Chapter 22

The Teacher’s Role in Implementing Prosocial Education

Judy Rosen

Integrating the Prosocial and Academic Curricula: Two Sides of the Same Coin

It’s not easy to be a young and developing high school teacher. A complex and confusing array of challenges—academic curricula, individual personalities, group dynamics, the developmental needs and interests of adolescents, and our societal need for an engaged and thoughtful citizenry—all hover in every classroom. I spent thirty-three years in those classrooms, trying to juggle and balance those challenges as I taught history and some of the other social sciences to teenagers in blue-collar Pittsburgh, rural Upstate New York, and suburban Westchester County. The deepest truth that pervaded my professional life in the beginning and intermittently throughout was that I had no idea what I was doing; I knew nothing. It was only my classrooms full of expectant and hopeful faces, and even the less hopeful ones with their downcast eyes, who challenged me to find an even deeper truth: that teachers and students create knowledge together by jointly finding questions worth answering and pursuing the answers collaboratively.

Questions of right and wrong, and the decision-making process for answering those questions, are inherently interesting to teenagers, especially when the questions come from real-life experience. What we label “moral education” was the most effective tool I slowly and painstakingly discovered for imparting the analytic skills and unwieldy information in the academic curriculum. Employing this approach works most efficiently in a school whose structures and culture value moral education, but framing curricular material around compelling questions of right and wrong can, in any school, open the minds of those students who believe that education holds no hope for improving their lives, as much as it opens doors for the most achievement oriented. The “right” questions are the key, and finding the right questions involves really knowing one’s students and supporting them to create a classroom climate that promotes curiosity, risk taking, and exposure, no easy task in any classroom in any school, but one that is infinitely worth pursuing.

When I started teaching at the Scarsdale Alternative School in 1985 (see Rodstein, case study 8C for more detail about the school), it was already affiliated with Lawrence Kohlberg and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Kohlberg & Wasserman, 1980). Each school year began with a six-day orientation in which students were introduced to the ideas of moral development and spent long days getting to know each other and the faculty. Making the rules by which our school would be governed and voting on those rules became the source of our community building. We discussed and argued about everything from whether we should have a community service requirement to what obligations each of us had to ensure that classes went well, obligations like getting there on time, coming to class prepared, not coming “high.” This experience taught me that classroom and school climate could be explicitly created rather than being the default setting that teachers and students were compelled to live within.

When I went back to teaching in a traditional school, I took that lesson with me and spent the beginning of each year creating class expectations with each of my classes. Instead of handing out a list of rules on the first day of school as I had previously done and as teachers traditionally do, I asked students to make a list of the conditions necessary for them to enjoy and be engaged in learning. Before I did this, I asked them to describe an enjoyable and satisfying situation in which they learned something that they valued. It could be anything from how to bait a hook or change a diaper, to how to solve a quadratic equation or write an argumentative essay. Having a concrete example in mind made it easier for many of them to think about what kind of environment would most promote their learning. They shared their answers with the class, getting to know each other a little as they did so, and we discussed and voted on which of the items on the list we wanted to live by in our classroom. I typed those lists up, hung them prominently, and when things got out of hand throughout the course of the year—as they inevitably did—we’d go back and reevaluate the list and our behavior. In my experience, hypocrisy is one of the greatest sins to teenagers, so their pledge to abide by rules to which they agree can go far toward creating a climate in which moral questions can be taken seriously. It was important for the students that I was required to meet their expectations as much as any other member of the class. I hoped that my willingness to try to do this would signal my respect for them and might convey the necessity of our working together.

In my first twelve years of teaching, before I got to the Scarsdale Alternative School, I had no idea how to create a climate of respectful, enthusiastic engagement in learning or, as I think it’s labeled today, how to “manage” a classroom, a euphemism for rewarding good and punishing bad behavior. In reflecting on that period, I believe that most of my classes worked because I genuinely respected my students; called them on their disrespectful or disruptive behavior; tried to think about the roots of that behavior, both with them and on my own; and reached for the good student inside every troublemaker.

An example of the struggle to do this took place during one of my first years of teaching in a rural Upstate New York school. The halls of the school smelled of the manure on the students’ boots because they had been up milking cows at five in the morning before they got to school. I was teaching world history to a tenth-grade “nonregents” (not college bound) group. The mood of the class swung wildly from out-of-control boisterousness to somnambulant. They told me that the subject matter was useless to them, refused to do any reading outside of class, and got restless whenever I asked them to do any work that involved reading in class. Two minor interventions turned this around. In addition to the fact that they saw no connection between what we were studying and their own lives, most of them couldn’t read very well. I decided to try an experiment. I called the County Agricultural Extension Agent and asked for some pamphlets relevant and useful for the kind of dairy and cattle farming at which my students worked. The day I brought in a huge box of those pamphlets, the room was silent, and everyone was reading—or struggling to read—material they saw as useful. They begged to sign the pamphlets out so they could finish reading them at home, an indication that they were capable of doing homework when motivated to do so. In the days after that, we did have to get back to world history, but something shifted both in their willingness to work and in their relationship to me. They knew I had listened to them and heard them, and thus they were more willing to listen to me.

Perhaps this example seems far from prosocial education. While no explicit moral dilemma was raised, the building of trust between students and their teacher is essential to their willingness to think deeply when moral dilemmas are presented, as was evidenced by the second “intervention” that really turned this class around. We had read something about how many more people throughout the world could be fed daily if Americans gave up eating beef one day a week (since the grain a cow eats could feed so many more people than the cow itself). I asked the class whether it would be right, beneficial, and fair for us to give up meat one day a week for this reason. I was shocked at the firestorm of impassioned opinion on all sides of this question, though I shouldn’t have been so surprised, given the fact that many of their families’ farms grew cattle for slaughter. The class got so involved in this question that they each went home and asked their families what they thought and what would happen on their farms if Americans ever made such a shift. They came back and asked their math teachers to help them with some statistical questions and then decided to conduct a schoolwide poll. After that project, for the rest of the year, they joined me for the study of world history because they came to see that they had a teacher on their side and that interesting questions might come up just where they least expected them. Also after that, I was inspired, by the courage they displayed in pushing past their limitations to carry that project through, to find new ways to teach them more effectively. Even in teaching situations where the curriculum is packed and standardized testing is breathing down everyone’s necks, I have found it worthwhile to take the time to do whatever is necessary to make students feel heard and to aim the course content toward their interests. Doing so saves the countless unpleasant hours it takes to “manage” disruptive behavior, and in terms of moral education, it is essential to build the kind of trust that flows from these kinds of interactions.

Another critical factor in creating the kind of classroom climate that fosters moral development, ironically, takes place outside the classroom. The kinds of relationships students observe as their teachers interact with each other and with administrators teach potent lessons about respect, concern, helpfulness, and power. In my experience, high school hallways teach as much about social organization as social studies classes do. Just as a school where every department chair and administrator is a man contradicts its paying lip service to the idea that “girls can be anything they want,” teachers sharing materials or helping each other when technology has one of its inevitable breakdowns, even when they are busy with their own class, models what we want our classroom climate to be. In contrast, schools in which the teachers gather in clusters to gossip mirror the adolescent hierarchy of cliques, a hierarchy that works powerfully to silence many potential participants in class discussions. While as an individual teacher I was often frustrated when the larger school climate clashed vehemently with what I was trying to teach in my classroom, I tried to give voice to those silent lessons and let students talk about what they observed. This sometimes made me unpopular with colleagues or administrators, but it hopefully taught my students that social relationships are open to question and thus to change, laying an additional foundation for raising moral questions within the curriculum.

I was lucky to come of age in a historical period when the civil rights and student, peace, labor, and women’s movements questioned and challenged every part of the political, economic, and foreign policy structures of American society. That same questioning found its way into the teaching of history in what was, at that time, called the “inquiry method” as part of the “New Social Studies” (Fenton, 1966; Fenton & Good, 1969), or using documents to help students figure out what they thought happened in various periods of American and global history. Today this method has trickled down to elementary and middle school and is included in the high school AP American history exam in the form of “document-based questions.” DBQs started in the AP exam; then high schools started to use them, which meant that middle schools, preparing students for high school, started to use a modified form of DBQs, and ultimately elementary schools went the same route. While this method is nothing more than allowing students to experience and practice the process of creating and writing history, the analytic skills it involves are some of the same ones employed in the teaching of ethical decision making: making logical inferences from information, considering multiple perspectives, and finding one’s way to the other side of the cognitive dissonance created by deeply considering conflicting accounts. Although I had been trained in the inquiry method, I only got to use it occasionally in the conservative schools in which I first taught, both in rural New York and working-class Pittsburgh. It is impossible to raise moral questions from a teacher-centered lecture, unless the teacher is telling the students what to think. Even at the Scarsdale Alternative School, lecture and discussion was the prevailing norm in academic classes until our affiliation in the early 1990s with the Brown Coalition of Essential Schools validated the idea of student as learner, teacher as coach (Sizer, 1984). It is ironic that it took us so long to integrate this principle in our classes since community meetings and all the other Just Community foundations of the school promoted moral development through hands-on experience, discussion, and debate, where the students were the workers, the teachers the coaches. Fortunately, as the Alternative School embraced the reforms that the Coalition of Essential Schools promoted, academic classes there started emulating the process of moral education that was happening in the other forums of the school. The coalition’s impact on high schools that were much more traditional than the Scarsdale Alternative School similarly laid the groundwork for this kind of teaching.

My students and I were the lucky recipients of these reforms because they freed me from within the confines of the social studies curriculum to ask moral questions. I experimented with different kinds of questions, and my students let me know which were the most compelling to them. A question that became the backbone of the many American history courses I taught at all levels, from classes for the least able students to AP classes, was the question of whether and in which situations the use of violence is justified. I first saw this question in a social studies series (the name of which I can’t remember, and it has been out of print for years) where a short piece recounted the history of events during the 1760s and 1770s leading up to the American Revolution, from the Stamp Act riots to the arming of the colonists at Lexington. A question at the end of the reading listed the various forms of protest the colonists used from boycotting to tarring and feathering Loyalists and asked students which form or forms were justified and why. The passionate student reactions on every side of each form of protest were fascinating to witness and easy to duplicate in the sadly recurrent theme of the use of violence in American history. I stumbled upon the usefulness of this question and looked for ways to expand upon it every year after the first one when I saw how much it captured the interest of teenagers who, age appropriately, are protesting and considering social mores in their search for identity. Because the question of how and when to rebel is central to their stage of development, the historical consideration of the question is organically interesting. There were years when my classes hosted “peace conferences” to prevent the War of 1812, considering the conflicting views of expansionist western settlers and northeastern merchants. Other years we tried Abraham Lincoln for provoking the Civil War and suspending civil liberties, or compared the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments that launched the feminist movement, and the Black Panther Party’s platform “to determine the destiny of [the] Black Community.” In all of these cases, students had to gather information from conflicting viewpoints, argue from an assigned perspective, weigh the merits of the varied positions against what could and could not be established as facts, and synthesize an array of material into their own personal positions. Besides the intellectual challenges of each of these tasks, activities that are organized this way have the additional benefit of seamlessly “differentiating instruction” because students’ roles can be assigned based on their level of difficulty, giving each of them a greater chance at success and each of them the necessity of listening to all of the others.

The same kinds of moral questions can easily find their way into other aspects of the social studies curriculum as well. In a senior elective I often taught on gender roles, one question that deeply captured student engagement was whether parents should raise their children without regard to gender roles. To answer this question, they had to consider why gender roles are useful and beneficial, the extent to which these roles limit opportunities for both men and women, and what the consequences of eliminating them would be for individual children and for society as a whole. In American government courses, simulations of Congress can raise infinite moral questions with regard to whether given legislation should be passed: from social questions regarding abortion or the right to die, to political/economic questions of whether society has an obligation to provide health care to all. In my experience, moral questions like these introduce and build the research and analytical skills that schools are designed to impart in a way that draws students in. At the same time and in its own right, teaching students to consider moral questions is, in my opinion, our best shot at making our society and our world more humane.

Teaching can be a torturous experience. The sheer number of interpersonal inter-actions taking place within any one forty-nine-minute class is exhausting to take in, let alone try to manage, to say nothing of the curricular content one is trying to guide her students to master. In discussing ways to integrate moral education into the academic curriculum, I have tried to emphasize that it is not only fine, but necessary, to stumble and to get lucky. Even the most experienced teachers are constantly creating their courses anew because each classroom of students is different from every other, and for new teachers, the many-layered demands and challenges can be truly overwhelming. The process of learning to teach students to think about right and wrong was, for me, an exciting way out of being overwhelmed. It helped me make sense of an always too-packed curriculum, and it brought me closer to the teenagers with whom I spent my days. I have been surprised that, in trying to write about the academic curriculum, I ended up devoting so much of this chapter to classroom climate and student–teacher relationships. Doing so has made me realize how essential those elements are to the process of moral education and how rich the experience of teaching can be on those days when the students, the curriculum, and the teacher create in their classroom a glimpse of a more moral social order, one where passionate disagreement is valued and where conflict and cognitive dissonance lead to progress and growth.

References

Fenton, E. (1966). Teaching the New Social Studies in secondary schools. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Fenton, E., & Good, J. M. (Eds.). (1969). Report on Project Social Studies. Social Education, 29.

Kohlberg, L., & Wasserman, E. R. (1980). The cognitive-developmental approach and the practicing counselor: An opportunity for counselors to rethink their roles. Personnel & Guidance Journal, 58(9), 559–568.

Sizer, T. R. (1984). Horace’s compromise: The dilemma of the American high school. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.