If our aim is long-term flourishing for our students, then we all care about helping kids discover their aspirations, build goals backward from those aspirations, and remain committed to those goals on a regular basis. And yet, the further you get down the list of those skills, the greater the challenge becomes for our kids: Defining the big […]
Character Strengths
Character Strengths, Integrity, and My Three-Year-Old
As I was brushing Laura’s teeth last Saturday morning, which happened to be the morning of Halloween, I listened to her titter about how excited she was because, later that day, she was “gonna be Anna!!!” from Frozen. As we were talking about it, I wanted to remind her that it was her Grandpa and Grandma Stuart who had bought the […]
Two Kinds of Curiosity and the One that Science Supports
I’ve mentioned before that there are two kinds of curiosity: fruitful and fruitless. Fruitful curiosity Fruitful curiosity is that which we efficiently act upon as we’re studying a subject. In my survey world history course, I’m reading about the five pillars of Islam in our World History textbook, and it mentions the hajj to Mecca, so […]
Submit an Idea for Cultivating Character; Win a $10,000 Grant
In case you haven’t heard, Character Lab is now accepting proposals for a new year of the Teacher Innovation Grant (TIG). You can learn more about TIG here, or just read these bulleted highlights: What you need to provide prior to the 11/2/15 deadline: an idea for developing one or more character strengths in your classroom; […]
21 Ideas for Developing the Motivational Character Strengths
In “The Character Strengths and Motivation,” I laid out the 4.5 character strengths that I consider motivational in nature, and, at the end of the post, I laid out an example of the kind of “self-experimentation” we can use to learn how to teach our students to develop the “motivational strengths” in themselves (because marshaling one’s […]