Preparing Middle School Teachers to Incorporate Moral Development in Academic Instruction: Teacher and Classroom Outcomes

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

Abstract

This paper presents teacher and classroom level outcomes of a project applying social cognitive domain theory to the teaching of social studies. The project prepared middle school history teachers to generate and implement lessons that integrate the learning of history with promotion of students’ development within the moral, conventional, and personal domains (Nucci, 2009).

Sample. Participants were eight 6th, 7th,and 8th grade teachers of World and American History and three control teachers distributed across grades from three Oakland, California public middle schools. Schools’ academic performance, based on state statistics, ranged from above to below average. Control teachers were selected for similarities in teaching styles to participating teachers.

Training. In several workshops, participating teachers were introduced to domain theory and instructed in strategies for constructing lessons that stimulate moral and social development as students learn basic information covered in history courses. The instruction included how to structure class discussions that are domain concordant (Nucci, 2009) and how to promote transactive discourse (Berkowitz & Gibbs, 1983). Participating teachers, with feedback and support from the researchers, constructed and implemented lessons distributed throughout the year that enacted the principles and teaching techniques presented in workshops.

Data Gathering. Prior to the workshops, participating teachers were observed teaching three lessons, of which the two were to “focus upon issues of morality and/or social norms.” These three lessons formed the baseline for analyses of the impact of the project upon teacher and classroom discourse. Control teachers were observed for at least one lesson. Observations of lessons constructed by participating teachers were conducted throughout the year. Observations employed a time-series checklist to record student engagement and overall classroom activity. These observations were supported by audio recordings of classroom discourse. For each lesson, teachers were asked to provide a self-evaluation. At the end of the year, students provided evaluations of the teacher and the course.

Outcomes. Classroom interactions and discourse analyses coded using NVivo indicate that levels of domain concordant and transactive discourse increased in participating classrooms compared to the baseline and were higher in participating classrooms than in control classrooms. Teachers indicated they would repeat teaching 92% of their lessons done with this project in subsequent years. (We will be corroborate that through follow-up with teachers in the coming year.) Teachers’ verbal reports and observational data indicate that students maintained high levels of engagement during the discussions about moral and conventional issues in the history lessons. Students rated the moral and social conventional development lessons higher than regular lessons in their classes (t = -8.35, p<.001).

Conclusions Findings indicate that teachers successfully integrated domain-based moral education within the regular academic curriculum and that will continue using the lessons in future classes. An unanticipated outcome, indicative of the value the teachers placed on what they had learned through their participation, was that they convinced the district to adopt a document based questionnaire (DBQ) essay evaluating the fairness of Spartan versus Athenian society as part of the year-end assessment of history learning for all 6th grade students in the district.

Author

• Deborah Powers, University of California - Berkeley