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New York City
November 2003

Connecting Character to Conduct: Helping Students Do the Right Things
reviewed by Merri Rosenberg

Published by the Association for Supervision & Curriculum Develop-ment. Alexandria, VA. 2000, 134 pp.

Here’s a slim volume that belongs in every school, if not in every classroom.

In clear, concise prose, the authors map out exactly how a school can succeed in having its students behave in ways that are consistent, and consonant, with appropriate behavior on all levels—moral, ethical, social.

Sounds almost too good to be true (and no one guarantees that following the steps they provide will transform every school into a utopia), but I’m sorely tempted to place a copy in the hands of my daughter’s high school administrators. There are invaluable lessons contained here that could be applied to almost any situation in almost any school.

What prompted this work was an exercise where they asked middle school students to describe the most difficult decision they had ever had to make. To their surprise, they found that these students were struggling with matters like figuring out which parent to live with in the case of divorce, what religion to follow, using (or not using) illegal substances with little input or guidance from the adults around them. As a result, they write, “our students helped us understand that they are making life-altering, long-term decisions with short-term reasoning skills, insufficient adult guidance and no core frame of reference for making the right decisions for the right reasons in contemporary society.”

The authors argue that push-in character education programs, or one-shot assemblies, do little to effectively change attitudes and behaviors. What they advocate instead is something they term RICE (Respect, Impulse Control, Compassion, Equity), a four-step formula, complete with diagrams and rubrics, which detail how a school can implement actual change.

They suggest that using questions like “What Do You Think?” or “Would You Like Some Help,” along with statements like “We need some time to consider the best choice in this circumstance” or “Everyone has an important role in helping our group succeed” defuse potentially fraught situations and remind students of how they’re expected to behave towards one another. Further, having this plan adopted by every member of the school community, from custodial staff and hall monitors, teachers and administrators, parents and students, makes it more likely that the school community will be a better place.

It’s practical in a way that many similar books are not. The authors address such common problem areas as incidents on the school bus, in the halls, during an athletic event, in parking lots, during assemblies or in the lunchroom, leaving the reader with useful take-away information.

They endorse the important role parents should play in a school community (as a parent, something that can’t be said often enough), and make a compelling argument for adopting the principles they propose.#

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All material is copyrighted and may not be printed without express consent of the publisher. © 2003.


 

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