A Final Note From Angela
The partnership between Character Lab and Education Week commenced in April 2020 in the early days of the pandemic. So much has happened in the intervening four years.
Now, as Character Lab prepares to , this wonderful partnership, too, must come to an end. It is with gratitude and joy that we look back on nearly 200 co-published articles鈥攁ll written for teachers seeking actionable advice, based on science, for helping kids thrive.
Here is the last of these articles, published at as our final Tip of the Week:
Here鈥檚 an adage you may have heard before:
Watch your thoughts, for they become your words.
Watch your words, for they become your actions.
Watch your actions, for they become your habits.
Watch your habits, for they become your character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
Aristotle likewise conjectured that character is the sum of our acquired habits. Good character, he argued, was consistently acting, thinking, and feeling in ways that are beneficial to others as well as ourselves.
What does psychological science have to add to these age-old questions: What is character? And why does it matter?
Like scientists who study anything, scientists who study character find plenty to disagree about. One area of unanimous agreement, however, is that character is plural.
Any parent who makes a list of the qualities they hope their children will grow up to embody will want a long piece of paper to do it.
In my , I find three families of character strengths.
Strengths of heart encourage relating to other people in positive ways. They are interpersonal鈥攅ither in the sense of an ethical and loving posture toward friends, family, and close others or in the sense of civic virtue, including our duty to our neighbors, our country, and the world beyond our borders.
Character Lab is grateful to the scientists who wrote our Playbooks on , , , , , and .
Strengths of mind encourage active and open-minded thinking. In this day and age, these intellectual virtues may seem in short supply. All the more reason to intentionally support their development.
Character Lab thanks the scientists who wrote Playbooks on , , , , and .
Strengths of will encourage the achievement of goals. These are intrapersonal insofar as they enable you to triumph over self-doubt, indecision, inertia, and other obstacles to a desired future.
Character Lab is proud to share its scientist-authored Playbooks on , , , and .
There was a time when your character was assumed to be an inherited disposition that, good or bad, would never change. But modern research suggests the opposite. As Eleanor Roosevelt has been credited with saying: 鈥淐haracter building begins in our infancy and continues until death.鈥�
At any age鈥攁nd most critically during our formative years鈥攐ur interpersonal, intellectual, and intrapersonal habits can be cultivated. This is why our 15 Playbooks include over 200 specific 鈥攁ctionable advice, based on science鈥攆or how to do so.
Although Character Lab as a nonprofit is sunsetting this June, the content we have curated will continue to be available at . And so will the blog at this very URL. The sun has only just begun to rise on the vision of a psychologically wise adult in the life of every child鈥攁 possibility that promises to make the world a better place for everyone.
顿辞苍鈥檛 assume that character is fixed. And don鈥檛 get hung up on whether is 鈥渃haracter鈥� or 鈥渟ocial-emotional competencies鈥� or 鈥渘oncognitive skills.鈥� A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Do model, celebrate, and enable character strengths of heart, mind, and will. When he was just 18 years old, Martin Luther King Jr. had the wisdom to declare: 鈥淲e must remember that intelligence is not enough. 鈥攖hat is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.鈥�
With endless gratitude,
Angela
