Homeschooling How To Tip: Let your children teach each other. This is one of the very best ways to check exactly what your child understood from the original lesson. There are a number of benefits – let me count the ways

*It highlights their learning and the gaps in comprehension for them.

* It makes them feel important.

* It is an opportunity for your child to genuinely give value to the family.

* It gives them the chance to understand that other people may learn differently – can you say “teach-able moment”?

* They come up with astonishingly creative ways to teach ideas that can inspire our homeschooling styles.

*Besides, this also helps to take care of the eternal question – how do I homeschool two (or more) children of different ages?

* It is a chance for you to sit down and have some tea!

This idea applies to us Moms just as much, there is nothing like having to teach an idea to make you really look at what you do understand about it.

I have frequently said that by the end of their homeschooling experience my children will have seen at least one complete education – MINE! Then they will have the tools to get one for themselves

That is actually food for a whole other conversation, but briefly, here is the Homeschooling How To Tip – your children will pay far more attention to what you do than to what you say!

Have you noticed that? I would love to hear your stories of how your children learn from watching. Please do send them in!

Homeschooling How To is all set for exciting new things in this new year! I look forward to the adventure with you!

Images of the ideal homeschool life include smiling, happy children engrossed in an educational activity, working alongside their siblings with grace and maturity and little conflict. Fighting, after all, may be typical for their public schooled peers, but certainly not acceptable behaviour for children taught at home under the watchful eye of mom. Throw in a crackling fire and some hot chocolate, mom busy baking cookies in the kitchen and the picture is perfect-the message intact-homeschooling life is a superior.

Naturally, this is a lie, and it is best for all new homeschooling moms and dads to know the truth, it may not set you free, but it will help your sanity remain intact even it is only safety pins holding the tattered ends together. Children will spend time focused on learning and there very well may be hot chocolate involved, but the idea that they will do this without a well-placed elbow jab to their older brother or a dirty look to their sister is just wishful thinking.

Children, homeschooled or not, will argue and fight, and it is the parents responsibility to understand this fact, embrace it even. Not to lower expectations, but to strengthen their resolve to persevere through the trials all the while building up an arsenal of battle ready skills.

There Will Always Be Conflict

There are moments, magical ones, when the stars align and the planet is in perfect rotation, and the children get along. Savour these times. Watch from a distance and do not interfere. It won’t last. It cannot last. It is not in the make-up of a child to abstain from conflict.

And that is a good thing.

Children learn important things about themselves when conflict arises. Limits are tested, character is shaped and patience stretched. When a child is in school there is little room for conflict, even less for resolution. Children are expected to conform to the structures and policies around them. The same goes for home life too. Families have their own set of policies children are expected to adhere to, but there is room to experiment and room to challenge with the space and time to accept defeat.

How to Handle Sibling Rife

There are ways to keep the bickering to a minimum. When patience is stretched beyond the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, and it is time for parental refereeing, it is important to remember two things:

It is not personal
It will not last forever

Here are eleven useful tips on dealing with the situation:

*Do not pit them against each other with negative comments meant to inspire.

*Build up each of their individual strengths and make them aware of how their differences complement rather than compete.

*Forge friendships by supplying times to get along using mutual interests and hobbies-computer games, sports etc.

*Reward them together so they can share the benefits

*Respect their individual need for space and privacy.

*Ensure alone time, quiet time when they need it.

*Expect arguments and give them space to work it out before getting involved.

*Remove the source of the problem and force quiet time.

*Have clear consequences

*Encourage them to work it out on their own-let them know if a parent has to get involved they will not enjoy the results.

*Reward loyalty.

Your homeschooled children will argue. They will challenge each other, provoke each other, tease and harass. The benefits are that they will also have a higher level of patience for younger siblings, a greater repertoire of problem solving skills, an appreciation for differences, and a pure enjoyment of one another.

From [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Karen_Pasqualucci]Karen Pasqualucci and Joy Kita

Karen Pasqualucci is a passionate (and opinionated) homeschooling mom! She has been homeschooling since 2001 and shares her discoveries and thoughts at her blog: http://www.homeschoolinghowto.com where she would love to hear your questions, comments and feedback! Come on over and get the latest news on homeschooling!

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Homeschooling-How-To---11-Tips-for-Dealing-With-the-Fighting!&id=6741577] Homeschooling How To – 11 Tips for Dealing With the Fighting!

The Great ‘S’ Debate

Socialization; a word that has become dirty to many a homeschooling family, and is akin to a curse word for all its implied meaning. The use of this word causes the most experienced home educating parent to cringe, or at the very least procures a heartfelt eye roll. No matter how long one has been homeschooling it is a question that is expected and dreaded in equal measures. Dreaded by teaching parents not because of a feeling of inadequacy in their ability to answer or because of a lack of strength in their answer, but because it is so very overused and abused. The sentiments behind the question may vary in condescending tones and sincerity, but it is always asked.

There have been enough reports filled with irrefutable statistics on the academic success of homeschooling that many critics have been silenced. Of course, as with any controversial subject, the critics never remain without argument for long. The idea that homeschooled children cannot possibly be getting the required amount of socialization-as if there is an industry standard-is not a new one. It has caused many a grandparent sincere grief, and given many experts in the field (the socialization one) a new platform in which to express their concern.

So the question remains; are homeschooled children receiving enough socialization? But is it the right question? Might a better one be, “are homeschooled children receiving the right kind of socialization?” And further to that thought can we not direct the same attention to public schooled children? Are our children, homeschooled or not, receiving good socialization? There is a difference, and most homeschooled parents are keenly aware of what that difference is.

In order to answer the first question with the proper attention it deserves it would be wise to dig a little deeper into the word itself. With all the opinions on how children should be socialized, and the assumption that a classroom full of same aged peers is the correct way to do it, knowing the meaning is only prudent.

Dictionary.com supplies this definition:

Socialization: a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position.

Parents work hard to ensure their children learn how to behave. While each family has their own set of values, there is a shared goal among us that our children understand how to live beyond our guidance and shelter. We want them to succeed outside of our shadow of influence.

Homeschooled children are given the time and space to develop a personal identity in a safe environment where they can explore and test who they are within their boundaries. They are able to interact with a cross section of people and begin to put into practice life-long communication skills.

Socialization is not rejected in the homeschooling family, but neither is it revered as the most important aspect to the bigger picture. There are play dates, music lessons, sports, neighbourhood children, church, and youth groups that all aid the process and extra time with parents, grandparents and siblings to refine it.

Are homeschooled children getting enough socialization? Ultimately, the question must be asked each family on an individual basis. Just as no two families are the same, there are no exact matches when it comes to homeschooling. This is the nature of schooling at home, the essence of why it works and the foundation of the complex wonders teaching your own children creates. This debate will never end. When you go against the grain of societal norms there is always increased friction. It is also how character is shaped, resolves strengthened, and courage forged.

Please send the Homeschooling How To Blog your comments, thoughts and questions!

How fast can you learn something when you are interested in it?

Quite!

In this entertaining Ted talk this marvelous man leaves computers in remote villages with no instructions on how to use them. Then he goes away for a while. When he comes back it is  to find astounding results.

Children have a natural innate passion for learning that will flourish if we give it a chance.  As parents and especially as homeschoolers, we need to trust in their instinct to learn, create an environment that will foster that and celebrate their wins! Celebration is important and FUN!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU

Now that you have seen the results - what do you think of the system? Were you as delighted and amazed as I was by the childrens’ curiosity? When I watched their faces I felt like dancing! They are quite able to delve deeply into subjects that would never even make it to the public system curriculums.

The “teaching each other” is an integral part of the learning which is interesting to note. This is truly wonderful from a homeschooling perspective. Many people ask how we can teach children of such varying ages at the same time - you can have them teach each other! This will build the confidence of the teaching child and solidify its learning, it will facilitate the learning childs discoveries, build team spirit and best of all - it is not you teaching!!

This goes back to my central point about being the “Facilitator of your child’s education” - not necessarily the teacher! That is a foundational  Homeschool How To Tip.

Please do let me know what you thought of the talk. What was your AHA! moment in this talk? How did it make you feel about your homeschooling adventure? Do you have a “Homeschooling How To Question” rising from this talk? Comment below or email me at Karen@HomeschoolingHowTo.com

Once I started doing the research the answer to “Why Homeschool?” changed and blossomed until I cannot even imagine an alternative.

So let me count the ways…

1. No stuffing square pegs into round holes! We can tailor each child’s education to their unique talents and interests. We can build their strengths into mastery instead of wasting fruitless hours building their weaknesses into mediocrities.

2. No trying to play pool with a wet noodle! We can tailor the education to suit each child’s learning styles and personality so that learning is easy and inviting instead of an endless exhausting uphill battle.

3. We get to make memories together! We spend quantity and quality time together. Quality time is always a function of how much quantity of time you put into a relationship. You cannot order quality time up or schedule it into a day timer. We can go on a field trip to the ski hill any day of the week or spend an entire week studying the antics of the hummingbirds in our back yard.

4. I get to like my children! We get to influence our child’s personality and manners and character. We get to understand them better and they get to be people we want to spend time with. You will behave a lot like the people you hang around the most. Socializing with adults on a regular basis means that our children learn how to behave like them as well and we get to avoid the “Lord of the Flies” situations we see in the school system so often. Mostly, my children even like each other. Mostly, anyway

5. I am the boss! We can start the day when we wake up naturally. We can study in our pj’s. We can study in the garden or up a tree or under a table. We get to write in crayon or pen or ketchup. We get to go to the washroom without announcing it to the entire room and getting permission. We get to go on holiday when it suits us – imagine Disney with short wait lines! My kids can do co-ops anytime of the day. Did I mention the pj’s?

6. The future is coming! We get to prepare for the future that is actually coming – the digital, electronic information based age where people skills are everything. As they explore this new world I am there to facilitate their learning and support them as they ask ever better questions.

Those are my top six reasons for homeschooling. When people ask “Why homeschool?”, my answer is always one or more of these, depending on how long they are willing to listen!

By Joy Kita

Homeschooling is a hot topic these days. We know someone doing it, have talked to someone thinking of trying it, or heard someone discussing it. There was a time, not too long ago, when those who homeschooled stayed quiet about their choice fearing judgement or worse; interference. No longer is that the case for most homeschooling families. There are blogs, websites, podcasts and old fashioned face to face discussions being had all over the globe about this subject.

Why the Change?

There is power in numbers. Today nearly two million families in North America choose to homeschool, and those numbers continue to rise each year. With more people choosing alternate education methods there are increased amounts of resources and support. There have been enough studies completed that proves homeschooling is good alternate choice to school. Parents have support systems and teaching co-ops to support their choice and provide knowledge through years of experience.

The Numbers Are Out

In the past two decades numerous studies have detailed the academic progress of homeschooled children. The results are clear. On average, home educated children scored higher on standardized academic achievement tests than their public schooled peers. There may be other arguments against homeschooling, but no longer can critics use academics to support their claims.

Why This Matters

Every year a large percentage of children get left behind in the school system. The learning pace is too fast, the teaching style too specialized, or learning disabilities go unnoticed and ultimately untreated. With growing class sizes and dwindling funds and moral it is our children who suffer the consequences. The standard of education is being lowered each year producing mediocre curriculum designed to suit the needs of a fictional ideal student.

Reasons and Reasoning

The personal reasons families choose to homeschool is as vast and varied as the people involved. Academic reasons, however, line a narrower path, one illuminated by years of experience and indisputable results.

*Free to choose

There are hundreds of curriculum choices available to families which allows for personalized choices to match the interest, and learning style of the student.

*Free to explore

Homeschool allows students to learn at their own pace. If there is need they can stop and relearn or study further. Subjects of particular interest can be explored further expanding their knowledge base.

*Free to learn

Studies have revealed that the average student stops enjoying the learning process in the primary years. Rigorous, rote methods of study, dry material, or unmet expectations rob a child of the desire to learn. Homeschooled children are free to study subjects and topics that interest them and have the time to dig deeper until their thirst for knowledge on the subject is quenched. This often leads to hobbies and specialized interests.

Parents who homeschool their children choose a different path than the majority, and in that choice they set the course their children will follow, establishing that one need not go the way of the masses to find success. Persevering is a challenge. Thriving is a choice.

So in the end, why homeschool? What are your reasons for thinking about it? Let us know below!

We are free in our homeschool to design the environment to exactly suit the character development that we choose to foster in our unique children. I love the idea that there is a test for Grit and character. That is way cool. After you read the article you will probably want to give the test a quick look. I will put the test into the next post.

I absolutely agree with the idea of allowing my child to fail while I am there to help him get back up so that he can learn that skill. It is a hideous thought that the first time a young person is allowed to fail is when they are set free to live in the real world with no safety net!

There is enormous value to failing in small ways and learning how to get back up, learning what to avoid, learning how to predict a fall and learning to manage your emotions during all of this. This is one of the most important abilities to becoming a successful person.

I would be interested to hear your opinions on the subject. Comment below or email me at Karen@HomeschoolingHowTo.com

The Education Issue from The New York Times

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

 

Tape Installation by Stephen Doyle. Photograph by Stephen Wilkes for The New York Times.

Riverdale Country School in the Bronx.

By PAUL TOUGH

Published: September 14, 2011

The Making of “Grit” Tape Installation

Tape Installation by Stephen Doyle. Photograph by Stephen Wilkes for The New York Times.

KIPP Infinity middle school in Manhattan.

Enlarge This Image

Tape Installation by Stephen Doyle. Photograph by Stephen Wilkes for The New York Times.

KIPP Infinity middle school.

Randolph, by contrast, comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric. He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and sweep of graying hair, makes you wonder, when you first meet him, if he might have played sax in a ska band in the ’80s. (The English accent helps.) He is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference, dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary, giving her the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters sat and remodeling the small outer reception area into his own open-concept work space, its walls covered with whiteboard paint on which he sketches ideas and slogans. One day when I visited, one wall was bare except for a white sheet of paper. On it was printed a single black question mark.

For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Let’s hear it for Sir Robinson!!!! He is funny and charming and extremely accurate! This is one of the real benefits of homeschooling - you can take this sort of information and use it to genuinely assist your child. You can adapt to your child’s needs and talents. You can actively foster the creativity that will be vital for him to make a joyous living in the world!

Fom a Homeschooling how to point of view - the biggest take away from this forme was find your child’s passion and foster it!

Here is a recent comment on the talk that I feel is really telling:

Nov 13 2011: “I taught school for 35 years. Most parents don’t believe me but one of the biggest problems is shoving information down children’s throats that are not only not interested in it or even more importantly not ready to receive it. Check out Piaget. He is so right. Some maybe even lots of children are not ready to read until they are 16. But who wants to wait until they are 16. Thats why so much talent is destroyed before they reach 16 because the powers that be want to put them in special classes that destroy their creativiity as well as their self esteem. Any teacher that believes as I still do will not have it easy in our educational system because not only do they want to suppress the child’s creativity put also the teachers. You need to support the children as well as any teacher that you find that supports this view. That is if there are any left.”

I think that most teachers should be sainted! They are doing their very best in a system designed to make it hard for them to teach! It lookes to me more like riot control than teaching when you stuff 30 small active bodies into one room!

Knowing that it is truly a gift you can give your children to homeschool them. Listening to Sir Robinson inspires me all over again each time I watch the talk. Not only that, but I get to feel all kinds of smug for protecting my cherubs from the terrors of the schoolroom

Please do tell me what your biggest Aha! from this video was - I would love to get your take on it….

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ46Ot4_lLo

There is a wonderful Homeschooling How To lesson to be learned here.

I cried as I watched this young man sing. The talent and passion are so very moving! He did not need a school or a teacher to push him into singing. It blossomed out of him. He pursued it because he wanted to. It is a marvelous example of character and persistence and also of the autodidactic philosophy.

When we homeschool our children we give them the gift of being able to follow their passions WITH support, with lessons, tools and mentors.  Imagine how this young man would have appreciated those opportunities!

That is one of the Homeschooling How To Tips: Foster your child’s passion!

Help your child discover his passion through exposure to a multiplicity of experiences and then help him to build on that strength. Help her to explore it and develope it and become truly skilled at it. This is one of the joys of homschooling!