Smart & Good High Schools - The Flippen Group

CHAPTER 6: Commonly Asked Questions about Smart & Good High Schoolsthe personal quest for excellence and ethics—doing ourbest work and being our best ethical self; and (2) supportingand challenging each other in this quest for excellenceand ethics.That means all of us need to be involved in developingthe 8 strengths of character that we want our students todevelop. We can’t give what we haven’t got. In the end,the people are the program. Develop the people, andyou’ll improve the program.How would a school go about assessing its effectivenessin developing performance character and moral characterand the eight strengths of character?Part of the next phase of our work will be to begin developingan institutional assessment system that enablesschools to rigorously monitor the development of thestrengths of character and the ethical learning community.Continue to look to our Center’s main websitewww.cortland.edu/character for our progress in this area.There are already a number of assessment tools availablefor use free of charge.In the meantime, you can begin with the Re-Bar process.Under Outcome 6 (page 162), for example, we describe aschool that used this process with its freshman advisories.This school had two goals: to decrease the percentage offreshmen who failed a first-semester course and toincrease the percentage who participated in an extra-curricularactivity. They collected data on both and foundimprovements in both areas, with room for furtherimprovement. They could have also done surveys andinterviews with at least a sample of their freshman toidentify how advisories might be strengthened to get evengreater gains. This is an example of the research-basedaction and reflection cycle that we’re recommending thatschools use with a variety of their practices.In the end, the people arethe program.Concerned about student cheating? Use a survey such asDon McCabe’s Academic Integrity Survey(dmccabe@andromeda.rutgers.edu) to get baseline data,then implement an honor code and classroom discussionsof academic honesty, then re-administer the survey, perhapscoupled with interviews of a sample of students andstaff. Look at the new data, make further improvementsin your interventions, then keep the cycle going.Concerned about sportsmanship and the extent to whichcoaches are character educators? Take a look at our website’sCoach’s Checklist.Where does the work of Smart & Good High Schoolsgo from here?We’ll be conducting regional institutes around the country,in conjunction with our growing network of regionalpartners. These regional institutes are designed to presentthe vision and findings of the report. We’re also workingon publications for diverse audiences in the hopes ofgenerating wide interest in the model. One on-line publication,beginning sometime in fall 2005, will be our Smart& Good High Schools E-Newsletter. You can sign up for a freesubscription on our high school website(www.cortland.edu/character/highschool).Working with our regional partners, we’re planning anational conference for 2006. See our website for details.We hope this national conference will become an annualevent where schools working with the Smart & Goodmodel can share best practices.We hope that a national Smart & GoodHigh Schools conference will becomean annual tradition.Future plans also include a multi-year research and developmenteffort designed to create, working with pilotschools, curricular materials, training services, and a comprehensiveassessment system. If you have any questionsabout any aspect of Smart & Good High Schools, email usat character@cortland.edu.Be careful of your thoughts,For your thoughts become your words.Be careful of your words,For your words become your deeds.Be careful of your deeds,For your deeds become your habits.Be careful of your habits,For your habits become your character.Be careful of your character,For your character becomes yourdestiny.—AUTHOR UNKNOWN218Smart & Good High Schools