This week we completed a monumental project: Critical Educational Outcomes: Model Standards for Academic, Social, Emotional, and Character Development. These standards, the first-ever effort to integrate all major educational outcomes, form the backbone of the new CHARACTER COUNTS! 4.0, a fully integrated school improvement and student development system any school can use. If you are an educator, please print them out and share them with your colleagues by sending them the above link .
We have received enthusiastic feedback from educators who have found value in this coherent and compact summary of academic, social, emotional and character outcomes schools are expected to produce. The document incorporates the essence of Common Core, 21st Century Skills, and social/emotional learning. It draws on the latest research and findings in the areas of executive functioning, growth mindset, change theory, the whole child, emotional intelligence, cognitive development, and instructional strategies. It represents hundreds of hours of work. We hope
you will take the time to read it. It will help you understand how CHARACTER COUNTS! has evolved and how its capacity to transform schools has grown. If you have been using CHARACTER COUNTS!, you will want to “upgrade” to this new platform. (Not upgrading to CHARACTER COUNTS! 4.0 is like staying on Windows 3.0 when Windows 8 is available.)
How to upgrade? Attend a Character Development Seminar. We’ve modified this three-day training to reflect everything contained in this document.
Up next: We’re working on a new “matrix” that will help you achieve these critical educational outcomes. We’re also developing a variety of new products that will reflect the Model Standards and the matrix.
Our training at the end of the month in Colombia will be based on these Model Standards (the document is being translated into Spanish now), and all future CHARACTER COUNTS! trainings and workshops in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Nigeria, and Costa Rica will be based on the educational outcomes articulated in this document.
Your feedback is always welcome — feel free to post a comment below.