Connecting Character to Conduct.

An important and continuing question for most school administrators is "How can we help students make the right decisions and do the right thing?" We know that the decisions students make today not only affect themselves but ripple outward to their immediate family and school.

We know, too, that student learning and school safety are inextricably connected to character and conduct. When we help students make the connection between character and conduct, we can offer them a safe environment conducive to learning. This book offers strategies for school staff to provide this help.

The authors, including administrators in several Long Island, N.Y., school districts, say they wrote Connecting Character to Conduct to demonstrate how students learn to do the right things. Their method is to adopt the principles of respect, impulse control, compassion and equity (RICE) inside and beyond the school walls.

The authors stress that these guiding principles are not an add-on to an already full curriculum. Through their connection to moral development, the language arts, citizenship and discipline, they already are a part of a standards-driven curriculum and instruction program. Our students depend on us to help them learn and stay safe. Their future, indeed our future, depends on how well we succeed.

(Connecting Character to Conduct: Helping Students Do the Right Thing, by Rita Stein, Roberta Richin, Richard Banyon, Francine Banyon and Marc Stein, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1703 N. Beauregard St., Alexandria, Va. 22311, 2000, 142 pp. with index, $22.95 softcover)