Character Compass: Four Directions for Building Powerful School Culture and Student Success

The popular volume on the power of character development in the classroom now features new chapters on intellectual risk-taking and open-mindedness, plus student, teacher, and school leader reflections on the value of the practice Character Compass, Second Edition returns to three, high-performing urban schools in Boston to reassess their distinct commitments to character education. Classical Academy prizes moral character, College Bound Middle School emphasizes performance character, and Civitas Prep prioritizes civic character. To this group, Scott Seider, Shelby Clark, and Madora Soutter add Bright Ideas Middle School, which champions intellectual character. They describe the ways in which these four school's distinctive character goals lead them to emphasize different programming and practices and to nurture different dimensions of their students' characters. Seider, Clark, and Soutter reconnect with the students that were interviewed more than a decade ago to ask how character education influenced their trajectories, and they invite the volume's original school leaders to share how their thinking has and has not changed. Their research reaffirms the foundational strength of character education in building a powerful school culture where students can thrive, and a new case-study on a school emphasizing intellectual character broadens the framework's reach. With its rare longitudinal and retrospective perspective, Character Compass, Second Edition provides K-2 educators and school leaders with powerful guidance for making character development central to their mission of supporting student success. Updates also help practitioners hone their chosen approach to best complement their own unique institutional commitments, community, and context.