Standing in a locker room at Baltimore County's Kenwood High School, the teenage girl kept her cool when one of her peers passed by and hit her with a book bag.
"Under normal circumstances, that would have been a major fight in our building," said teacher Nancy Hanlin, recounting the incident.
Instead, Hanlin said, the girl told her classmate that she would have hit back "if I wasn't working on my virtues."
The fight that wasn't illustrates the changes that school officials say they are seeing at Kenwood, where a new character education initiative called the Virtues Project has begun altering the way teachers, administrators and students communicate with one another. The "virtues" are 52 good character traits, such as truthfulness, patience, responsibility and self-discipline.
"Our kids are so used to all of us telling them what they did wrong," said Hanlin, who, along with physical education and sports science chair Tammy Jackson, suggested trying the project.
"Instead of looking at the behavior, we're actually looking at the kids."
Teachers use the virtues to acknowledge, guide and correct students, said Dara Feldman, director of education initiatives for the project and a former Montgomery County teacher who used its principles in her classroom.
Teachers might take a moment to thank someone for his honesty in returning a missing item or suggest a teen consider what traits she needs to call on to deal with a crisis, according to Jackson and Assistant Principal Allison Seymour.
The State Department of Education encourages, but does not mandate, character education. Such initiatives vary throughout the state, and even within districts.
"We want students to become good students, but we also want them to become good citizens," said Paula McCoach, an education specialist in the state agency's youth development branch. "Character education ... has influences on the climate of the building and the school itself."
Kenwood appears to be the first Baltimore County school to adopt the Virtues Project. Feldman has also trained educators in Anne Arundel, Howard and Montgomery counties and in Baltimore City, she said, but Kenwood has taken "a holistic, excellent approach."
The school draws students from the Essex and Middle River areas, which have many struggling families, said Paul D. Martin, the principal. Students come from "a tough environment," Hanlin said. "They just want to survive in their neighborhood. They bring that into our building."
