Preparing Middle School History Teachers to Integrate Moral Development Within Academic Instruction: The Basic Framework

• In Event: Integrating Moral and Social Development Within Middle School Social Studies: A Social Cognitive Domain Approach

Abstract

This paper presents the overall theoretical framework, goals, and structure for a project integrating development of moral reasoning and students’ concepts about social conventions and social systems within the teaching of middle school social studies. This paper sets the stage for two subsequent papers in this symposium presenting outcomes of the project on participating teachers and students and the degree to which the project succeeded in addressing competing goals of moral and social development and academic attainment.

The project was guided by social cognitive domain theory, which distinguishes development of moral understandings and judgments about issues of harm, welfare, and rights from development of conceptions of consensually determined conventions of society and their function in structuring social organization (Turiel, 2002). The overarching strategy for translating domain theory into educational practices came from the author’s book “Nice Is Not Enough” (Nucci, 2004). This project is the first full-scale implementation and evaluation of the efficacy of the ideas presented in that volume with classroom teachers instead of trained researchers working with small groups of students. The project employed newly constructed assessments derived from recent work on students’ moral development (Nucci & Turiel, 2010) along with assessments to measure developmental changes in concepts of social convention (Nucci, Becker, & Horn, 2004). This paper provides an overview of the developmental patterns in early adolescence that emerged from that recent work that informed the assessment of moral and social development in this project.

Efforts to engage teachers in moral education have long been confronted with the challenge of coordinating attention to moral education with the academic goals teachers have for students. This is even more pressing in an era of high stakes testing and the adoption of common core standards. Researchers have also known for some time that, although dilemma discussion is an effective technique for promoting moral development (Berkowitz & Beir, 2008), teachers do not generally engage in the use of moral discussion beyond the period of a research study, generally because these activities are seen as apart from the overall goals of teachers (Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989). As will be outlined in this paper, the project presented in this symposium was designed to address each of these concerns while also testing the efficacy of social cognitive domain theory as a framework for moral education.

The basic structure entailed providing teachers with workshops on social cognitive domain theory and support for their construction of lesson plans that integrated attention to issues of morality and social convention that emerge within the regular History curricula. Teachers were taught how to identify topics that would engage moral and conventional issues, to frame classroom lessons and student discourse, and to generate student written work that would support their emerging conceptions. Teachers created and implemented lessons throughout the year that were observed by the researchers. Data were obtained on teacher and student outcomes providing evidence of project impact on student moral development while connecting with the academic goals of teachers and the school district.

Author

• Larry P. Nucci, University of California