Sport plays a crucial role in personal and collective development, reflecting core values and serving as a platform for holistic growth. As athletics, especially intercollegiate sports, face increasing pressures and challenges, the need for leadership training and character development has become more critical than ever. This article emphasizes…

The highest form of virtuous behavior in the Aristotelian virtue ethics approach to character education involves practical wisdom, or "phronesis," which allows an individual to act in the right way about the right things for the right reasons. Here, we use our experiences with social-emotional and character development (SECD) in…

Urie Bronfenbrenner is almost certainly best known for his theoretical writings about the ecology of human development. His interest in theory was not, however, separate from his practical concerns, particularly those related to early education and care of children and the families and teachers who interact with them. From the role that he played…

In the past two decades, psychologists, educators, and economists have shown that social stratification creates social inequalities that have long-term detrimental effects on children's physical, emotional, and academic development. The segregation of social networks, as well as experiences of social inequality in the form of prejudice and bias,…

This article embeds the study of character development within the two-decades-long research program framed by the Lerner and Lerner model of positive youth development. Character development involves attaining the feelings, thoughts, and skills needed to act coherently across time and place to serve self and others in mutually beneficial, positive…

In this article I propose that curriculum and instruction are inextricably intertwined, curriculum development should be an important function of educational supervision, and supervision should foster a multidimensional curriculum developed by teachers. The proposed curriculum framework includes cognitive, social-emotional, moral, cultural,…

There is a growing demand for equal support of social-emotional learning across the globe. In the United States, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning has shed significant light on the power of affective development for school-aged children, indicating that, without it, students are limited in their ability to reach their…

Virtual environments have the potential to be an important teaching tool for emotionally sensitive issues capable of producing a sense of presence, perspective-taking and introspection in users in a risk-free, rapid feedback experience. In designing such experiences, it is essential that users are regularly engaged in a collaborative design…

"Conflict Narratives in Middle Childhood" presents evidence from twenty years of research, examining nearly 3,000 narratives from 1,600 children in eight settings in two countries about their own experiences with interpersonal conflict. Close readings, combined with systematic analysis of dozens of features of the stories reveal that…

Character development has become an important component of physical education that contributes directly to the affective learning domain. However, teaching character development can be challenging. The purpose of this article is to suggest that character development be promoted through the teaching of wrestling, due to the unique moral development…

Contemporary culture has wrought profound changes--especially in the lives of children. In today's world, more than ever, schools need to think about what it takes to educate children to be psychologically healthy and of good character, to give them the tools that will enable them to find meaning in their lives both in school and after they…

Sometimes a single word changes everything. In his groundbreaking book "Choice Words", Peter Johnston demonstrated how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. Now, in "Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives", Peter shows how the words teachers choose affect the worlds students…

Far from being unthinking energies or irrational impulses that control or push people around, emotions are intricately connected to the way people perceive, understand, and think about the world. As such, emotions are also an inextricable part of people's moral lives. As people go about making moral judgments and decisions, they do not merely…

As the United States has struggled to answer the question of what education for the 21st century must look like, most states have now responded by signing onto the Common Core Standards. Drawn from lessons learned from a generation of standards-based education and research on what high-performing countries do to enable young people to prosper, it…

This chapter presents a brief introduction to the developmental and educational literature linking children's moral emotions to cognitive moral development. A central premise of the chapter is that an integrative developmental perspective on moral emotions and moral cognition provides an important conceptual framework for understanding children's…