Teaching Character Education: What Works
New research report launched by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues
With the character development of pupils being given more prominence by both the Department for Education[1] and Ofsted[2], more and more teachers and schools are asking – how exactly do you teach character?
This latest report, published by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, provides in-depth practical insights into what works in the teaching of character in the classroom. The report considers new data as well as drawing together a decade worth of Jubilee Centre research to continue to support character education in schools.
Over the past ten years, there has been a resurgence in recognising a school’s role in enabling a child to flourish. The Jubilee Centre’s A Framework for Character Education in Schools (2017) has supported practitioners in developing their understanding of what character is, whilst also providing a shared language of virtue. This has aided schools, teachers, and professionals in developing a more explicit approach to character development. The increased interest in character education amongst schools has been accompanied by a growing demand for practical guidance that can be embedded within school settings. It is against this backdrop that the Jubilee Centre launches its latest research report, Teaching Character Education: What Works. This report combined existing insights with new research involving 477 primary and secondary school teachers and 59 character education leaders.
Character education is really, for us, the foundations of everything else that we do.
The Character Teaching Inventory is published alongside this report as a practical tool to accompany the Framework. The Inventory provides 70 character education teaching strategies which teachers perceived to have had a positive impact on their pupils’ character development. The Inventory is intended both for schools that have already begun their character education journey, and for those about to begin.
This Inventory aims to guide a leadership team and encourage the use of multiple caught, taught and sought teaching strategies across a school, making more explicit the implicit aspects of character education. Reflecting on the Inventory, former Secretary of State for Education, Baroness Nicky Morgan, writes in her foreword that ‘the strategies in this report make successful character development achievable for all schools, and that is good for all of us.’
To learn more about this project, download The Character Teaching Inventory, and to access existing resources and publications that this research builds upon, visit the Jubilee Centre website.