I’ve always liked the TV character Ted Lasso’s definition of moral education. Being a soccer coach, he said, is “about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.”

A few years ago, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Angela Duckworth, got a bit more specific. She wrote that character formation means building up three types of strengths: strengths of the heart (being kind, considerate, generous), strengths of the mind (being curious, open-minded, having good judgment) and strengths of the will (self-control, determination, courage).

I’m one of those people who think character is destiny and that moral formation is at the center of any healthy society. But if you’re a teacher in front of a classroom, with 25 or more distracted students in front of you, how exactly can you pull this off? Moral formation isn’t just downloading content into a bunch of brains; it involves an inner transformation of the heart. It involves helping students change their motivations so that they want to lead the kind of honorable and purposeful lives that are truly worth wanting. It’s more about inspiration than information.

And yet every day, there are schools that are doing it. On just about every campus I visit there are professors who teach with the idea that they can help their students become better people. It may be a literature professor teaching empathy or a physics professor who doesn’t teach only physics but also the scientific way of life — how to lead a life devoted to wonder, curiosity, intellectual rigor and exploration.

This week I was at a convening on moral development hosted by the Making Caring Common project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. The room was filled mainly with educators and as they described their work, it was like being offered a tool kit of concrete practices that together constitute an outstanding moral education. Here are some of the ideas the conversation stirred in me. I suspect that they could be helpful for parents as well as teachers or anybody who wants to build a society in which it is easier to be good:

A countercultural institutional ethos. People’s characters are primarily formed when they live within coherent moral ecologies. They are formed within an institution — whether it’s a school, a biker gang, a company or the Marine Corps — that has a distinct ethos, that holds up certain standards (“This is how we do things here”). In this way habits and temperament are slowly engraved upon the people in the group.

Richard Weissbourd, the faculty director of Making Caring Common, notes that over the past many years, schools and the broader culture have embraced the idea that the purpose of childhood is to prepare for individual achievement and happiness, rather than, say, caring for others or the common good.