Winning With Character is a non-profit organization providing character, ethics, and leadership training to high school and college athletic programs.

The purpose of our program is to improve moral reasoning and social values among male and female students athletes. Our four year program is designed to:

• challenge athletes to reach their full potential in the classroom,
  on the field, and in society;
• provide understanding, reasoning, and application or moral and
  ethical principles; and
• change students values and thinking (year 1), and behavior (years 2-4).

Originally created for the University of Georgia football players, and after three years of measured success, the program is being implemented across men’s and women’s sports at UGA, and other high schools and colleges around the country.

Our program operates based on financial support provided by license fees by our member schools, and gifts and contributions from foundations, corporations, and individual donors.

 

OUR SERVICES

Winning With Character provides curriculum, testing, training, consultation, and support to member schools through an annual license fee arrangement.

The Winning With Character program stands apart from other programs in the following ways:
    1. combines informal and formal education methods;
    2. research-based curriculum targeted to student
        athletes;
    3. imbedded facilitators and mentors within the local
        sports program;
    4. pre and post testing measurement evaluation;
    5. professional academic content, backed by 14 years
        of research; and
    6. service and consultative supported program.

Character Education is a combined lifelong informal and formal process about knowing, valuing, and doing the right thing, which culminates in moral character.

 

The curriculum research, design, and philosophy examines personal and social values such as respect, honor, and responsibility, with the belief that the development of a personal and social value system should bring honor to the individual as well as develop leaders of character.

Our model will focus on two questions of right choice:
    1. Are my actions honorable?
    2. Are my actions responsible?

Evaluative measurement instruments are utilized to check principled thinking, and moral reasoning growth. This database has been created over 14 years of research of 60,000 students across 250 different high school and university sports studies. Our measurement tools are based on the belief that:
    •  character is learned;
    •  learning has a definitive, cognitive process;
    •  if learned, character can be taught; and
    •  if taught, character, or principled thinking, can be measured and improved

Curriculum Design

The course materials are designed to provide critical examination and reasoning of personal and social values such as respect, honor, and responsibility.

The curriculum balances three proven learning approaches for character development: cognitive dissonance, modeling, and environment.

The curriculum is tailored specific to the students, it is research-based, with imbedded facilitators, and includes pre-and-post testing measurement tools.

Measurement Tools

A good measurement/assessment program should be married to ethical education, where learning cognitively and from role models and our environment, is measured for effectiveness, knowing what was learned and what was not.

All of our instruments are developed from a theoretical construct (a lengthy and thorough philosophical document that outlines the ethical theory that acts as the biases for what we do)

In our case, the theoretical construct is directly linked to the writings of the great philosophers and theologians of Western Tradition, and the psychological ethics of modern thought.

We then combine our theoretical construct with our own expertise as competitors, athletes, and coaches, as well as our years of teaching within the content area to develop the instruments.

Then we use ethical statistical and assessment practices. All of the instruments are piloted at least twice before we begin to actually collect data. Our data bases are some of the largest in the world in analyzing and studying competitive ethical behavior.

The HBVCI instrument is the preferred choice among most university studies of sport and athletics and is currently in use in over 200 studies.