CHARACTER COUNTS! focuses on building students’ character skills and shaping a positive school culture. Our flexible framework emphasizes:
Administrators, educators, and families want safe, supportive, high-performing schools. By prioritizing character development and positive school culture, schools can see improvement in students’ character, social-emotional, and academic skills, and ensure their school is a safe and welcoming learning environment.
CHARACTER COUNTS! helps students develop the Six Pillars of Character:
Trustworthiness
Have integrity, be honest, keep promises, and be loyal to values
Respect
Show acceptance and respect for others
Responsibility
Be accountable for actions, show perseverance and self-discipline
Fairness
Be open-minded and demonstrate good sportsmanship
Caring
Show compassion, gratitude, and forgiveness
Good Citizenship
Dedication to making choices that protect the safety and rights of others.
When students develop character skills, they’ll be more likely to achieve their personal, school, and career goals and become engaged, responsible, and productive citizens. You’ll notice more:
Learn more about the Six Pillars of Character.
CHARACTER COUNTS! helps students develop key social-emotional skills:
Self-Awareness
Identify and understand emotions, values, attitudes, motivations, mindsets, and personal attributes
Self-Management
Regulate emotions, attitudes, and actions, and resist negative emotions and impulses
Relationship Skills
Create positive relationships and meaningful connections with family members, classmates, and teachers
Responsible Decision-Making
Make decisions based on rationality, ethics, and effectiveness
Social Awareness
Assess the feelings of others and be sensitive to the feelings and needs of others
When students develop social-emotional skills, they’ll be more likely to develop positive, healthy relationships, manage their emotions, and make good choices. You’ll notice more:
CHARACTER COUNTS! helps students develop skills to be more successful in academics.
Critical and Creative Thinking
Acquire, remember, understand, and apply knowledge
Curiosity and Passion
Enthusiastic to understand more about themselves, others, and the world around them
Effective Problem-Solving
Make rational, ethical, and effective decisions to find the best solutions to problems
Self-Direction and Engagement
Fully engaged in the educational process and connected to the school community
Diligent Learner
Have a growth mindset and is willing to learn from mistakes
When students develop these skills, they can reach their intellectual and academic potential. You’ll notice:
CHARACTER COUNTS! helps create a school culture where students, administration, faculty, and staff are:
Committed to Excellence
Value collaboration and feedback in order to grow and improve
Supportive and Respectful
Treat each other with respect, every student is connected to a caring, responsible adult in the school, and staff feel supported by the administration
Safe
Contribute to making the school a safe place to learn; a proactive, instructive, and restorative approach to student behavior.
Dedicated to Stakeholders
Commitment to ensuring students’ mastery of academic content and character development.
Accepting and Encouraging
Ownership of creating a positive, welcoming learning environment where everyone can feel accepted and part of the school community
Inspired
Appreciate and trust other school community members and dedicated to making the school better
When schools focus on character development and educators teach, enforce, advocate, and model school values, you’ll notice:
GRADUATION
RATES
ELEMENTARY MATH PROFICIENCY
ELEMENTARY ENGLISH PROFICIENCY
2-year implementation results, Buffalo Schools (New York)
We’re here to provide support and best practices for character development and culture shaping. With the CHARACTER COUNTS! framework as a guide, we provide practical, research-based strategies, curricular resources, and professional development training. We’ll also provide best practices on incorporating CHARACTER COUNTS! into your existing character development or SEL program.
Our team can help evaluate your needs and select services to meet your goals.
The success of any character education program is directly tied to the fidelity and consistency of its implementation. We offer two types of assessments:
Our interactive, professional development workshops provide strategies to teach the Six Pillars through our TEAM approach and research-based tools.
Workshops include:
Our team can collaborate with you on:
Consultations are a great way to keep your CC! program on track and provide your team with new ideas to help make you successful.
We offer a variety of character education curricular resources in our online store, including:
Our Digital Classroom provides character education activities that can be filtered by grade level and topic.
Check out our Digital Classroom.
Let’s talk about how we can help you reach your goals.
Teach children that their character counts. Teach character skills and what they look like in action.
Enforce and encourage good character. Reward good behavior and discourage bad behavior by imposing fair and consistent consequences.
Advocate character. Continually encourage children to show good character by explaining and showing why it matters.
Model good behavior. Everything you say and do sends a message about your values. Be sure that these messages reinforce doing the right thing, even when it is difficult. When you slip, be accountable; apologize sincerely, and do better!
The Good Ideas book is full of engaging lessons and activities designed to infuse character development into your classroom. The variety of lessons allows teachers to customize and select instruction based on the learning needs of their classroom.
Each lesson can be done as a stand-alone activity, in conjunction with other lessons, or as a supplement to your already established character education program.
Good Ideas is available in print or digital. Versions are also available in Spanish.
2702 Forest Avenue
Des Moines, IA 50311
515-271-1910
RayCenter@Drake.edu
© 2024 The Robert D. and Billie Ray Center at Drake University.