Typically when a topic comes up about education, I have a strong opinion. Yet, when it comes to moral education, I didn't until recently. Maybe it was because I felt I don't have time for it. Maybe I felt it was the parents' responsibility to build in morals. Maybe I was doing it and not even realizing it. Now I know it was and still is going on. I have a major impact on the development of my students' moral education. Yet I feel there is a right way to do it. Graham Haydon states, one of the views of moral education is, "that all education is in a sense moral education" (Haydon, 2005, p. 2). It is also pointed out by the same author that "moral education is but one aspect of education" (Haydon, 2005, p. 2).What I now feel strongly about is the way I develop my students' moral education.
It is impossible to teach and not express or model some of my moral views on to my students. We do it as a whole school. When we teach our students our school-wide behavior expectation systems, we are in a sense developing their virtues (Graham, 2005, p. 5). A major part of our behavior lessons is having students talk about what behaviors they see in the videos and making judgments on what type of behaviors those are. As Graham brings up, discussion is a vital part of the moral education schools can provide, but also requires students to make value judgments (Graham, 2005, p. 8) (Lickona, 1991, p. 8). More specifically, I am developing my students' moral education when I express my expectations of them. I am also developing them when I bring up examples of behavior I have seen and how I expect those behaviors will not be seen again.
What I think is the most important and often minimized part of moral education is explicit discussion. Kids like to talk. My students especially process verbally more than in their own minds. It is a natural stage of the developing process. When something is out of the ordinary in the class. When the schedule does not follow the routine. When one of the regular staff members are gone. My students continually process. And as they process, they ask questions. This naturally leads to a discussion of the origin of the change. At the beginning of every day I go over our daily schedule and take questions on our day. Even though this is a stretch to connect to moral education, it is still a vital link. My students are not able to deal with change until there is information that supports it. The same is true for moral education. There can not be positive growth in the area of children's moral education without discussion and dialogue (Haydon, 2005, p. 8).
In my class this is most directly tied to student behavior. A few years ago I had a student that was diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder. She was very intelligent, yet the behaviors she demonstrated on a daily basis were disturbing to the other students. The other students were not able to concentrate due to her verbal and physical responses to the adults in the room. They were also uncomfortable that her behaviors did not fit the "norm." Haydon concludes that the aim of moral education will create tension with each other yet there is reason to pursue it (Haydon, 2005, p. 9). So, instead of ignoring the signs from my students that they were uncomfortable with her behaviors, we talked about it. We brought in our district social worker and talked about what ASD was and how it could affect someone. The positive attributes of their classmate were emphasized (because she was such an interesting and valuable part of our class!) so students could look beyond her behaviors. That to me was the best educating I had done all year. I was teaching moral values to my students in a way that let them express concern and responded with knowledge about how minds of students work differently. The message that was clearly sent was differences are okay.
We also gave the class strategies of how to model appropriate classroom behavior and to encourage our classmate to do them as well. We gave them techniques to help redirect her behavior if they saw her anxiety being expressed. Now let me get on my soap box for a quick minute. I understand that not all classroom behavior expectations make sense for every child. I was not, and my students were not, asking this child to change who she was. We were just trying to help her be understood by the class and to have them see value in who she was as a person. We were also trying to give the students permission to ask questions and to accept differences in others. Thomas Lickona address that "there is a clear and urgent need" for values education (Lickona, 1991, p. 20). This was my goal and still is today. There is no longer strength in combining ignorance with false judgements. I could have easily dealt with my student's behaviors in a figurative bubble and redirected or ignored other students' desires for answers. Yet, that would be sending an even louder message to them-that we ignore differences and move on without understanding them. That to me is moral education of another kind.
Moral education is present in every classroom and should be. Questions regarding differences in morals should not be ignored but discussed in a purposeful way. This is the way to having acceptance of a variety of morals in classrooms and eventually the community outside of it.
I also found that I had not previously thought too much about the topic of moral education and its place in public education. This recent theme has opened some new doors of thinking for me. Maybe I, like you, thought of moral education as something that should be done at home. Yet, there seems to an absence of this going for many students, though. Just today I picked up my daughter and her friend from church. In the car they were talking about all the kids who are cheating in their Advanced Placement U.S. History class. Other students have gotten test copies and homework from students who have taken the course in previous years. Rather than reading the book and doing their homework in preparation for the test they are just copying from previous students. My daughter and her friend are really frustrated. These two are doing all the work themselves and aren’t getting as good a grade on their homework assignments as their cheating classmates.
ReplyDeleteMaybe parents are telling their kids not to cheat at home, but so much of what kids are viewing on TV in the form of reality shows doesn’t promote high moral values in regards to honesty and integrity. In contrast, there seems to be a lot of doing whatever you can to get ahead. My daughter said her teacher told the class he thought that a lot of kids must be cheating because they are doing so much better than students in previous years. He doesn’t seem to be doing anything to combat the problem, though, like changing the assignments or tests so they can’t just be copied. What is most shocking is that these are what most people would consider the “good kids”! These are kids who will eventually be leaders in their community and professions! In your post you refer to something that Haydon says about all education being moral education. My daughter’s AP U.S. History teacher is definitely teaching something about values and morals by not addressing the cheating problem going on.
Your discussion of actually using discussion as in instructional technique for values/morals is interesting as well. Learning how to treat a special needs classmate most certainly falls in the moral education realm. Using discussion to help your other students learn how to interact and understand this autistic child helps to instill compassion, patience, and a generosity of spirit that we need more of. It seems to me that openly discussing their frustrations with this autistic child also validates their feelings as well and can be used to teach children to respectfully dialogue about difficult people they encounter in daily life. This is a moral value in and of itself.
I definitely believe that since we are teaching moral values all day long by how we run our classrooms and schools, we ought to not leave those values up to chance. Our school communities, and maybe our district communities at large, need to be having a broader conversation about the values we want our children to be learning. By hearing the voices of a variety of people, backgrounds and beliefs I think we can develop a list of values/virtues/morals that we all think would be good for kids to learn at home and school.