconscious fears and self-destructive habits, using techniques like "self-talk" - putting an immediate crisis in perspective by reminding yourself of the larger context. "The kids who succeed at KIPP are the ones who can C.B.T. themselves in the moment," Brunzell told me. Part of the point of the character initiative, as he saw it, was to give their students the tools to do that. "All kids this age are having mini-implosions every day," he said. "I mean, it's middle school, the worst years of their lives. But the kids who make it are the ones who can tell themselves: 'I can rise above this little situation. I'm O.K. Tomorrow is a new day.' "

For Randolph, the experience that Brunzell was describing - the struggle to pull yourself through a crisis, to come to terms on a deep level with your own shortcomings and to labor to overcome them - is exactly what is missing for so many students at academically excellent schools like Riverdale. And perhaps surprisingly, it may turn out to be an area where the students at KIPP have a real advantage over Riverdale kids. On the professional development day in February when I visited Riverdale, Randolph had arranged a screening for his entire faculty of "Race to Nowhere," a movie about the stresses facing mostly privileged American high-school students that has become an underground hit in many wealthy suburbs, where one-time showings at schools, churches and community centers bring out hundreds of concerned parents. The movie paints a grim portrait of contemporary adolescence, rising in an emotional crescendo to the story of an overachieving teenage girl who committed suicide, apparently because of the ever-increasing pressure to succeed that she felt both at school and at home. At Riverdale, the film seemed to have a powerful effect on many of the staff; one teacher who came up to Randolph afterward had tears in her eyes.

"Race to Nowhere" has helped to coalesce a growing movement of psychologists and educators who argue that the systems and methods now in place to raise and educate well-off kids in the United States are in fact devastating them. One central figure in the movie is Madeline Levine, a psychologist in Marin County who is the author of a best-selling book, "The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids." In her book, Levine cites studies and surveys to back up her contention that children of affluent parents now exhibit "unexpectedly high rates of emotional problems beginning in junior high school." This is no accident of demographics, Levine says, but instead is a direct result of the child-raising practices that prevail in well-off American homes; wealthy parents today, she argues, are more likely to be emotionally distant from their children, and at the same time to insist on high levels of achievement, a potentially toxic blend of influences that can create "intense feelings of shame and hopelessness" in affluent children.

Cohen and Fierst told me that they also see many Riverdale parents who, while pushing their children to excel, also inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experience that can lead to character growth. As Fierst put it: "Our kids don't put up with a lot of suffering. They don't have a threshold for it. They're protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it O.K. for there to be challenge, because that's where learning happens."

Cohen said that in the middle school, "if a kid is a C student, and their parents think that they're all-A's, we do get a lot of pushback: 'What are you talking about? This is a great paper!' We have parents calling in and saying, for their kids, 'Can't you just give them two more days on this paper?' Overindulging kids, with the intention of giving them everything and being loving, but at the expense of their character - that's huge in our population. I think that's one of the biggest problems we have at Riverdale."

This is a problem, of course, for all parents, not just affluent ones. It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know - on some level, at least - that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you're lucky. But it's one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it's quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense.

And it's that problem that Randolph is up against as he tries to push forward this new kind of conversation about character at Riverdale. When you work at a public school, whether it's a charter or a traditional public school, you're paid by the state, responsible, on some level, to your fellow citizens for the job you do preparing your students to join the adult world. When you work at a private school like Riverdale, though, even one with a long waiting list, you are always conscious that you're working for the parents who pay the tuition fees. Which makes a campaign like the one that Randolph is trying to embark on all the more complicated. If your premise is that your students are lacking in deep traits like grit and gratitude and self-control, you're implicitly criticizing the parenting they've received - which means you're implicitly criticizing your employers.

When I asked Randolph to explain just what he thought Riverdale students were missing out on, he told me the story of his own scholastic career. He did well in boarding school and was admitted to Harvard, but when he got to college, he felt lost, out of step with the power-tie careerism of the Reagan '80s. After two years at Harvard, Randolph left for a year to work in a low-paying manual job, as a carpenter's helper, trying to find himself. After college, he moved for a couple of years to Italy, where he worked odd jobs and studied opera. It was an uncertain and unsettled time in his life, filled with plenty of failed experiments and setbacks and struggles. Looking back on his life, though, Randolph says that the character strengths that enabled him to achieve the success that he has were not built in his years at Harvard or at the boarding schools he attended; they came out of those years of trial and error, of taking chances and living without a safety net. And it is precisely those kinds of experiences that he worries that his students aren't having.

"The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure," Randolph explained. "And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything."

Most Riverdale students can see before them a clear path to a certain type of success. They'll go to college, they'll graduate, they'll get well-paying jobs - and if they fall along the way, their families will almost certainly catch them, often well into their 20s or even 30s, if necessary. But despite their many advantages, Randolph isn't yet convinced that the education they currently receive at Riverdale, or the support they receive at home, will provide them with the skills to negotiate the path toward the deeper success that Seligman and Peterson hold up as the ultimate product of good character: a happy, meaningful, productive life. Randolph wants his students to succeed, of course - it's just that he believes that in order to do so, they first need to learn how to fail.

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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

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Randolph has been pondering throughout his 23-year career as an educator the question of whether and how schools should impart good character. It has often felt like a lonely quest, but it has led him in some interesting directions.

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All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

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Silicon Valley Parents Are Raising their Kids Tech-Free

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Silicon Valley Parents Are Raising their Kids Tech-Free

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Silicon Valley parents can see firsthand, either through living or working in the Bay Area, that technology is potentially harmful to kids.

Many parents are now restricting, or outright banning, screen time for their children.

The trend follows a long-standing practice among high-level tech executives who have set limits for their own children for years.

This is an installment of Business Insider's "Your Brain on Apps" series that investigates how addictive apps can influence behavior.

It's 9 a.m. in Sunnyvale, California and Minni Shahi is on her way to work at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Her husband, a former Googler named Vijay Koduri, is meeting his business partner at a local Starbucks to discuss their startup, a YouTube clip-making business called HashCut.

Shahi and Koduri's two kids, 10-year-old Saurav and 12-year-old Roshni, have already been dropped off at school, likely immersed in one of the Google Chromebooks they were issued at the start of the year.

The Koduris' life is that of the quintessential Silicon Valley family, except for one thing. The technology developed by Koduri and Shahi's employers is all but banned at the family's home.

There are no video game systems inside the Koduri household, and neither child has their own cell phone yet. Saurav and Roshni can play games on their parents' phones, but only for 10 minutes per week. (There are no limits to using the family's vast library of board games.) Awhile back the family bought an iPad 2, but for the last five years it's lived on the highest shelf in a linen closet.

"We know at some point they will need to get their own phones," Koduri, 44, told Business Insider. "But we are prolonging it as long as possible."

'The difference is, they don't think of themselves as dangerous'

Koduri and Shahi represent a new kind of Silicon Valley parent. Instead of tricking out their homes with all the latest technology, many of today's parents working or living in the tech world are limiting - and sometimes outright banning - how much screen time their kids get.

The approach stems from parents seeing firsthand, either through their job, or simply by living in the Bay Area - a region home to the most valuable tech companies on Earth - how much time and effort goes into making digital technology irresistible.

A 2017 survey conducted by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation found among 907 Silicon Valley parents that despite high confidence in technology's benefits, many parents now have serious concerns about tech's impact on kids' psychological and social development.

"You can't put your face in a device and expect to develop a long-term attention span," Taewoo Kim, chief AI engineer at the machine-learning startup One Smart Lab, told Business Insider. A practicing Buddhist, Kim is teaching his nieces and nephews, ages 4 to 11, to meditate and appreciate screen-free games and puzzles. Once a year he takes them on tech-free silent retreats at nearby Buddhist temples.

Former employees at major tech companies, some of them high-level executives, have gone public to condemn the companies' intense focus on building addictive tech products. The discussions have triggered further research from the psychology community, all of which has gradually convinced many parents that a child's palm is no place for devices so potent.

"The tech companies do know that the sooner you get kids, adolescents, or teenagers used to your platform, the easier it is to become a lifelong habit," Koduri told Business Insider. It's no coincidence, he said, that Google has made a push into schools with Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the learning management suite Google Classroom.

Turning kids into loyal customers of unhealthy products isn't exactly a new strategy. Some find that major tobacco companies spend nearly $9 billion a year, or $24 million a day, marketing their products in the hopes kids will use them for life. The same principle helps explain why fast-food chains offer kids' meals: Brand loyalty is lucrative.

"The difference [with Google] is they don't think of themselves as dangerous," Koduri said. "Google for sure thinks of themselves of 'Hey, we're the good guys. We're helping kids. We're helping classrooms.' And I'm sure Apple does as well. And I'm sure Microsoft does as well."

In San Francisco, parents notice a 'malaise of scrolling'

Erika Boissiere has little doubt that tech is poison to young brains.

The 37-year-old mom of two in San Francisco works as a family therapist alongside her husband. She said they both make an effort to stay current with screen-time research, which, despite suffering a lack of long-term data, has nevertheless found a host of short-term consequences among teens and adolescents who are heavy users of tech. These include heightened risks for depression, anxiety, and, in extreme cases, suicide.

Many of the fellow parents she and her husband talk to have said they notice an anti-tech sentiment, too. Just by living in the world's tech epicenter, the couple has front row seats to what Boissiere called a "malaise of scrolling."

"We live on a pretty trafficked street," Boissiere told Business Insider. In the 15 years they've lived there, she's noticed "a noticeable shift that everybody is on their phones on the bus. It doesn't seem like someone's reading a Kindle, for example."

Boissiere will go to great lengths to prevent her kids, 2-year-old Jack and 5-year-old Elise, from having even the most basic interactions with technology. She and her husband haven't installed any TVs in the house, and they avoid all cell-phone use in the kids' presence - a strict policy the couple also requires of their 28-year-old nanny, who Boissiere said has been caught scrolling on the job.

The couple has devised a strategy to help them stick to their policy. When the two of them get home from work, they each put their phone by the door. On most nights, they'll check the phones just once or twice before they go to bed, Boissiere said. Sometimes she'll break the rule, but more than once her kids have entered the room while she's mid-text, sending their mom fleeing into the nearest bathroom.

Around 10:30 p.m., Boissiere and her husband get in bed and end the day with an episode of "Black Mirror" on their laptop: a dose of morbid reassurance that the anti-tech approach is for the best.

Low-tech parenting has been a quiet staple among Silicon Valley moguls for years

Silicon Valley's low- and anti-tech parents may seem overly cautious, but they actually follow longstanding practices of former and current tech giants like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Tim Cook.

In 2007, Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft, implemented a cap on screen time when his daughter started developing an unhealthy attachment to a video game. Later it became family policy not to allow kids to have their own phones until they turned 14. Today, the average American child get their first phone around age 10.

Jobs, the CEO of Apple until his death in 2012, revealed in a 2011 New York Times interview that he prohibited his kids from using the newly-released iPad. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home," Jobs told reporter Nick Bilton.

Even Cook, the current Apple CEO, said in January that he doesn't allow his nephew to join online social networks. The comment followed those of other tech luminaries , who have condemned social media as detrimental to society.

Cook later conceded Apple products aren't meant for constant use.

"I'm not a person that says we've achieved success if you're using it all the time," he said. "I don't subscribe to that at all."

Kids aren't necessarily hooked for life

A silver lining to constant tech use is that negative effects don't seem to be permanent.

One of the more hopeful studies, and one often cited by psychologists, was published in 2014 in the peer-reviewed journal Computers in Human Behavior. It involved roughly 100 pre-teens, half of whom spent five days on a tech-free retreat engaged in activities like archery, hiking, and orienteering. The other half stayed home and served as the control.

The tech companies do know that the sooner you get kids, adolescents, or teenagers used to your platform, the easier it is to become a lifelong habit.

After just five days at the retreat, researchers saw huge gains in empathy levels among the participating kids. Those in the experimental group started scoring higher in their nonverbal emotional cues, more often smiling at another child's success or looking distressed if they witnessed a nasty fall.

The researchers concluded: "The results of this study should introduce a much-needed societal conversation about the costs and benefits of the enormous amount of time children spend with screens, both inside and outside the classroom."

Schools have started accommodating the anti-tech parent

Not all parents who raise their kids low-tech strive to keep the same standards when it comes to education. Koduri's kids, for instance, share a Macbook Air for homework and use Google Chromebooks at school.

But around Silicon Valley, a number of low-tech schools have popped up in an effort to reintroduce the basics. At the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, a private school in Los Altos, California, kids use chalkboards and No. 2 pencils. Faculty don't introduce kids to screen-based devices until they reach the eighth grade.

At Brightworks School, a K-12 private school in San Francisco, kids learn creativity by using power tools, dismantling radios, and attending classes in treehouses.

Meanwhile, at many public schools, technology has become a guiding force, according to educators Joe Clement and Matt Miles. In their 2017 book "Screen Schooled," the co-authors make the case that technology does far more harm than good, even when it's used to boost scores in reading and math.

"It's interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads, Steve Jobs's kids would be some of the only kids opted out," they wrote. (Jobs' children have finished school, so it's impossible to verify if that would have been true.)

The apparent double standard still lingers, they argue. As the authors wrote, "What is it these wealthy tech executives know about their own products that their consumers don't?"

Parents of older kids see changes across generations

On the western edge of the San Francisco Bay, in San Mateo, tech entrepreneur Amy Pressman lives with her husband and two kids, 14-year-old Mia and 16-year-old Jacob. Her oldest child, 20-year-old Brian, is a sophomore in college. (Business Insider has changed each child's name at Pressman's request.)

Though she no longer has control of what Brian does when he's away at school, at home Pressman is strict. There are no devices at the dinner table. After 10 p.m., kids must surrender their phones and leave them charging in the kitchen overnight. Weekly gaming is limited to five to seven hours a week.

This world didn't exist when I was growing up.

Like Koduri, who said he fondly remembers playing outside as a kid and raises his own kids with that upbringing in mind, Pressman longs to return to a more analog world.

"Kids aren't going out and just playing in the street," Pressman, co-founder and president of the software company Medallia, told Business Insider. "My older son would have more of his friends come over and hang out than my younger children do."

In the past few years, the family has gotten a lot better about spending time together, she said. Instead of family members coming home and installing themselves in separate rooms, eyes glued to devices, they now make use of season tickets to the theatre and keep an ongoing ranking of San Francisco's best ice cream shops.

A couple years ago, Pressman planned a trip to Death Valley over a long weekend. The lack of USB charging ports and Wifi were two of the destination's main selling points.

"The connectivity there was pretty abysmal," she said. "That was lovely."

Daily restrictions are tough, but they may be worth it

Pressman and other parents told Business Insider that it's often hard to strike a balance in limiting tech use, since kids quickly begin to feel left out of their peer group. The longer parents try to impose their restrictions, the more they fear they're essentially raising a well-adjusted outcast.

"I've got no role model for how to deal with this world," Pressman said. "This world didn't exist when I was growing up, and the restrictions my parents put on TV use don't make sense in the world of technology when the computer is both your entertainment and your homework and your encyclopedia."

Many parents who spoke to Business Insider said their best defense against tech addiction is to introduce replacement activities or find ways to use tech more productively. When California droughts wiped out Koduri's backyard, he filled the lot with cement and built a basketball court, which both of his kids and their friends use. When Pressman noticed her daughter taking an interest in computers, the two of them signed up to learn programming together.

These parents hope they can teach their kids to enter adulthood with a healthy set of expectations for how to use - and, in certain cases, avoid - technology. Every so often, they said, a glimmer of hope shines through.

In just the few years since Pressman began advocating for less tech use, her oldest son has started to see the value in cutting back on screens. A math major who prefers to use hardcover books, Brian told his mom he finds digital versions distracting.

As Pressman recalled, the family was in the middle of a long road trip around Christmas last year when, out of nowhere, he surprised his mother with something few parents ever tire of hearing: an admission of error.

"You know how you're always railing on social media, and I thought you were all wrong?" Pressman recalled Brian telling her, referring to her many tirades calling for "real" human interaction. "Well," he said, "I'm coming to think you're right."

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Silicon Valley parents are raising their kids tech-free - and it should be a red flag

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Silicon Valley parents can see firsthand, either through living or working in the Bay Area, that technology is potentially harmful to kids. Many parents are now restricting, or outright banning, screen time for their children. The trend follows a long-standing practice among high-level tech executives who have set limits for their own children for years.

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Regardless of what it's called, cross-disciplinary teaching and learning are rooted in very specific foundations. Review this video to spark your magic!

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This Panda is Dancing - Time Well Spent (YT Video). Thoughts... Mindfulness/What do we value? How is character development different in the digital age? How many characters do I have or play IRL and online?

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A poetic short film by Max Stossel & Sander van Dijk: In the Attention Economy, technology and media are designed to maximize our screen-time. But what if they were designed to help us live by our values? www.timewellspent.io What if news & media companies were creating content that enriched our lives, vs.

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Hello and Happy Valentine’s Day!

We would like to take this time to ‘officially’ welcome you to the Character Inquiry Group for the remainder of the school year! We are so excited to work with you and collaborate on a cohesive vision for Character Education at Saint Paul’s .

We have 3 “division meetings” left on our calendar this school year which are on Wednesdays, March 13, April 17, and May 15. Please mark your calendars for these dates, but expect these division meetings to look a little different. These meetings will be used for our inquiry into character and the locations of these meetings are TBD (by us).

We would like to have a brief introductory meeting before our first official divisional meeting. Please mark your calendar for Friday, March 1st after school for this brief but fun meeting of the minds. We plan to meet off campus at Smokey Bones in Clearwater Mall. We will be there by 4pm and encourage you to join-- you are welcome to bring your children if that’s helpful.

In the meantime, please take a look at the core values listed below and choose six that resonate with you on a personal level. We have provided these as examples, but feel free to select your own! These will be used to generate a list for a community-building activity.

Finally, please visit the following link to access Padlet, the tool we will use to communicate and reflect throughout the inquiry process: https://padlet.com/aflinchum/lpbtyawdjp80

Core Values:

Action

Authenticity

Achievement

Adventure

Authority

Autonomy

Balance

Beauty

Boldness

Compassion

Challenge

Citizenship

Community

Competency

Contribution

Courage

Creativity

Curiosity

Determination

Diversity

Fairness

Faith

Fame

Friendships

Fun

Growth

Happiness

Honesty

Humor

Influence

Integrity

Inner Harmony

Joy

Justice

Kindness

Knowledge

Leadership

Learning

Love

Loyalty

Meaningful Work

Mindfulness

Openness

Optimism

Passion

Peace

Pleasure

Poise

Popularity

Recognition

Religion

Reputation

Respect

Responsibility

Security

Self-Respect

Service

Spirituality

Stability

Success

Status

Trustworthiness

Wealth

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In this column, please feel free to share any readings, videos, etc. you come across that are connected to differentiation! We look forward to collaborating with you on differentiating different aspects of learning! ❤️

-Megan and Kelly

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How to Differentiate Without Losing Your Mind 

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How to Differentiate Without Losing Your Mind 

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“The goal with differentiation is to make any single lesson accessible to all students“

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Instructional expert and esteemed blogger Larry Ferlazzo wants you to know: Differentiation isn't as hard as you might think.

In an animated video published by Education Week this fall, he explained that differentiating instruction is really about getting to know your students and being flexible with the ways they demonstrate their learning. It is not, in fact, about spending your evenings planning a separate lesson for each student.

Today, we're publishing two more videos about differentiation featuring Ferlazzo and veteran teacher Katie Hull Sypnieski. (They recently co-authored a book called The ELL Teacher's Toolbox.)

In the video below, Ferlazzo and Hull Sypnieski describe techniques they use to differentiate lessons for English-language learners. Those include strategies like pairing up students of different language levels and playing classroom videos at slower speeds.

And in the other video, below, the teachers talk through the kinds of questions they ask themselves when planning a lesson for a multi-ability classroom. What will students do if they finish early? How can the materials be modified to make them useful for all types of learners?

The goal with differentiation is to make any single lesson accessible to all students. "Not everybody will get the same exact text or use the same strategy," Hull Sypnieski explains in the ELL video, "but it's fair because you're meeting every student where they are."

For more information (and tips) on differentation, see Differentiated Instruction: A Primer and this collection of blog posts from Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo.

You may also want to check out this widely read 2015 opinion piece by educational consultant James R. Delisle about why "Differentiation Doesn't Work" and the response from education professor Carol Ann Tomlinson.

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How to Differentiate Instruction (Without Losing Your Mind)

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Instructional expert and esteemed blogger Larry Ferlazzo wants you to know: Differentiation isn't as hard as you might think. In an animated video published by Education Week this fall, he explained that differentiating instruction is really about getting to know your students and being flexible with the ways they demonstrate their learning.

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Differentiation means tailoring instruction to meet individual needs. Whether teachers differentiate content, process, products, or the learning environment, the use of ongoing assessment and flexible grouping makes this a successful approach to instruction.

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What can we ask of our kids that makes the technology fall into the background and the inquiry and the discussion move to the foreground?

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What can we ask of our kids that makes the technology fall into the background and the inquiry and the discussion move to the foreground?

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Notes from our first meeting!

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Questions that linger from our March 13, 2019

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Questions that linger from our March 13, 2019

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Differentiation is making a single lesson accessible to all students. We achieve this by proactively responding to the readiness, interest, and learning style of each child. Differentiation can be met through content, process, product, and environment.

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Assessment is very important when it comes to differentiated instruction.

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We create practical, timely, affordable professional learning to help educators and instructional leaders provide students with a modern, equitable, and quality education.

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What do you already do well with regard to differentiation? What can you improve on? What support would you like?