Foreword: An Invitation to Character Formation

Like many who work in higher education, I find working with college students exciting because it is often a season of so much growth for them. For those afforded the opportunity to study at a college or university, these years hold immense potential. Where else are people offered such time and educational resources—along with so much agency to direct these towards outcomes of their choice—with the goal of improving themselves? Of course, there are many challenges that college students feel acutely: mental health concerns, financial pressures, relational and spiritual crises, to name just a few. But even amid such challenges—and sometimes because of them—the experience of attending a college or university, stewarded rightly, can produce incredible personal growth.

My desire to help foster such growth led me in 2013 to my role as Program Director at Anselm House, a center for Christian thought at the University of Minnesota. With the Anselm House team, I’ve been part of developing co-curricular programs that offer spiritual, intellectual, and moral formation for students, faculty, and staff at a public, pluralistic university. Like many staff members at similar centers for Christian thought, I came to this work with some significant academic training in the intellectual and theological questions that animate our work and first-hand familiarity with the academic vocation. And I came with intuitions about education and formation, born from my own educational and spiritual journey, that I still think are (mostly) sound and have often been confirmed through my experience and further study of education and human formation. (For instance: that educational and spiritual growth happen best in community; that education is a holistic formation that involves the entire person; and that how we see ourselves in relation to God matters deeply for the kind of people that we become and the shape of our lives.)

When I first began this work, though, I had little practical experience in designing and running formation programs, aside from some teaching experiences in graduate school and church contexts. I had questions about how to do the work of a Christian study center better: How do we build effective formation programs, especially without we lack the incentive of course credit? How could I know that our programs are reaching the outcomes we intend for them? Given the limited time we have with participants, what are the most effective activities for participants? These and related questions eventually led to conversations with researchers at Baylor University and the John Templeton Foundation that resulted in a three-year collaborative research grant that we call “Developing Character in College Communities” (or “DC3” for short), investigating how character formation happens for college students, at pluralistic colleges/universities and at Christian ones.^[1]

Among the helpful tools I’ve found in this journey toward better developing better programs at our center is the tool of assessment. (A related, but slightly different, term is evaluation). My appreciation for and understanding of assessment has increased significantly by working with evaluation experts—especially Dr. Karen Melton, co-editor of this toolkit—who have been part of this research project. As will be explained in greater detail below, I’ve come to see that assessment can not only be a means for evaluating whether character formation programs are effective, but also a powerful means for fostering that character growth.

My invitation to fellow practitioners at similar centers for Christian thought^[2] is to consider the ways that assessment can help you and your center better accomplish its mission, especially with respect to the character formation of students. What you’ll find contained in this toolkit are a flexible set of tools that you can apply in a variety of ways. My hope, and the hope of our entire research team, is that this toolkit will be immediately helpful for you and your center in better achieving your student character formation goals.