THE ASPEN INSTITUTE

ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL 2012

CAN CHARACTER BE TAUGHT?

Doerr-Hosier CenterAspen Meadows Campus

Colorado, 81612

Sunday, July 1, 2012

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LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

ANDREA MITCHELL Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for NBC News Host of MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports

DOMINIC RANDOLPH Sixth Head of the Riverdale Country School Former Assistant Headmaster at the Lawrenceville School

PAUL TOUGH Author of How Children Succeed: Rethinking Character and Intelligence, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America, Editor at The New York Times Magazine and Harper's Magazine, Reporter and Producer for the Public-Radio Program This American Life.

RUSSELL SHAW Head of Georgetown Day School Former Legislative Assistant to Congressman Henry Waxman, Former Outward Bound Instructor

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P R O C E E D I N G S

(1:15 p.m.)

MS. MITCHELL: I am so happy to be here and so

excited to read -- first of all, having read the article

by Paul Tough and excited about reading his book, Can

Character Be Taught. A lot of new thinking on this; Paul

is on the cutting edge of what's being done in this arena.

And we at NBC are partnering this year with Aspen, with

the Ideas Festival, for our Education Nation panels,

leading in our case to a summit in New York City in the

fall for Education Nation; you'll see these on your seats.

So we're looking forward to continuing this

conversation and in fact, I think you've sat down already

with Brain Williams and been talking about some of these

issues with him as well for Rock Center. Can character be

taught? Can schools teach character, should they? What

do we mean by character anyway?

Paul Tough, for those who didn't see the New

York Times piece, is a journalist and author of Whatever

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It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and

America as well as this new book coming out as we say in

September, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the

Hidden Power of Character. His work has appeared in the

New York Times, the magazine cover story entitled What if

the Secret to Success is Failure?

Dominic Randolph is the head of school at

Riverdale Country School, a pre-K through twelfth grade

independent school, about 1,100 students, located in New

York City. Dominic began thinking about character

education when he moved to the United States. He was

educated at British boarding schools where there was as

much focus on teaching character as there was on teaching

academic subjects.

And Russell Shaw, known to many of you, I think,

in this audience from the Washington area is the head of

school at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown Day incorporates character

education in its day instruction and a belief that school

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curriculum is as important -- that the character

curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.

So let's talk about what we mean by character.

In this case, we're not talking about what you would think

of character, honesty, truth, judgment. We're thinking

about something else when I throw out the words to you,

conscientiousness, grit, resilience, perseverance,

optimism, resourcefulness, professionalism, integrity,

self control, willpower, zest, gratitude, curiosity,

social intelligence. As we go through this discussion,

we'll see that those words have a particular significance

when we talk about teaching character in education.

Paul, what does your research show and how did

you come to this? And largely, we want to also talk about

the work that Dave Levin has done with KIPP, because he

was key to this, in bringing this into the KIPP schools

and in going to the research done by Martin Seligman at

the University of Pennsylvania.

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MR. TOUGH: So when I started working on this

book, I was starting from this idea that there were skills

out there that seemed to matter in kids' success that

didn't have to do with IQ. It didn't have to do with

scores on straight cognitive tests. But there aren't a

lot of good words for those skills. And so I start -- my

first inroads into this idea was through economics and

economists called these noncognitive skills.

So for a while I thought I was writing a book

about noncognitive skills. The problem with the

phrase "noncognitive skills," one is that it puts

everybody right to sleep and the other is that when you

talk to psychologists who are also very involved in this,

they point out that some of these so-called noncognitive

skills are, in fact, cognitive so that noncognitive skills

is a really, really bad word for it.

And then I met Dave Levin of KIPP and Dominic

Randolph of Riverdale and I found that they were embarked

on this project to try to teach some of these noncognitive

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skills and they had a different word for it and that

phrase was character strengths. But the character

strengths that they were talking about were very similar

to the noncognitive skills that these economists were

talking about, things like perseverance, grit, gratitude,

curiosity, self control, things that we've learned through

the scientific method can actually predict how well kids

do in school.

So that was the word I started using; character

instead of noncognitive skills. The problem with

character is that it is a word that most of us think of as

something fixed, that character is something you get at

birth and never really changes, and they are talking about

a very different definition of character as something that

is very malleable, something you can learn, something you

can teach, something that parents absolutely instill in

their kids but that teachers can teach as well.

And so the more time that I spent with them, the

more I came to believe that what they're doing is exactly

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what these economists were looking for, ways to instill

exactly the skills that kids need to succeed in all sorts

of ways.

MS. MITCHELL: And Dominic, you were working

with Dave Levin.

MR. RANDOLPH: Right.

MS. MITCHELL: And you were searching for a way

to teach this?

MR. RANDOLPH: Yeah.

MS. MITCHELL: And you found that there as

actually an academic bible of this, Seligman's work and

then Angela Duckworth, his student and now a professor as

well.

MR. RANDOLPH: Right.

MS. MITCHELL: So tell me a little bit about the

practical application at Riverdale.

MR. RANDOLPH: Right.

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MS. MITCHELL: And as you have had experience

through your own students and through working with Dave at

the KIPP Schools.

MR. RANDOLPH: Right. So let me -- I'll tell

you just a bit about the process whereby we -- the sort of

sheet that was handed out of character, the sort of

character growth card. That's actually what we developed

with Angela, Marty Seligman, Chris Peterson, you know,

mainly Upenn out of the Positive Psychology Center.

And it looks like a very simple list, but it

actually really took us about 2 to 3 years of discussion

and trying out how to take some of Marty Seligman's ideas

in positive psychology, which really do annunciate along

with Chris Peterson a set of 24 strengths that sort of

supposedly encompasses all of human endeavor, lots of

different belief systems, lots of different philosophies.

And so we tried to see if we could -- how we'd

extrapolate, how we get into discussion to see how we take

that and move that into a school in a real way and it took

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us some time to figure that out. We were interested. We

didn't feel that we could actually work at KIPP and

Riverdale, two very different schools with some overlap in

populations with kids. You know, I've got kids on

financial aid who are coming from KIPP to Riverdale.

How could we bring a common set of strengths

that we were going to focus in on in two very different

schools? So we spent a long time trying to hash out if we

could knock it down from 24 to some manageable list and

basically got down to this, the list that you have in

front of you that's got ones like optimism, curiosity.

We were very interested, as sort of Paul was

saying and Andrea was talking about, of moving away from

the sort of moral character of honesty and, you know,

integrity that seemed very, very vague and trying to make

it much more concrete. And so even though that looks

really simple, the way that we actually got the indicators

and I'd really point you to look on that sort of right-

hand side of the sheet of the student behaviors was, let's

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say for optimism, we asked kids, faculty, parents, what is

it like when you're optimistic.

And we got lists of over 200 to 300 behaviors,

then basically we -- the Upenn group, statisticians have

knocked it down to about 50 nonredundant behaviors and

then we went through ano