This book is a clear, concise, holistic resource for classroom teachers, with a thoughtful collection of approaches to integrating character education into daily learning and school life.

Winner of the 2023 Outstanding Book Award from AERA's Moral Development and Education SIG! In PRIMED for Character Education, renowned character educator Marvin W Berkowitz boils down decades of research on evidence-based practices and thought-provoking field experience into a clear set of principles that leaders, administrators, and teacher-leaders can implement to help students thrive. The author’s original six-component framework offers a comprehensive guide to shaping purposeful learning environments, healthy relationships, core values and virtues, role models, empowerment, and long-term development in any PreK-12 school or district. This engaging and heartfelt book features tips for practice, anecdotes from award-winning schools, and straightforward tenets from moral education, social-emotional learning, and positive psychology.

Promote a climate of trust, academic growth, and positive behavior by launching each school day with a whole class gathering. This comprehensive, user-friendly book shows you how to hold Responsive ClassroomMorning Meetings, a powerful teaching tool used by hundreds of thousands of teachers in K-8 schools. In the new edition of this essential text, you'll find: Step-by-step, practical guidelines for planning and holding Responsive Classroom Morning Meetings in K-8 classroomsDescriptions of Morning Meeting in action in real classrooms100 ideas for greetings, sharing, activities, and messages: some tried-and-true and some newUpdated information on sharingGuidance on adapting meeting components for different ages and abilities, including upper grades and English Language Learners.Explanations of how Morning Meeting supports mastery of Common Core State Standards, 21st century skills, and core competencies enumerated by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

Combines character education and physical education in forty-three community-building fitness activities that meet NASPE standards, and includes reproducible forms for portfolio assessment.

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

A sweeping new look at the unheralded transformation that is eroding the foundations of American exceptionalism. Americans today find themselves mired in an era of uncertainty and frustration. The nation's safety net is pulling apart under its own weight; political compromise is viewed as a form of defeat; and our faith in the enduring concept of American exceptionalism appears increasingly outdated. But the American Age may not be ending. In The Vanishing Neighbor, Marc J. Dunkelman identifies an epochal shift in the structure of American life—a shift unnoticed by many. Routines that once put doctors and lawyers in touch with grocers and plumbers—interactions that encouraged debate and cultivated compromise—have changed dramatically since the postwar era. Both technology and the new routines of everyday life connect tight-knit circles and expand the breadth of our social landscapes, but they've sapped the commonplace, incidental interactions that for centuries have built local communities and fostered healthy debate. The disappearance of these once-central relationships—between people who are familiar but not close, or friendly but not intimate—lies at the root of America's economic woes and political gridlock. The institutions that were erected to support what Tocqueville called the "township"—that unique locus of the power of citizens—are failing because they haven't yet been molded to the realities of the new American community. It's time we moved beyond the debate over whether the changes being made to American life are good or bad and focus instead on understanding the tradeoffs. Our cities are less racially segregated than in decades past, but we’ve become less cognizant of what's happening in the lives of people from different economic backgrounds, education levels, or age groups. Familiar divisions have been replaced by cross-cutting networks—with profound effects for the way we resolve conflicts, spur innovation, and care for those in need. The good news is that the very transformation at the heart of our current anxiety holds the promise of more hope and prosperity than would have been possible under the old order. The Vanishing Neighbor argues persuasively that to win the future we need to adapt yesterday’s institutions to the realities of the twenty-first-century American community.

Throughout history, and in cultures all over the world, education rightly conceived has had two great goals: to help students become smart and to help them become good. They need character for both. Smart & Good High Schools, a 227-page "report to the nation" by Thomas Lickona and Matthew Davidson based on two years of research on American high schools, describes nearly 100 promising practices for developing adolescent character. These practices are organized around a vision aimed at encouraging a paradigm shift in character education: from focusing only on moral character to focusing on both performance character (needed for best work) and moral character (needed for ethical behavior). The report's research included visits to 24 diverse high schools, a comprehensive research review, and the input of a National Experts Panel and a National Student Leaders Panel. --Publisher description.

Children in today's world are inundated with information about who to be, what to do and how to live. But what if there was a way to teach children how to manage priorities, focus on goals and be a positive influence on the world around them? The Leader in Meis that programme. It's based on a hugely successful initiative carried out at the A.B. Combs Elementary School in North Carolina. To hear the parents of A. B Combs talk about the school is to be amazed. In 1999, the school debuted a programme that taught The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleto a pilot group of students. The parents reported an incredible change in their children, who blossomed under the programme. By the end of the following year the average end-of-grade scores had leapt from 84 to 94. This book will launch the message onto a much larger platform. Stephen R. Covey takes the 7 Habits, that have already changed the lives of millions of people, and shows how children can use them as they develop. Those habits -- be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek to understand and then to be understood, synergize, and sharpen the saw -- are critical skills to learn at a young age and bring incredible results, proving that it's never too early to teach someone how to live well.

The educational system in the United States has ended its failed experiment with separating the intellectual from the moral. Schools from K–12 to colleges and universities are increasingly paying attention to students' values and character. But how can we ensure this new era in character education makes the right kind of difference to young people? What obstacles in our current educational system must we overcome, and what new opportunities can we create? This anthology offers unique perspectives on what is needed to make character education an effective, lasting part of our educational agenda. Each chapter points out the directions that character education must take today and offers strategies essential for progress. The expert contributors reveal why relativism has threatened the moral development of young people in our time—and how we can pass core values down to new generations of students in ways that will elevate their conduct and their life goals. And they show the critical importance of reestablishing student morality and character as targets of higher education's central mission. Perhaps most important, they clarify the necessity of authority in any moral education endeavor—and show how it is a powerful force for developing personal freedom and building character.