Character Education Curriculum

Challenge

Can you help us integrate our core values into an innovative learning experience for 9^th grade students? That was the question posed to us by the leadership team at the Muhammad Ali Museum and Education Center in Louisville, Kentucky. They wanted to build a character education curriculum that could be used by teachers across the Jefferson County Public School District.

Context

We flew out to Kentucky and spent some time at the museum and with friends and family of Muhammad Ali to make sure we could properly create a curriculum that reflected his core values and life lessons. We worked with a cross-sector and cross-city team of educators, evaluators, and youth development professionals to build a robust curriculum called “Creating Our Futures.” The curriculum had a number of noteworthy features.

The modularized content allowed instructors to “build” lesson plans that were flexible and customized to the audience, time constraints, and social/political context within the classroom. The curriculum unfolded in a cumulative fashion and gradually challenged participants as they moved from level one to level six activities. The content used words, phrases, and a variety of material from popular culture to engage youth in a critical examination of current affairs.

The material was also developed to be easily adapted for online learning platforms. The curriculum deputed in schools throughout Louisville as part of a pilot launch in 2012. Since then it has reviewed positive reviews.

Results

Through our work with this client, we demonstrated a number of our core business capabilities. The engagement included: (1) in-depth interviews with leaders of the agency’s training department; (2) strategic planning sessions to identify and to map the learning needs and learning objectives of students in the district; (3) development of an instructional design plan; (4) creation of learning materials, including course materials and participant workbooks; (5) delivery of a train-the-trainers program for senior teachers in the school district.