The point of teaching kids to develop self-control isn’t to get them to obey or comply or behave as if they’re in a prison. Such caricaturizations or misapplications of instruction around self-control miss it all. Rather, self-control is about helping our kids do what they need to do so they can get where they want […]
character strengths
Babies, Bathwater, and Grit
I was sitting in an evening meeting some months ago, one of those situations where a sampling of K-12 teachers are brought in to share their two cents about where they’d like the district to go. We were in table groups, and the facilitator had just asked us to brainstorm a list of adjectives to […]
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 […]
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 […]