We All Do Better When We All Do Better: A Youth-Led Character Education Program

In this article we describe a year-long character education program where a 5th grade class and teacher took the lead in developing a character education program that focused on responsibility, respect and caring behavior. Students in the school developed rubrics for the three character traits and evaluated their classrooms each week to determine how they were doing. Comparing data from the first half of the year to the last half, they discovered that the program did yield some positive directions about their growth in good, better, and best indicators. Results showed that they seemed to "do better when they all did better."