Cultivating virtues requires opportunities for knowing, enacting, and realignment (see Chapter 2—Why Virtues Matter in Higher Education). One practical way that students can learn about virtues is to identify them in their daily lives. However, the skills of recognizing and labeling virtues often require practice. Students can practice recognizing and labeling virtues by engaging in a variety of personal reflections. This chapter provides a practical guide for facilitating students’ personal reflections on virtues using worksheets.

Step-by-Step Guide

This guide offers a step-by-step approach to personal assessment using worksheets that facilitate students’ reflection on their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as well as promote setting goals related to the personal cultivation of a particular virtue. Fifteen worksheets have been created specifically for this toolkit. Each worksheet is focused on a specific virtue that you can print and provide to your students.

Worksheets start with a psychological definition of a specific virtue, followed by several items from research scales to help students identify how that virtue can be expressed in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. These first sections allow students to know the virtue by being able to label and recognize it. The worksheet will then lead students through a series of statements to reflect on how they are personally enacting the virtue. This provides students with the opportunity for realignment. The final section, The Extra Mile, is designed to guide students on personal steps to continue reflecting or enacting the virtue in their daily lives, ensuring that the learning process extends beyond the classroom.

This guide presents one way to use these worksheets for virtue formation. However, we strongly encourage you to be creative and adapt the method to suit your needs and your students’ unique characteristics. This flexibility is a key feature of our approach, empowering you to tailor the process of student reflection on virtues to your specific educational context.

Step 1. Choose the setting

Consider the various contexts in which you can administer a worksheet on virtues to your students. By context, we mean the when and where. One option is to provide a worksheet to an entire group as an engaging activity during a program session. Alternatively, you could plan to administer a new worksheet (or even the same worksheet) each week, focusing on a different virtue. You may also want to provide a worksheet to a student as a follow-up activity to a conversation about virtues. Ultimately, the versatility of these worksheets allows for their use in a wide range of settings, providing you with ample opportunities to facilitate student reflection on virtues.

Step 2. Choose the Virtue Worksheet

Worksheets have been created for each of the virtues listed below. Identify the virtue that you want students to reflect on. The next chapter provides more information on the worksheet structure.

Print the worksheet to be administered.

1. Intellectual Humility
2. Expressed Humility – Teachability
3. Interpersonal Generosity
4. Gratitude
5. Gratitude to God
6. Transcendent Indebtedness to God
7. Transcendent Indebtedness to Humans
8. Interpersonal Patience
9. Life Hardships Patience
10. Daily Hassles Patience
11. Inhibitory Self-Control
12. Initiatory Self-Control
13. Courage
14. Meaning in Life
15. Beyond the Self Orientation

Step 3. Facilitate Worksheet 

At the designated time and place, administer the worksheet to students. Instead of simply handing out the worksheet, we suggest you guide students through completing the worksheet instructions. Read the instructions aloud. Then, provide time to complete the worksheet. Time will vary based on the length of the worksheet, but on average, worksheets will take about 10-15 minutes to complete. A facilitated worksheet could take 30-60 minutes.

Below, we provide an example of a facilitator script. In this script, the facilitator begins by discussing the definition of a particular virtue, how this fits in the Christian narrative, and exemplars. Then, the facilitator moves students to reflect on the virtue in their lives using survey items and reflection questions. The facilitator then provides space for students to share their reflections and offer insight. Finally, in a section titled, The Extra Mile, students are allowed to consider the next steps for moving forward and cultivating this virtue in their lives. However, we offer a caveat and recommend that practitioners help students discern if adding new practices to their lives is the next best step in this season of their life. The purpose of The Extra Mile is to challenge growth in students, but not all students are ready for growth. You may already be skilled in helping students discern if they should adopt new practices. But if not, then we provide a facilitator script with The Extra Mile to help you guide students through discernment for adding new spiritual practices ^[1]

Step 4. Connect & Support

Remember that students who reflect on these questions may engage in positive and negative emotions that they would like to discuss further. Connect these students to your staff, spiritual leaders, and other mental health professionals.

Additional resources