This culminating activity is designed to help you develop a presentation or project that teaches character through the curriculum and encourages ethical reflection. Your final project may be in the form of a webpage, videography (no longer than 10 minutes), poster, brochure, song, poem, or any other instructor-approved medium.
1. Select one of the following content areas:
Math
Language Arts
Social Studies
Science
Art
Physical Sciences
Physical Education
Sports
Music
Modern Language
2. Using your selected content area, design a presentation or project that will help your students develop the cognitive side of character (performance, civic, and/or moral) by (include all of the following):
Raising ethical awareness
Creating an understanding of virtues of your chosen character type and how to apply them in concrete situations
Helping them to take the perspective of others
Helping them to reason morally (Why are some things right and others wrong?)
Helping them make thoughtful decisions (the virtue of prudence)
Helping them create self-knowledge, including the capacity for self-criticism (the virtue of humility)
3. At the end of your presentation, include a final project summary statement that addresses the following:
What are your core personal values, those virtues and elements of character that make you who you are?
What are your personal strengths as a moral model? More specifically, what moral awareness, feeling, or action do you bring to the classroom or workplace? Your home?
Who are you as a future role model or educational leader?
4. Finally, address your future. You are still learning, you will always develop, so look to the future: What's next? Now that you know more about character, what skills might still remain to be refined or added? What might you want to explore further in the arena of moral leadership?
Examples of project ideas:
A video presentation for a science classroom that is designed to teach students how to use character to accomplish tasks through teamwork.
A PowerPoint presentation for a language arts classroom that illustrates how a particular piece of literature incorporates character and how this can be analyzed in a literature study.