OPINIONS - JOURNAL OF CHARACTER EDUCATION
In 2021, the Journal of Character Education introduced a new section called “Opinion.” As the only journal with an exclusive focus on character education, we have proudly published articles written by and oriented toward both researchers and practitioners, ranging from scholarly research articles, to “Voices” articles presenting innovations and perspectives of character education practitioners.
Now, with our Opinion section, we hope to publish perspectives from leading authorities in the field that might be more provocative. And, in doing so, we hope to engage you, our readers, in ways we have not before—by inviting comments, responses, and conversation to take place here on the Center for Character & Citizenship Opinions page.
The first blogs include the two inaugural Opinion articles published in Volume 17, Issue 1 of the JCE. We welcome you to read the opinions and ideas shared by the authors, and we invite you to respond with your own opinions and ideas related to the topics discussed.
We are excited to bring this new section of the JCE online and hope to see conversations ensue that are both provocative and inspiring, challenging and uplifting.
Note: To Read comments and post comments, click on EACH OPINION title.
Comments will be moderated. In addition, the editors reserve the right to post comments on the Center for Character and Citizenship website.
Opinion - "For The Better" by Marvin W Berkowitz
“IT IS TIME TO HAVE THE COURAGE . .
. . . to have the moral courage, to transparently identify the central goal of youth socialization as moral formation.
If we do, then we can look at the methods that actually support the development of moral character, of integrity and justice and compassion.”
Journal of Character Education, Volume 17(1), 2021, pp. 125–127
FOR THE BETTER
Marvin W Berkowitz University of Missouri—St. Louis
Recently my university unveiled a new marketing slogan, “We Change Lives.” It has a nice ring to it. After all, my good friend Avis Glaze often says that the field of education “is in the people changing business.” And indeed we are. However, as well intentioned as the slogan is, it reflects, unintentionally I am sure, two chronic problems in the fields of character education and socioemotional learning: moral phobia and missing adjectives.
To situate this argument, it is necessary to provide a little context. Humans have always, or as long as we can ascertain, been concerned with the socialization of children and adolescents. That is, there has always been concern about what kinds of people the upcoming generations will be when the world is inevitably placed in their hands. Hence, some form of moral education, character education, socioemotional learning or positive youth development has been there, whether formally or informally and whether done by society (for example in schools), by religious authorities, or in the home. And it has always centered on human goodness, however that is defined in a particular place and at a particular time in history. The nature of the desired person, the means of shaping development, and the labels we use to describe all this vary widely, but the bottom line is that we are trying to help youth to be the best people they can be, both for their own sake and for the people and world around them.
At the core of this is morality, human goodness, ethics, justice and compassion, et cetera. After all, if we want to live in a more just, equitable, and compassionate world, we need just, compassionate and ethical people. If we want people to authentically care about us, treat us with respect and fairness, and to be generally concerned about our best interests, then we need people who understand that, care about that, and have the capacity to act in that way.
Interestingly, at least in most western societies, while the general populace has no hesitation to voice such concerns and use such terms, those who are in charge of education (and other public enterprises) seem to be allergic to talking about goodness, morality, and virtue. They avoid the vocabulary of morality and goodness as if it were poisonous. This is what I mean by moral phobia. As I go from meeting to meeting, and conference to conference, experts and other leaders in the field turn them-selves into semantic pretzels trying to avoid being associated with moral terminology. The National School Climate Center was focused on climate because it was a more neutral term that was felt to have the potential as a rallying point for the disparate “factions” (it failed to do that). Socioemotional learning (SEL), a cumbersome and somewhat opaque term, has had great traction, with over 30 states adopting SEL standards, in part because it is more palatable than moral or character or virtues education. Some of my colleagues expended a lot of time and energy trying to find a common denominator term (prosocial education) and edited a fine two-volume collection of papers with the hope that it would break the terminological logjam and become embraced widely. It wasn’t.
Years ago, when a local St. Louis school district enacted an enlightened and protracted communitywide process to craft a new mission statement, I chided them for eventually avoiding any ethical language. They were going to educate “capable, curious, and confident learners.” I pointed out that effective terrorists had the same characteristics. To their impressive credit, they went back and added “caring” as an adjective to their mission statement. More recently, I chided the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for the same problem. There was no moral language in their mission and vision. They could as well be preparing antisocial predators, who were well equipped to excel at their chosen antisocial purposes. And they are not alone in this regard in the philanthropic sphere. A colleague in Europe reported a recent conversation with a large philanthropy that funds work in this sphere. They doggedly refused to fund anything that used specifically moral or ethical language as it was seen to be politically imprudent to do so.
As we look around the world, and in particular at western democracies, we see great unrest and dissatisfaction with civic leaders. In the United States in particular, especially in the build up to the 2016 presidential election, the two candidates, Trump and Clinton, were utterly polarizing, with each side seeming to despise the other side’s candidate. What I did not hear throughout the contentious campaigns were complaints about the candidates’ socioemotional competencies, or their lack of grit, or limited future-mindedness, or short supply of optimism. Rather I heard lamentations about their moral character. Because we know that is what is most important both for individuals and for humanity. And in the more recent presidential election, I again did not hear ringing endorsements or critiques of the socioemotional competencies of any of the candidates. But I heard plenty about their moral character.
If your child were to bring home a new prospective life partner, I doubt that your foremost concern would be that person’s socioemotional learning and competency or her grit. Certainly those matter. But what would be most important to you would be their moral fiber. Their goodness.
Yet, legislators and educators and other policy makers run from such terminology. But this is not merely a matter of terminology and semantics. This matters. My colleagues Tom Lickona and Matt Davidson, leaders in the field of character education, introduced two sides of character, moral and performance. The former has to do with matters of human relationships, justice, welfare and compassion. The latter has to do with excellent performance. I long argued with them that morality had to take precedence, but they saw them as two sides of a single outcome. To his credit, in his 45 year retrospective on his career, Lickona opined that he had to “eat humble pie” in not realizing that all too often the performance interest of educators, scholars and policy makers trumped a focus on human goodness. Teddy Roosevelt once said, “to educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.” We cannot afford to educate a generation with great grit and other performance characteristics but with no moral GPS to direct those performance skills toward an ethical purpose.
The media lament the perceived decline in morality. The populace laments the perceived immorality of its leaders (in government, religion, politics, media, and sports). Yet the field of education, which has the responsibility for a large part of the grand and eternal project of socializing youth, cowardly hides from saying the same thing. So we create curricula to promote optimism, and to foster grit, and to enhance future-mindedness, and to teach the intra- and interpersonal competencies of socioemotional learning. And we push morality to a corner or fully ignore justice and compassion and integrity … and do so at our peril. This is not to suggest that grit, and future-mindedness and interpersonal skill are not good things to pursue. It is just to suggest, again following Teddy Roosevelt, that without a moral GPS to guide them, they are as prone to immorality as to amorality or morality. Thus they are potentially dangerous.
It is time to have the courage, no to have the moral courage, to transparently identify the central goal of youth socialization as moral formation. If we do, then we can look at the methods that actually support the development of moral character, of integrity and justice and compassion. Otherwise, we will be educating, as C.S. Lewis described it, “more clever devils.” Or as one former U.S. Secretary of Education once said, “we are competing for the hearts and minds of our youth, and we are not the only ones.” It is a competition we cannot afford to lose.
There is an old Native American tale about a boy and his grandfather. The grandfather tells the boy that inside him is a good wolf and a bad wolf and they are battling for control of him. Frightened by the prospect of two wolves battling within him, the boy asks his grandfather, “Grandfather, which one will win?” To which the grandfather answered, “the one you feed.”
To feed the good wolf, we need to name it as moral. We cannot avoid saying that we are most concerned about human goodness, far beyond human competence. And to name it as such we have to start courageously using the adjectives of ethics. We don’t just want to educate for character, but want to prioritize moral character. And when people say, this is not the role of public institutions, like schools, we can point out that there is no off switch to moral character formation. This is age old wisdom.
Aristotle said, over 2 millennia ago, that “every adult who is around children impacts their character, whether they intend to or not.” It is time to get past our moral phobia, to have the moral courage to use the adjectives of goodness … for goodness sake.
Journal of Character Education, Volume 17(1), 2021, pp.125-127 ISSN 1543-1223 Copyright © 2021 Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of the Journal of Character Education
Marvin W Berkowitz
Marvin W Berkowitz is the Sanford N. McDonnell Endowed Professor of Character Education and Co-Director of the Center for Character and Citizenship at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.
Article originally published in the Journal of Character Education Volume 17 / Number 1 / 2021
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Comments will be moderated. In addition, the editors reserve the right to post comments on the Center for Character and Citizenship website.
Opinion - “The Overlooked Inequity” by Eric Schaps
“URBAN STUDENTS ARE . . .
Consistently deprived of the holistic, higher-quality instruction afforded students in many affluent districts.
Shifts toward learner-centered instruction could help significantly to level the playing field.”
Journal of Character Education Volume 17(1), 2021
THE OVERLOOKED INEQUITY
Eric Schaps
A lot has been said about the inequities faced by students in urban districts. Much discussed are the problems of inexperienced teachers, inadequate facilities, and high turnover of administrators and teachers. Also, increasingly, the underlying problem of inequitable per-student funding is recognized. Compared with dollars spent on suburban students, urban students receive significantly fewer on average.
But one fundamental inequity remains overlooked: the heavy diet of didactic instruction that prevails in most urban schools. Lecturing predominates across grade levels and content areas. Teachers do most of the modeling and questioning as well as the talking. Students are put in passive sit-and-get roles. And reward-and-punish discipline systems such as positive behavioral interventions and supports are used to keep them in line.
When students acquiesce to this state of affairs—and they usually do comply even if they are bored or alienated—most urban educators feel successful. They are proud that their school is orderly and safe, and that students are generally civil and obedient. Moreover, when parents visit the school, they will often approve of these same conditions—adult control and order. Educators and parents alike seem to believe that these conditions are not just necessary but sufficient for all kinds of learning to take place—academic, social, and ethical.
In such schools, teachers tend to be viewed with suspicion who deviate from telling as teaching or who reject a heavy diet of surveillance, extrinsic rewards, and predetermined “consequences” for misbehavior. Their colleagues want them to be team players, so as to maintain consistency and present a united front. Their colleagues fear that less external control and more student autonomy will lead to disorder, disruption, or conflict.
This state of affairs stands in clear contrast to what happens in many suburban schools, where teachers have more leeway to practice their craft as they see fit, and to provide students with autonomy. Student autonomy may take the form of frequent opportunities to communicate and collaborate actively with peers, or pursue learning of their own choosing, or even to reflect with teachers and classmates about how the learning process can be improved. Also, discipline is less likely to be of the behaviorist variety in suburban schools; positive behavioral interventions and supports is much less common in affluent settings than in low-income ones.
LEARNER-CENTERED INSTRUCTION
Where didactic instruction dominates, learner-centered instruction is perforce in short supply. “Learner-centered instruction” is a fuzzy term, as are the terms “holistic,” “constructivist,” “experiential,” “inquiry-based,” “problem-based,” “differentiated,” and “hands on” learning. But ideally defined, learner-centered instruction is the use of multiple teaching methods that are simultaneously attuned to:
• academic goals, content, and skills;
• social, emotional, and ethical goals and skills;
• students’ personal interests and questions as well as the essential elements of the subject matter at hand;
• the current state of students’ knowledge and skills (which may vary widely within any given classroom);
• the goal of evoking and strengthening students’ intrinsic motivation to learn;
• the goal of building an inclusive learning community in the classroom;
• the goal of involving students in assessing their own growth; and
• the particular pedagogies that enable students to learn best in light of the foregoing considerations.
Learner-centered instruction is necessarily a complex endeavor in light of these many interlocking considerations. It involves a fundamental shift in focus from what the teacher is doing to how students are responding, both cognitively and affectively, both individually and collectively. It involves a shift in ownership of the learning process, so that students join with the teacher to assess their progress and adjusting accordingly. And it can involve the use of such wide-ranging pedagogies as small and whole-group discussion, role-playing, brainstorming, experimentation, debate, and various forms of cooperative learning.
To be sure, didactic instruction—that is, lecturing, demonstrating, and short-answer questioning—needs to be one of the methods used in learner-centered instruction. But it is only one element in an array of pedagogies that, taken together, afford students more responsibility in the learning process – the responsibility for interacting considerately and productively with other students, working independently with focus and perseverance, and contributing to the well-being of the classroom and school community.
Greater student autonomy and responsibility require that students acquire and apply the skills for managing themselves and collaborating effectively. With greater responsibility comes greater need for self-monitoring, self-management, listening attentively and respectfully to peers, disagreeing constructively, and a variety of other socio-emotional capacities that take time and practice to learn. And so fully integrating character education and socioemotional learning (often referred to as “SEL”) into the academic curriculum is essential if students are to be successful.
Similarly, learner-centered instruction requires that teachers possess, or develop, certain observational, communication, facilitation, and classroom management skills. They must become proficient with new teaching strategies. They must come to know their students well—their current capacities and interests, their strengths and limitations. They must be able to make moment-to-moment pedagogical adjustments. And they must be willing to trust students to use their greater autonomy effectively while conforming to school rules and norms.
IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
Urban educators will often maintain that their students are not prepared to handle the greater demands of learner-centered teaching methods, and that those methods “don’t work” for them. They may attribute their students’ unpreparedness to many factors including family and neighborhood dysfunction. Their reservations should not be dismissed. Because of the considerable demands of learner-centered instruction on students and teachers both, it presents many more challenges than stand-and-deliver teaching and sit-and-get learning. Even modest shifts toward it must be supported by informed district and school leadership, aligned professional development, aligned curricular and assessment resources, and adequate time for teachers and students to successfully move through the change process. Never easy, the challenges become even more daunting when a district must contend with high student and teacher mobility, limited time and money for professional development, and unrealistic expectations for short-term results.
School board members and top administrators in urban districts may or may not clearly recognize these challenges. But even when they do recognize the difficulties, they tend to underestimate what is needed to introduce learner-centered instruction successfully. Under many pressures from many quarters, they try to do too much, with too little, too quickly. They may introduce an overly ambitious array of pedagogical or curricular changes at one time. Or they may fail to provide the various types of support and focus that urban teachers need to comfortably expand their instructional expertise. Or they may allocate insufficient time for the desired changes to become well established before moving on to mandate additional change efforts.
The result is a pervasive inequity in public education: Urban students are consistently deprived of the holistic, higher-quality instruction afforded students in many affluent districts. This difference in teaching methods persists despite posing a formidable obstacle to student success. As one prominent observer puts it, “The fact that U.S. schools are structured such that students routinely receive dramatically unequal learning opportunities based on their race and social status is simply not widely recognized” (Darling-Hammond, 2001, p.221).
Research dating back 2 decades (e.g., Bransford et al., 1999; Lambert & McCombs, 1998) showed that students become more motivated and engaged when they experience learner-centered instruction. They report greater liking for school, academic self-esteem, trust and respect for teachers, and perceived classroom supportiveness. Over time, they tend to demonstrate greater conceptual understanding, perseverance, and problem solving abilities, and their grades and course completion rates tend to improve (Darling-Hammond, 2001; Learning First Alliance, 2001).
And so where urban students are concerned, shifts towards learner-centered instruction could help significantly to level the playing field. Expanding the instructional repertoires of urban teachers—perhaps even modestly— could be a singularly efficacious route to advancing students’ academic and pro-social development. Doing so successfully depends on giving this priority substantially more time, protection, and resources than has been the case to date. It may require a deliberately incremental, steadfast, district-office-led approach to implementation that:
• recognizes the difficulties involved and thus the need for a multiyear, go-slow, sustained focus;
• systematically deploys, from the outset, the expert personnel needed to provide principals and teachers with timely, role-specific, training and coaching for each phased subset of desired changes;
• also deploys the already-aligned instructional and curricular materials that most teachers need in the way of implementation support—in addition to, and integrated with, the aforementioned professional development;
• monitors and reports to all stakeholders on actual classroom implementation of the desired changes, or lack thereof, and does so in an ongoing, candid manner, so as to enable informed decision-making about any needed implementation adjustments.
Such a well resourced and carefully orchestrated approach to implementation may be as challenging for district leaders to undertake as student-centered instruction is for classroom teachers. But here too there may be no alternative if urban students are to be justly served.
REFERENCES
Bransford J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds). (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. National Academy Press.
Darling-Hammond, L. (2001). Inequality in teaching and schooling: How opportunity is rationed to students of color in America. In B. D. Smedley, A. Y. Stith, L. Colburn, et al. (Eds.), The right thing to do, the smart thing to do: Enhancing diversity in the health professions: Summary of the Symposium on Diversity in Health Professions (pp. 208– 233). Institute of Medicine, National Academies Press.
Lambert, B. L. & McCombs, N. M. (Eds.). (1998). How students learn: Reforming schools through learner-centered education. American Psychological Association.
Learning First Alliance. (2001). Every child learning: Safe and supportive schools. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Journal of Character Education Volume 17(1), 2021, pp. 121-124 ISSN 1543-1223 Copyright © 2021 Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of the Journal of Character Education
Eric Schaps
Eric Schaps is the retired founder and president of the Developmental Studies Center, now called the Center for the Collaborative Classroom and located in Alameda, CA.
Article originally published in the Journal of Character Education Volume 17 / Number 1 / 2021
Note: To read comments and post comments, click on this OPINION title.
Comments will be moderated. In addition, the editors reserve the right to post comments on the Center for Character and Citizenship website.