What are Character Strengths?
Character Strengths are the positive qualities of your personality that impact how you think, feel, and behave. Teaching character strengths for students promotes well-being and creates a positive classroom culture that focuses on strengths and growth. When students become aware of their character strengths, they will feel empowered with greater confidence.
The VIA Institute, led by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, collaborated with 55 psychology scholars and scientists for three years to create a framework of character strengths. They categorized six virtues—wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence—and assigned 24 culturally universal character strengths to each virtue category.
Why are Character Strengths important?
Teaching character strengths is important because research has found that character strengths in adolescents relate to multiple aspects of well-being, such as emotional health, relationships, and academic achievement. Clearly, as positive psychologist Martin Seligman has shown, people are happiest when using their strengths.
Learning about character strengths has also been shown to increase life satisfaction. A study of students who participated in strengths-based exercises at school showed that the students who did an activity to recognize their individual strengths showed dramatic improvements in life satisfaction as compared to students who did not.
How to Teach Character Strengths?
A great way to begin instruction on character strengths is to have students take an assessment to determine their character strengths. The VIA Institute on Character offers a free, psychometrically valid online test measuring character strengths for youth. You may find it at https://www.viacharacter.org. After students take the assessment, they will provide rank-order results of their strengths. Teachers have the option to set up a professional account and to keep track of students’ results.
The next step would be to have students analyze their strengths using our Character Strengths Analysis lesson.
Finally, it might be fun to dig deeper into individual character strengths. We have lessons about the virtue of courage and the four character strengths of courage—zest, bravery, honesty, and perseverance. In all of these lessons, students will learn the meaning of these character strengths and connect them to a historical figure.
In our lesson on zest, for example, students learn all about zest. Students will learn about zest through the example of Michael Jordan, who exemplified zest with his love of the game and his energy to improve constantly.
