Phase 3: implementation project

The third phase of The Ethos Project enables you to put your experience of Character education into action in your own context. Throughout phases 1 and 2 you will have had the opportunity to reflect on the positive and not so positive aspects of character education in your setting. You will have formulated some ideas and approaches that you can implement.

Phase 3 provides you with the consultant support from the course team to plan and implement your project successfully. Its aim is real and practical change, led by you, in your own context, which will permanently change what your institution does, and drive forward a focus on making Character education explicit, opportunistic and dialogic.

You can choose :

Individual consultant support:

One of the course team will visit your setting for two half day sessions between October 2008 and January 2009.
The first will be an action planning session, in which we scope the project, agree success criteria and resource requirements.
The second session will be approximately halfway through the programme. This session will enable you to check progress, analyse opportunities and barriers, reframe if necessary and move on to concluding the project.
Consultants can be used to join you in meeting other key stakeholders (either "above" or "below" you in the institution's hierarchy) in order to help you create "buy-in".
Additional support will be available through the discussion forum on the website from both the course team and other participants.

Consultant support to a collaborative group:

Where there is a project that involves collaboration between two or more course participants the consultant support could be aggregated to support the group project, so for example if three participants worked on a joint project the consultant support would be three days.

In both models, the consultant support should be booked as far in advance as possible and availability is limited by the consultants' other commitments - so book early.

What should I do for my project?

The choice of Phase 3 project is very open-ended. You may wish to, for example:

create an audit of Character education and draw other participants in your school into the process
empower the Student Voice to help drive a focus on Character education
propose and champion curriculum (or other) reform in your context, with Character education in mind
devise a piece of action research to investigate something you suspect is the case but which remains a presumption or oversight in the current polity in your context
etc, etc, etc...

Different consultants from the course team will be able to give different kinds of support dependent upon their expertise, own context, and availability. The course team will guide you as to which consultant will support your project once you have an idea in mind.