Moral & Ethical Behavior in the Classroom - Standard 1

Moral & Ethical Behavior in the Classroom

Standard 1:

Model ethical and moral behavior.

Standard Aligned Course(s):

EDU6085: Moral and Theological Issues in Education

Reflection:

I believe every student has a desire to do well in school. I believe it is the teacher’s job to help students achieve this goal and I believe moral education plays a significant role in student success. According to James, “if you want to reach your destination, make sure each step you take is in that general direction” (James, 2015, p. 6). Right now, there are many students and many teachers that are taking steps that do not propel them towards their intended final destination. Students are put into a unique situation in public high schools. They are told the path they are supposed to follow and the end goal is graduation. However, they are put into an environment where they are working with others who are from completely different backgrounds, upbringings, family situations, learning styles, etc. and expected to work well with each type of person. What is often forgotten is, coming from those different backgrounds means their knowledge of how to act in diverse situations will be different as well. Something I strive for in my classroom is,

“listening as well as talking, striving to understand points of view different from one’s own, challenging ideas and proposals rather than persons, admitting ignorance, slowing the rush to decision so as to clarify or reframe the problem or gather more information…even appreciating the principle attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”” (Parker, 2003, pp. 87-88, as cited in James, 2015, p. 7)

I want my students to feel comfortable in my classroom. I want them to know that they do not all need to agree on a topic to have a valid viewpoint. Like Nord & Haynes, I believe, “[s]chools teach morality in a number of ways, both implicit and explicit” (Nord & Haynes, 1998). It is important for teachers to be aware of this, so they can help students become the best students/persons they can.

My core religious values stem from my belief in Christianity. I did not grow up going to church, but both of my parents had grown up in church. My dad grew up Catholic and my mom grew up Presbyterian. Although I did not regularly attend church, my parents raised me in a way that aligns with many church values. They taught me to be honest, to work hard, and to help those who are in need. I was also influenced by my best childhood friends Alyssa and Emily. It was through them I was able to first learn about God. I went to vacation bible school, to the occasional Sunday school lesson, and was a part of their families’ lives. Seeing the people involved in the activities I was able to be a part of with these friends, I chose to surround myself with people who attended church and was brought to the Lord through their invitation into their community. This conviction to know God deepened when I met Peter, my boyfriend at the time, husband now, at youth group. I knew that God was a large part of his life and his family’s life and I wanted to know what Christianity was all about. As I got to know Peter and his family I realized the values of the Christian church and the values I grew up with are very similar. In Christianity, you are taught to love thy neighbor. I believe this has truly been engrained in my way of life. My parents will do anything they can to help someone out. This has translated to my life as a teacher.

As a teacher, my first goal is to help as many students as possible be successful and to meet the potential I know they have inside of them. There are definitely students I do not see eye to eye with but that does not mean there is no way to reach them. I do my best to help students realize they are capable of more than they think. I currently teach mathematics at Renton High School. I have a large number of students who come into my classroom with a preset idea of their math skills. When someone already has a preconceived notion about themselves it is difficult to change their mind. I have found that, like Wirzba says, “The test of faith is always the test of love” (Wirzba, 2013, p.39). As a teacher, I put forth a lot of effort to make sure my students know that first and foremost I care about them and their success. “To create a healthy learning environment, students need to develop the virtues of responsibility and respect for others. They must eliminate habits of laziness and sloppiness and acquire habits of self-control and diligence” (Ryan, n.d.). Although many of the students I work with initially come across as lazy and inattentive to detail, once we have built a relationship and an understanding around expectations has been built, students tend to push themselves to meet the expectations put in front of them. So, “raising teacher awareness of the importance of being both warm and demanding can certainly improve classroom relationships, which are fundamental to successful teaching and learning” (Pace, 2015, p. 40). When students know you are going to demand a lot from them, they also have to know you have their back if they struggle.

To help students know they can be successful, we do a lot of board work. Students will work on something at their table groups and then it will be time to show it on the board. From the beginning of the year, I will have a student choose a number, that number will correspond to someone in the classroom and then that person will come to the board. I am always near the board with them and the norm is that they can phone a friend, phone the teacher or write up what they have on their own paper. No matter which option they choose, they must explain the process. As the year goes on, the teacher lifeline disappears and they are only able to phone a friend or write up what they have on their own paper. This helps build confidence in their abilities. Also, when students are working, if I see a student who does not usually volunteer with the correct answer or a method not many people have used I will ask permission to show their work under the document camera. I will also do something similar with my high achieving students. If a student who is generally high achieving makes a simple mistake I will ask permission to show it to the class. This shows students that even if you make mistakes you can still be successful in math.

My goal that all students can be successful is challenged daily by what I see in my classroom. I believe, “Moral education, then, refers to helping children acquire those virtues or moral habits that will help them individually live good lives and at the same time become productive, contributing members of their communities” (Ryan, n.d.). I have had many phone conversations with parents/guardians of my students over my first five years of teaching. Many times, their values and expectations for their student are different than mine. They value their students time as a baby sitter, as a chef for the family, as a money earner for the family, as an athlete, etc. but many times they do not see their student as a student once they have left the school building. This was one of my biggest struggles my first couple of years of teaching. I had to learn the boundaries I needed to set for myself so that I could expect great work from all of my students and hold them to the high expectations I have for them. If I was assigning a large amount of homework every night I was not going to get great work from all of my students. I was only going to receive great work from the students who have the privilege to go home and study, the students who don’t have any responsibilities outside of school, the students who have parents at home in the evening to check up on them, etc. There were some students it was not physically possible to do large amounts of homework outside of school. I had to make sure I was offering time right after school, before school, and during lunch so that my students had access to help. It was a significant transition for me to realize not every family is set up the way mine was growing up. The priority in my house was school, everything else was secondary.

The second goal I have is for all of my students to feel loved, supported and known within my classroom. This goal comes from the comfort I have that God loves, supports, and knows me. I want my students to be able to know what it is like to be heard when they are struggling, rejoiced with when exciting things happen in life, and forgiven when they make a mistake. I come into each day as if it is a new day. Whatever happened yesterday, I try to forget. This way each student has a clean slate every day in my classroom. If they made a mistake yesterday, we talk about it and then move on. I also know that, “[b]eing both demanding and warm may be particularly crucial when holding students accountable or giving them critical feedback” (Pace, 2015, p. 40). I believe it is crucial for teachers to let students know they care about them before they give them critical feedback, otherwise you will lose the students trust. If you are unable to gain a student’s trust, your efforts will be futile.

To help students feel known in my classroom, I make it a point to greet students as they enter my classroom. I ask them how their day is going and wait for a genuine answer. I let them know information about my life so they know that I am also comfortable with them and trust them with what I have going on. I let them know that if they are having troubles, school or not, they can come and talk to me and I will try to help in whatever way I can. I try to model a school version of the person my mom is for me. When building relationships with students, I am trying to model positive adult interactions for them. Many of the students at my school have had experiences with adults that make them defensive. My school is an inner-city school with a high population of students who are below the poverty line. My students know that if they are hungry all they need to do is ask for a snack; they know that if they communicate what is going on in their lives I will modify or extend deadlines to help accommodate their specific situation. It has been suggested “that if students are to be adequately oriented in life, they should be educated somewhat less about its material dimensions and somewhat more about morality and those forms of community that bind us together with our fellow human beings, with the past, with our posterity, and, perhaps also with God” (Nord & Haynes, 1998). Helping students build positive adult relationships is something that will help them throughout their lives.

My goal of making students feel loved, supported and known within my classroom is challenged by the school I work in. The students who attend Renton High School are wonderful. However, there is a handful of students who have been so hurt by the school system, they shut down any time someone tries to break into their hardened exterior. “Teachers face a fundamental predicament. They must persuade students, especially those deemed underachieving, to invest time and effort in assignments. However, students may not be willing or able to do so” (Pace, 2015, p. 23). I work with students who fall into this category. I do not believe the part that says they are not able to do so, but not willing is another battle. There are students who will show up to school every twenty days so that they do not get dropped from the school: we have a 20 day drop policy. We have students who will work tremendously hard to receive a failing grade in a class. We have students who will try to get suspended so they can have a “break”, as one of my students called it. I am challenged to give students a clean slate every day. Although it is something I work really hard on, I am still challenged to do it when there are students who are consistently needing the clean slate. The other challenge comes from the lack of control I have about the future of some students. Wirzba says, “we need to reposition ourselves as persons who do not possess and control life, but continually receive and share it” (Wirzba, 2013, p. 117). I want to force students to do the work I know they are capable of. I want to make them understand that they are cared for in my classroom, I want them know they are in a safe space. Yet, there are some students who resist and I have to let go of needing to control every situation. To help students know they are loved, I need to let go of control so that I can truly show them they are cared about. This is the biggest challenge for me in regards to this goal.

My third goal is for my students to know each other and to be able to work effectively with their peers. My students know that I expect them to work hard, respect each other and the classroom, and to learn how to work with all of their peers. To work with their peers, they need to be empathetic, compassionate, and able to think about something from someone else’s point of view. Moral education has two purposes: “One purpose of moral education is to help make children virtuous—honest, responsible, and compassionate. Another is to make mature students informed and reflective about important and controversial moral issues” (Nord & Haynes, 1998). As a math teacher, I do not get to cover many controversial topics, however, I work really hard to help students gain a “certain degree of open-mindedness from their fellow citizens, a willingness to consider values and perspectives beyond their own” (Kunzman, 2105, p. 79). I believe it is important to be able to see things from multiple perspectives. Due to this, I make sure we work on tasks as teams where there is more than one way to arrive at the same answer. This gives students a chance to see that although their way is correct, their neighbor’s way is also correct. I make a point to talk about this as a class too. We talk about differing viewpoints and how we are able to live in the world easier if we are informed.

Another way I help them think about things from multiple perspectives and help them build the ability to see things from their peers, point of view, is to ask them questions that involve ethics. In the upper level math classes, we work closely with many statistical tests. We talk a lot about the way statistics can be manipulated to say what we want it to say. Some of the questions students are asked are,

“Does mathematics evolve” (Haese, Haese, Haese, Mäenpää, & Humphries, 2014, p. 337)? “Can we trust statistical results published in the media and in scientific journals? What role does ethics have to play in mathematics” (Haese, Haese, Haese, Mäenpää, & Humphries, 2014, p. 539)? “How does a knowledge of probability theory affect decisions we make” (Haese, Haese, Haese, Mäenpää, & Humphries, 2014, p. 603)?

Students are asked how the math they are doing will affect those outside of the school. If they looked at the data a different way would it affect a different group? Is there a way to make sure we are taking our biases out of the statistics we are performing? These are just a few more questions students must grapple with in mathematics. Finally, to help them get to know each other, I ask them silly questions they must talk about. I do most of my instruction in teams of four. To determine the reader for the day, I will ask students who has the most pets, who lives the farthest from school, who got up the earliest, etc. Students then talk about their answers so they are able to figure out who their reader is for that day.

There are significant challenges to this last goal. Students come in with their own biases about themselves and their peers. They make snap judgements or they have been with certain peers for many years. Trying to break the tensions and preconceived notions students come in with is by far the most challenging part of getting them to work with a diverse group of people. When asking students to share information about themselves, there is always the risk a student will refuse or not feel like they are able to share. I try to remember, “to love is not to coerce, but rather to nurture and empower creatures with the freedom to pursue their own ends” (Wirzba, 213, p. 50). Students have their own agenda. Trying to align their agenda to yours or yours to theirs becomes incredibly messy. This is another challenge this goal poses in the classroom. Trying to get my goals across to my students in a way they are receptive and willing to participate is something I am continuing to work on.

The three goals above have given me a starting place for thinking about the culture in my classroom this next school year. “To fulfill their essential role of educating young people to be full participants in a diverse world, schools must spawn development of informed, caring, and active citizens in our multicultural society” (Pace, 2015, p. 111). Helping students recognize the knowledge they can gain from getting to know those around them is something I will continue to try and accomplish. Teaching students how to be tolerant of differing viewpoints, question their own beliefs, and to looks at things from multiple perspectives will help them learn how to be an integral part of the classroom society and eventually the society outside of the classroom. I connect my ideal classroom to the garden in Way of Love. Wirzba says, “[w]hen done right, gardens are places where God’s love becomes beautiful, nutritious, and tasty” (Wirzba, 2013, p. 62). When a classroom is set up well, it becomes a beautiful site of learning and growth for students, it feeds their desires to learn and their minds with knowledge, and it is something to strive for. As this school year begins and I get to know my new students, I will be looking to move towards a well-kept garden. A place that is well nurtured, taken care of, and flourishing under the conditions it finds itself in.

Artifacts:

Religion in the Classroom Reflection
The Charged Classroom Reflection
Way of Love Reflection

Sources:

·       Haese, R., Haese, S., Haese, M., Mäenpää, M., & Humphries, M. (2014). Mathematics for the international student: Mathematics SL. Adelaide: Haese Mathematics.

·       James, J. H., Schweber, S., Kunzman, R., Barton, K. C., & Logan, K. (2015). Religion in the classroom: dilemmas for democratic education. New York: Routledge.

·       Nord, W. A., & Haynes, C. C. (1998). Taking religion seriously across the curriculum. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

·       Pace, J. L. (2015). The charged classroom: predicaments and possibilities for democratic teaching. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

·       Ryan, K. (n.d.) Moral Education - A Brief History of Moral Education, The Return of Character Education, Current Approaches to Moral Education. http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2246/Moral-Education.html

·       Wirzba, N. (2013). Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity. San Francisco: Harper One.