David Levin, cofounder of both the Relay Graduate School of Education and KIPP Charter Schools, invites teachers, administrators, and anyone with Internet access to take his free course “Teaching Character and Creating Positive Classrooms” from Coursera.org, a web-based provider of free online courses. As a middle school writing teacher in a low-income Philadelphia school, I enrolled in David Levin’s course hoping to avoid a recurring frustration with character education programs. The latest character curriculum championed by my administration often arrives prepackaged, all-included and top-down with little room for flexibility. I would often have to abandon cherished classroom strategies to follow the rigid new protocol. This was contrary to my instincts—every year as a teacher I felt most successful at influencing my students’ character after adopting then adapting strategies from psychological research to complement the other systems and structures in my classroom. What could explain my frustration? Was this indicative of urban education, the way my administration rolled out new programs, or the field of character education? This article explores, from a teacher’s perspective, how David Levin’s course, and the entire field, could benefit from recognizing where and when teachers could adapt such strategies to even better address the needs of their students. Such a change could have tremendous benefits for teachers like me who often see fascinating discoveries in basic research become overly simple and scripted to offer quick results in our complex and dynamic classroom settings. I have divided David Levin’s course into its four main parts. I evaluate each part in terms of its connection to academic research on character education before addressing how I wish David Levin and other scholars in the field reformed their pedagogical strategies to benefit the many teachers who feel the way I do.Levin believes, like me, that education should do more than instill academic information; it should leave students happier and with the habits of self-discipline to succeed in the workforce and beyond. His goal is PERMA, an approach to well-being articulated by positive psychologist Martin Seligman in his book, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (2011). To promote PERMA is to promote:In the first week’s lessons, Levin interviews Seligman who says, “If you increase PERMA, you increase how much kids learn in school. If you increase how much they learn, you increase PERMA.”The symbiotic relationship between academic achievement and well-being is nourished by teachers cultivating, and students discovering, their 24 character strengths (see the Figure 1).Martin Seligman’s Flourish (2011) details the research and interventions that he and his colleagues have conducted across a variety of schools and student populations. From class gratitude letters for supportive adults to analyses of the character of famous historical figures, Seligman’s interventions supplement subject area and school wide efforts to boost well-being and achievement. From the best of my exploration through the scientific literature, this framework seems pretty solid. There is a large body of science that shows a reciprocal relationship between academic achievement, intrinsic motivation, and well-being (Ryan Ryan ). Additionally, many of the 24 character strengths are conceptually related to other psychological phenomena like perseverance, interest development and self-regulation, all of which promote academic achievement and motivation (Farrington et al., 2010). As a teacher, the course’s goals seem not only compatible with the academic instruction required of me but a great way to facilitate learning. Helping students to build awareness of their virtues could certainly help students visualize how to connect learning to their capabilities and future aspirations.While “virtue” represents a rather nebulous term, something between a talent and a personality trait, such a construct can be found across cultures and contexts—see Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman’s Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004) for detailed exploration of the topic. Perhaps most appealing about the concept of virtues is that it recognizes a middle ground when discussing human capabilities. Measurements of intelligence, such as IQ scores, share only small correlations with occupational success, academic grades, and even income (Stanovich, 2010). Other construals of intelligence, such as multiple intelligence theory, are equally problematic because it fails to separate a person’s situation-specific ability (or “talent”) from a person’s centralized cognitive processing ability (or “intelligence”) (Willingham, 2009). Coherently packaging all human capabilities into 24 character strengths may seem a bit contrived and under representative of the diversity of human thought, but it provides a practical language to describe a diversity of academically important abilities grounded in scientific research.Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of well-being is also very similar to other well-validated measures of well-being, such as psychological well-being and subjective well-being. As Table 1 indicates, the elements of PERMA are more similar than different to the components of other models of happiness.All things considered, I think Levin’s framework for education proves a suitable framework for educators interested in promoting the well-being of their students. Given the nexus of learning, well-being, and motivation, preferring Levin’s call for PERMA, character strengths, and academic achievement seems warranted. In fact, this underlying approach represents the very reason I and many other educators in my school continue to teach. I am an educator in a dramatically underfunded and underperforming Philadelphia school. The most successful teachers I admire recognize that academic achievement is too simple an end goal. It must be paired with relevancy, personal growth and pleasurable learning experiences for students to fully realize why people from Charles Darwin to Beyonce have happily immersed themselves in their crafts.But some warning signs have popped into my head during this portion of Levin’s course that remind me of my more dissatisfying experiences with character education programs. Virtues appear to be a promising construct to celebrate with students as long as educators and parents recognize that not all aptitudes neatly fall into 24 character virtues (public speaking skills or metacognitive ability, for example). Given American cultural norms that often emphasize test scores, grades, and how classmates compare to their peers, a more broad scope for child development provides a productive step toward creating more positive classrooms. But if the 24 character virtues become regarded as the new holy grail of education, what was emancipatory becomes suppressive. I have seen teachers and administrators paradoxically overlook students’ ability to create their own practice tests, translate confusing directions into a new classmate’s native language or challenge a teacher’s way of grading an essay because it did not neatly fit into the tracking and incentive system of our very rigid character education system. Finding our uniqueness is certainly a necessary element of self-actualization and well-being. Recognizing 24 character virtues over GPA sees the forest for the trees when it comes to student potential and achievement. We also cannot let the forest distract us from the greater biome of human capacities and strengths. I doubt American icons, like Abraham Lincoln to Mae Jemison, could have had their success boiled down to just 24 traits.Levin offers several big picture recommendations to promote positive classrooms. The first involves a trifecta of emphasizing how intelligence and academic abilities can change with hard work (growth mindset), offering encouraging feedback even when a student offers either a correct or incorrect response (constructive responding), and framing this current moment in the classroom with the 24 character virtues, whether it be demonstrating grit by working hard to get the correct answer or zest by excitingly approaching the remainder of the lesson. He calls this the micromoment triangle, which is reprinted below in Figure 2.For example, a video from a KIPP Charter School classroom features a student who was presented with a task framed as a challenging but solvable math problem (growth mindset).The student was recognized and encouraged for her correct answer and her effort that led her to the correct answer (constructive responding), and she was asked to share which character strength she exemplified, namely grit (character behavior language). Levin’s micromoment triangle introduces teachers with a way to build character, positivity, and academic ability simultaneously.In isolation, each part of Levin’s model has ample research to back it up. Not only has research demonstrated that students find curricula that involve character virtues engaging (Steen, Kachoreck, Toner, Haslam, Robinson, Weber White it would be recognizing and tracking their own growth on a spectrum of essay writing skills. Capturing the tenacity of rewriting essays drafts based on teacher and peer feedback in a simple question, answer, explanation format would prove challenging to do in front of a 40-student class. Constructive responding would become more like Constructive conversations. As the complexity of the academic product increases, so too does the complexity of the academic feedback. (I am sure any professor who has helped graduate students edit papers for publication can attest to this.) Given my context as an educator who sees many good educational practices become overused precisely because they were effective initially, I wish David Levin, and his contemporaries influencing character education across the nation, would explain that his micromoment triangle should adapt alongside the instruction.While Levin’s micromoment triangle deals with how teachers deliver a lesson, his macromoment structures tackle the lesson being Levin as system or that explicitly or He that lessons the academic content and skills of the subject with the content of PERMA and the character For example, in the in his course an teacher has students essay drafts to promote an school teacher the of norms during to promote and school teacher the class to the character strengths of a a on and character research on character education to the of the of this who found themselves speaking different each the field of and character is with research and interventions that in and strategies to the of a While research has that are successful character building schools and classroom little is if these changes are long or what psychological make some more effective than & David Levin the three of teachers creating their own character education interventions in their certainly fall to the of are intelligence, and other character education in very different am not a so I cannot to how problematic or promising it is for teachers to create their own character education strategies in their which is what the very macromoment strategy As a teacher, such an approach is not what could be more complex than building and human intelligence in my English class would require in how students work it translate to the more in a education class. 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Dan LaSalle (Mon,) studied this question.