What do you teach?
It’s a trick question, of course. You’re supposed to answer by identifying your core teaching area or year level, only to be corrected by the smug questioner who says “I teach children”, or some such.
I hate it when people do that to me!
Let’s start again.
Who do you teach? And what are you teaching them?
For me, over the course of my career, the answers to these questions have changed. I’d like to tell you how and why.
In 1995-1996, I had a rare opportunity to teach two senior groups the same Modern History course in parallel over two years. By then, I’d been teaching since 1988 and had gained sufficient mastery of the content and the fundamentals of classroom management to feel as though I could teach.
I’d learned that the respect of learners had to be grounded in deep knowledge of the intersection between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. I understand now from my recent research program in South Africa that this is the “valuable knowledge” that students prize as the playbook for the game of school. It’s this combination of aspiration and pathways to success what drives achievement in the classroom, examinations and post-school pathways. So much of this is the “secret sauce” of character learning that we at CIRCLE Education discovered in our global study of character education in 2016.
"It was an apprenticeship in how to be an historian and how to contribute one’s own thinking. It was all based on a process of becoming the type of person who is committed to telling true stories of the past through good judgment."
There’s another ingredient to this secret sauce: a sense of kinship born of meaningful relationships bound together with a unity of purpose. By 1995, I knew enough to believe that a connection to and a concurrent commitment to build knowledge about the learners themselves by me as the teacher and (more importantly) the other students in the class enabled the development of these relationships within a team environment where shared goals and attainment could be pursued most successfully. Perhaps the Book of Proverbs puts this best: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” (27:17)
What I learned next way back in the mid-1990s was how to frame the central question of our study of History. Hitherto, I’d believed that the best approach was dedication to the “What?” (the absorption of as many facts and figures as possible) and the “Why?” (the channeling of these facts into essays shaped by purposeful structures that corresponded to a range of text-types).
To date, my students had achieved very respectable exam results and they, their parents and my superiors at school were all pretty pleased with my efforts. I’d gathered together what I’d learned and wrote my first test-book on the writing of essays in History (which was quite well-received).
"I had changed my framing question to that which I now believe is the most important of all: 'Who?'"
Yet there was something missing. There had to be more to what I felt called to do in a History classroom than perfecting a method based on the technical and clinical structuring of extended responses. And I also felt that the results could also be a little bit better.
In 1995, I also began my PhD in Australian history. My choice of thesis was, perhaps, idiosyncratic. My earlier study might have suggested a topic based in Classical or Hellenistic Greece. Or perhaps the American, Russian and Cold War history about which I was beginning to assemble student guides which themselves might become the first of the series of History textbooks I wrote and had published in the 1990s and 2000s.
Instead, I chose to delve into historiography, the study of how history is constructed in response to its context. Context is more than just the time and place surrounding an event; the ideas and culture that influence (or provoke) an historian to write are perhaps even more important. I wanted to use a significant Australian cultural phenomenon – a powerful archetype of masculinity drawn from our early military history called the “Digger” – to test the influence of culture on history and, in turn, history on culture. It took me until 2003 to work out how to do this and finish my doctorate.
I now know from research work conducted as Dr Phil between 2016 and 2019 that we teach who we are. Back then, I’d gained enough of an understanding that when we write, we give something of ourselves to the process. In other words, try as we might, we can never be completely objective. Although we can strive to be as diligent as possible in our use of evidence to capture the truth in our accounts of the past, we can’t ever completely separate ourselves from what it is we say when we put pen to page.
A very young teacher Phil would have been appalled by this this thought; a slightly less young teacher Phil was certainly perplexed by it and wondered what might happen if he tried to teach one of those parallel classes to “become historians” instead of just “to do History”. It was helpful that one of the groups was very fact driven which we meant they could be “History students” who could “do History”. The other group was a little more challenging. They needed to get their teeth into the chewier stuff of ideas and debate and discussion to stay engaged and committed. I got along with both groups pretty well; it would be safe to say that most of them would have felt as though they belonged in our class.
"The question of “Who?” asks us to invert our thinking – to identify who we want our students to become in terms of the knowledge, skills, dispositions and habits that the relationships and experiences of school will give them."
And so I began to think about what makes us historians, what makes us distinctive in how we see and relate to the world. I landed on three concepts: causation, methodology and the relative merit of ideas or factors in the operation of both of these.
This is what I taught to that more feisty group of “historians” in 1995-1996: how to recognise in the interactions of peoples in the modern world certain patterns of cause and effect, and how to exercise the evaluative capacity required to say whether one factor that influenced this flow of events in these causal patterns was more or less important. It was an apprenticeship in how to be an historian and how to contribute one’s own thinking. It was all based on a process of becoming the type of person who is committed to telling true stories of the past through good judgment.
By the end of 1996 when both groups had graduated and their results came through, it was clear that this approach had, at the very least, not harmed the results of the “historians”. I found over the following 15 years that groups of “History students” of all ages responded better and better to the process of becoming “Historians” as well as being “History students”.
Having now spent the better part of 15 years over the latter stages of my career as Associate Professor Phil thinking about the development of people through the processes of education, what I can recognise now is that I had changed my framing question to that which I now believe is the most important of all: “Who?”
The question of “Who?” asks us to invert our thinking – to identify who we want our students to become in terms of the knowledge, skills, dispositions and habits that the relationships and experiences of school will give them. It’s about the character that they acquire in an education done with and for them in a transformational place of belonging, not just a series of transaction of the stuff that we try to get them to do and to learn along the way.
All of what we do in school must point deliberately to the person we want each and every student to become. Otherwise, it’s just organised trivia, or (worse) an exercise in sorting out those who will and those who won’t go on to have the opportunity of further social mobility regardless of the merits of their character.
So what do I mean by character? Or, as one distinguished Headmaster said when I proposed the first global study of character education in schools for boys in 2016, “What is this thing called character?”
I think that, after conducting seven rounds of research in hundreds of schools during which we’ve had thousands and thousands of conversations, survey responses and focus groups with students, teachers, leaders and families across more than thirty countries, and after which we have written hundreds of thousands of words about character and character education, I’m more confident now in saying what I think might help us to answer this question.
Character is how we live a life. It’s about how we wrestle with our inner drive to realise who we might become and our need to replicate the outward expectations of others to be in a certain way. It’s in this wrestling that our character is formed, but rarely resolved.
It begins with the civic character of belonging that is bounded defined by civility, consideration and respect. The more we feel as though we belong, the more we grow in the performance character of fulfilling potential that comes from persistence, purpose and reflection. The more we belong and the more we fulfil our potential, the more likely it is that we will use the courage, honesty and humility of moral character to do good and right in the world.
We form character through everything we do at school. We know that we will form character in our students; how well we do this through the structures of care and curriculum is up to us. We will propel the development of character through curating a sense of belonging that permeates everything:
- Belonging is integral to that combination of aspiration, kinship and pathways to success which great schools foster in their culture.
- Belonging makes it possible for us to inspire, challenge and support our students to strive for excellence.
- Belonging is what permissions us to keep students in their groove and hold them to their purpose.
Certainly, we need to ask ourselves how best to teach and assess for a particular type of character. I hear people all over the world say that they want children to be imbued with a particular type of character – “resilience” and “curiosity” are those most frequently mentioned.
"It’s about the character that they acquire in an education done with and for students in a transformational place of belonging, not just a series of transaction of the stuff that we try to get them to do and to learn along the way."
Yet I wonder how often we really ask ourselves how a particular way of teaching builds a particular type of character. I can’t see, for example, how giving students all of the questions and answers in a content-heavy and overly teacher-dependent classroom leaves students with the room to wander and wonder that genuinely promotes both resilience and curiosity. On the other hand, we also need to provide young brains with the structure and sequence required to build layers of knowledge, skills, dispositions and habits that will equip them with the competencies they need to thrive in our world.
I’ve written elsewhere for the Australian Council for Educational Leaders about the radical balance needed to build character in a school that is genuinely future-fit. The exercise of balance in the cultivation of our traditions and rituals helps to keep us in our groove as we build a school for tomorrow. They help us see ourselves as part of continuing story of yesterday, today and tomorrow. They keep us humble and cognisant of the need to contribute to something greater than ourselves. It’s this quality of selflessness in the formation of character that lies at the heart of all great schools.
Balance is what is required when we consider the situation of our learners in relation to us. We at CIRCLE learned from our 2016 global study about the importance of pedagogies which range from explicit to implicit, and from planned to spontaneous. Great teachers employ all of these modes when teaching for character, and the competencies and behaviours which evidence good character. We’ve seen this clearly also in our long-standing longitudinal research project with Dr Challoner’s Grammar School in Amersham, UK.
Balance also sits at the heart of the apprenticeship of designed learning relationships in which experts model, scaffold and coach learning that sees novices explore, articulate and reflect on their being and becoming. Over time, experts yield authority and transfer responsibility as novices develop expertise and learners of their own.
It’s this type of relationship – “character apprenticeship” – that holds students and teachers most effectively to our educational purpose. It’s also the most influential and impactful way we have to teach. After all, as I said earlier, we teach who we are. And we do this best by starting with belonging.
And so after more than three decades of teaching and research, a much older Dr Phil would like put it to you that an education for character must be more than the accidental by-product of the pursuit of social mobility – the “When?” And it must be more than simply incidental to the acquisition of knowledge - the “What?”
Character is the reason why we do school - the “Why?” It’s the whole work of a school, formed in designed relationships of character apprenticeship - the “How?”
And it’s recent conversations with wise educators around the world such as Sanele Majola from St Stithians in Johannesburg, South Africa that confirm for me that an education for character should properly be framed deliberately by the question of the people our students might become as we prepare them to thrive in their world — the “Who?”
"All of what we do in school must point deliberately to the person we want each and every student to become."
And it’s our job as educators to think about how all the pieces of this education can fit together intentionally to form a whole. This process sees shared values translate into actionable behaviours through targeted learning experiences in a place of belonging — the “Where?” At a School for tomorrow. we’ve learned particularly through the work of our public education program, the Game Changers Podcast, how our places of learning need to be human centred, technologically enriched, people and place and planet conscious, and intentionally purposeful in what they do.
So as I draw to a close, I wonder what your takeaways from this story of mine might be?
In a pedagogy for character through relationship, the voices, agency and advocacy of our students must come to the fore. We really need to know, care for and love every student whom we teach. And we need to show them who we are so that they might come to know who they are. Through our particular discipline and with our expertise, we need to teach them to be and to become. And it must begin with a place of belonging where learning and care for the child find a home.
I think those are my key takeaways from a life spent teaching children, young people and adults. As I’ve extended my “What?” and come to understand more about my “Why?”, it’s the “Who?” that occupies my attention and demands my energies more and more. It’s what directs me to advocate for the building of a character that can help each and every learner thrive in their world. This is what makes sense to me as the true object of an education: the honouring of the new social contract for education through a deep commitment to every learner to create today’s learning for tomorrow’s world.
It’s in this respect that I think the moral imperative of our work in schools has changed most over my years in education. It’s no longer acceptable for steep hierarchies of power and control to justify the privileging of the few over the many. And our economies and societies demand that each and every student must be able to exercise their say in what it is that they do in order for them and their families to grow and succeed.
We can’t control everything in schools; much of the character formation of our students is done outside of our walls. Students have told us in our 2024 study that it’s their parents who add the greatest value. All sorts of social institutions and structures, not the least of which is the now all-pervasive influence of social media, guide our young people for better or worse.
But we must acknowledge that our schools (and the students and staff within them) continue to play a vital role in creating powerful positive values and value propositions for learners at all ages and stages according to each of the rounds of our ongoing research program. Thus, the work of forming character is too important to be left up to chance or accidental and irregular transmission.
My new Character Education series, published by the brilliant people at Amba Press, was developed with this in mind based on insights from my companies: CIRCLE - The Centre for Innovation, Research, Creativity and Leadership in Education , supported by a School for tomorrow. These four student-focused guides can help your young people reflect on character, growth, and leadership for tomorrow’s world in a structured and intentional fashion as they consider:
1. A Life of Purpose
2. The Pathway to Excellence
3. Leading for Tomorrow’s World
4. Make a Difference
You can order the Dr Phil Cummins Character Education Series here:Australia & NZ: https://hubs.la/Q039H6By0WorldwideAmazon: https://hubs.la/Q039HjS10Barnes & Noble: https://hubs.la/Q039GYj20Booktopia: https://hubs.la/Q039HxSP0I’m very grateful to all who have helped me on my journey towards an education for character. I’ve been blessed by the advice and support of many mentors and colleagues in and outside of the classroom.Most of all, I’ve been so lucky to have taught so many wonderful students along the way. And I wonder if those two special groups of boys I taught back in the 1990s know how much I appreciate what they taught me about belonging, being and becoming.