About a year ago, the two of us were power walking in Seattle when the conversation turned to a free online course called Leading with Character — one that JoAnn, along with an incredible group of global scholars, had recently designed. The course was about to launch, and the anticipation was palpable.
As someone new to the course, what struck Brittany most was its willingness to take love, a quality often dismissed as too squishy for professional or business contexts, seriously as a virtue central to leadership. We discussed how that tide, encouragingly, seems to be turning. But we also shared concerns, grounded in years of teaching experience (some of it through COVID, no less), about the persistent challenges with online learning. Character is shaped in and for community. Asking people to work through character content and activities alone, without in-real-life relational accountability, risks truncating both completion rates and the transformation that happens in relationship.
Out of that conversation and the deep conviction that character is formed in community, the idea for a Leading with Character Fellowship was born. We approached faculty and staff who worked with our student leaders (residential advisors, student chaplains, club officers, and others) to explore what it would look like to run a cohort of students through the online course together, with added structure, accountability, and an invitation to participate in communal activities, like shared meals.
What emerged was a six-week pilot fellowship launched at the start of the fall quarter. We advertised the opportunity to student leaders across campus and incentivized participation with the chance to apply for a fully funded trip to Oxford for students to attend a leadership conference. This was made possible through a generous grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University and Lilly Endowment. We kicked things off with an online summer meeting before the quarter began and built a full Canvas course around the existing Leading with Character online course. The Canvas structure (familiar to students and already on their dashboard) added clear deadlines and a streamlined way for students to submit their journal reflections, which were already embedded in the course as optional activities. We graded these and provided feedback to help students feel seen, heard, and known throughout the fellowship. The depth and personal nature of the students’ reflections underscored how important it was to honor and witness their words with our own attention and reflections.
Students were also organized into small groups that met weekly for character check-ins and discussion, including conversations about how the material intersected with their faith and their current spheres of influence on campus. A set of common discussion questions we provided guided these meetings. Three larger in-person gatherings bookended and anchored the experience: a kick-off at the beginning, a mid-point check-in, and a closing session near the end of the quarter. That final gathering was particularly memorable for our community. We were fortunate to host Professor Edward Brooks (one of the course’s originators and core supporters, as well as the director of the Oxford Character Project), who joined us in Seattle for a high tea talk and a small lunch gathering with the fellows.
The fellows who completed the course were, by their own account, genuinely changed — not just by the online content, but by the community that formed around it. We witnessed this firsthand: students clearly articulated how they showed up differently, with love, hope, and courage in their day-to-day roles on campus and began to reimagine what it means to be a good leader. One of the most resonant themes, as we asked students to dream with us about the future of the course at our institution, was the belief that it would be valuable for all students and the earlier in a college career delivered, the better. That sentiment was grounded in a clear recognition of how the course had shaped their own sense of identity as leaders and the purpose behind their leadership.
Encouraged by the pilot’s success, we moved into a second phase: integrating the full online course into Brittany’s in-person General Psychology course. She had been running weekly “character labs” on Mondays for years, but this new model asked the full class of 150 students to work through Leading with Character together. Monday meetings became a time for students to debrief module content in small groups, reflecting on key takeaways, applications to their own lives, connections with their spiritual and religious traditions, as well as questions the material raised. Students also discussed their experiences with the character challenges woven throughout the course, which added an extra layer of accountability to complete these critical components.
The data from this phase is still being analyzed, but the general response was enthusiastically positive. Students were particularly moved by the framing that everyone is a leader, a message that was eagerly embraced by the General Psychology students, many of whom were in their first quarter of university. Students from the class also praised an opportunity they had to hear from the Leading with Character Fellows as a part of a panel that accompanied the high tea talk from Professor Brooks. This created meaningful connections across students at different stages of their undergraduate journey and helped inspire students towards completion of the course.
Ultimately, two fellows from the original cohort were selected for the sponsored trip to Oxford. They participated in the Leadership for Flourishing conference, led by Katie Granville-Chapman and Emmie Bidston, and they’ll share their reflections in Part 2 of this article.
In the meantime, for educators looking to weave character formation into their work but unsure where to begin: some amazing and freely accessible tools already exist. The Leading with Character course is among the finest we have encountered to help build character conversations on campus. It is substantive, global in perspective, and designed with the kind of care that allows students from any background to see themselves in the material. What the fellowship model added was accountability and community. Such relational scaffolding can transform online learning into an even more deeply formative and embodied experience. The human connection afforded through graded reflections, weekly small groups, and shared meals is not supplemental to character formation but essential to it. We have experienced this truth for ourselves, both as educators and as learners: character is always most powerfully cultivated in community.
NOTE: This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from The Wake Forest University and the Lilly Endowment Inc. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Wake Forest University or the Lilly Endowment Inc.
