Coaching Character at Home; Strategies for Raising Responsible Teens

Character education is a hot topic. Insensitivity, self-indulgence, self-focus, materialism, sexual license, and violence corrupt our society. Role models who influence and shape our children possess a 'me first' mentality, a sense that the individual is entitled to satisfy every desire, without regard for others. Negative influences threaten to overwhelm, and parents are struggling to counter them. Today's parenting is all about character building--knowing and wanting to do the right thing, and then actually doing it.

In Coaching Character: Strategies for Raising Responsible Teens, Michael Koehler shares his program of character education based upon the Seven C's of Character. Koehler became familiar with these strategies as a young athlete and continued to use and develop them throughout his career as an educator, school administrator, and high school football coach. Koehler defines the Seven Cs as:

* Connectedness: shared enthusiasm for a common interest * Control: self-control, self-reflection, self-evaluation, and self-correction * Commitment: personal investment, complete and focused involvement * Consistency: firmness of purpose, the refusal to quit * Cooperation: the willingness to work with others, to share success and failure * Conscience: empathy for others, understanding the difference between right and wrong * Competition: the willingness to make the effort to win and to realize that this effort is more important than the outcome

Parents can use these same principles to instill character in their children, and Koehler shows parents how to do it. Coaching Character is a comprehensive guide that includes lively discussion, helpful and entertaining pointers, and sample dialogues, plus personal stories and anecdotes from Koehler's personal experience. Koehler's advice is knowledgeable, sympathetic, clear confident, practical, and time-tested.

Michael Koehler's commitment to character education grows from a lifetime devoted to education and sports. A grandson of athletic icon Jim Thorpe, Koehler played football at the University of Nebraska, where coaching greats George Kelly and Tom Osborne helped shape his character.

A career educator, Koehler holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah, and is former adjunct professor of educational administration at Northeastern Illinois University and also worked as a counselor, high school English teacher, college professor, and administrator. Throughout his academic career, Koehler has coached high school football, helping shape the character of thousands of young athletes for over thirty years.

Koehler now devotes his attention to character education and writing full-time. Koehler lectures widely and has written for print, radio and television media. He's also written audio and videotape presentations, as well as numerous education and sports articles. Coaching Character is Koehler's 16th book.