Character Education and Conditions for Teacher Flourishing: An Exploratory Psychometric and Correlational Study of Two Scales

This study examines the relationship between character education and teacher flourishing by proposing a theoretical model and two psychometric instruments: the Character Education Scale (CES) and the Teacher Flourishing Conditions Scale (TFCS). In a cross-sectional survey of 518 teachers from nine schools in four countries, exploratory factor analyses supported a four-dimensional structure for the CES and a theoretically meaningful, though preliminary, two-dimensional structure for the TFCS, although its overall model fit was unsatisfactory (RMSEA = 0.16; TLI = 0.88). Both scales showed high internal consistency, which in the TFCS may partly reflect item redundancy. The findings provide preliminary evidence for the psychometric usefulness of the CES and support further development and validation of the TFCS, which in its current form assesses perceived school conditions supportive of teacher flourishing (leadership support and teacher climate). All CES dimensions showed moderate to strong positive Spearman correlations with both TFCS dimensions (ρ = 0.38 to 0.67), with the highest coefficients observed for mission alignment and visibility of character education. Within-school correlations were smaller but remained positive (ρ = 0.31 to 0.53). Teachers were nested in nine schools and several intraclass correlations indicated substantial clustering; therefore, these correlations and their confidence intervals are unadjusted for school membership and should be read as descriptive and exploratory. Because the design is cross-sectional and correlational and the participating schools were self-selected, these associations do not establish directionality and may not generalise to other school settings. The study offers an exploratory conceptual and operational framework that requires confirmatory testing in independent samples.