Character and Competence At Almaden Country School, we believe a competent student is one who not only learns factual information, but also develops achievement skills and positive character traits. Factual information is what typically comes to mind when thinking about what students learn at school—math, science, and history, for example. Factual information forms the basis of grade-level academic standards and provides the content for standardized tests. Almaden Country School students excel at learning factual information. Imagine a student, however, who understands academic facts, but doesn’t know how to set goals, manage time, or apply those facts to a new set of variables. These are achievement skills, and they allow students to use their academic knowledge constructively. Almaden Country School proactively teaches achievement skills in addition to traditional academics. Beyond factual information and achievement skills, there is still more for a student to learn before becoming truly competent. The media are full of examples of intelligent men and women who have achieved much in life, but who have done so in ways that can hurt either themselves or others. They have missed developing the third part of competence: character. At Almaden Country School, we proactively teach students how to make decisions that help, rather than harm themselves or other people. Just as we have curricula for learning traditional academics, we also have a schoolwide curriculum for developing character traits. These are qualities such as empathy, honesty, integrity, and social awareness. Students meet weekly to discuss ethical issues from their own experience. Teachers actively teach and model positive character traits, then help students apply those traits to their own classroom behaviors. As a result, students create a very cohesive classroom culture, where they feel accountable to each other for helpful behavior. In such an environment, students then feel safe to take the risks necessary to break through their own limits and take “competence” to new heights. |
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