Rabbi Barry Kislowicz, Ed.D., heads the lower and middle schools of Fuchs Mizrachi School in Cleveland, OH.
Perhaps our greatest hope is that our children grow up to be good, moral individuals. Many definitions of morality focus on how we treat others and function in a group. Therefore, if we want our efforts in moral and character education to be successful we must ensure that they relate to our students not only as individuals but also as a group. As John Dewey suggested, if we want to teach students how to function morally in society, then school itself needs to be an “embryonic society” (1990, p.18). We can only teach students to be good people in the organic medium of a miniature community.
The point may be obvious but the goal is very difficult to achieve. It is much easier to deliver a lecture on ethics or lead a discussion about the mitzvah of tzedakah than it is to build a true moral community. But despite the challenges inherent in achieving this ideal, each individual step that we take along the path can enhance our children’s moral growth. In the spirit of collegiality I offer suggestions, ranging from the modest to adventurous. In doing so, I hope to inspire others to add these strategies to their own repertoires and to use my experiences as building blocks to help launch their own initiatives.
A natural place to begin discussing building a true moral community is the area of informal and experiential education programs. These have made significant inroads in many schools in recent years with numerous schools now employing student activities directors who plan events such as retreats, shabbatonim, and holiday hagigah parties. However, these programs often remain just a fun counterpoint to the typical curriculum or as a vehicle to infuse additional spirit and even spirituality, but without an explicit focus on moral growth they may not effectively build moral community.
If we are to be successful, we must view experiential programming as an instrument we can use to set the tone for school culture and build community. We must design a year of informal programming at least as thoughtfully as we plan the year-long formal curriculum for an academic course. To do so, we should begin with the ultimate outcome in mind – in this case, the chosen aspect of moral community which we hope to build or enhance – and proceed from there to design the individual steps of the learning process.
Perhaps even more importantly, the mode and medium of these programs must itself be viewed as a key step towards achieving our goal. All too often, informal programs consist of outside professionals, such as musicians or entertaining speakers, who are brought in to put on a show while the students are fundamentally passive. In the case of the classic holiday hagigah students may even sing or dance, but this is still far from the level of participation for which we would hope.
In contrast to this passive approach, we can envision two types of experiential program better suited to the purpose of community building. The first type includes programs designed explicitly with team-building in mind, such as the well known ropes course programs, which center around challenging physical tasks that students must use teamwork to complete. While outside professionals are readily available to run these programs at campgrounds across North America and in Israel, it is essential that school educators collaborate with ropes course facilitators to insure that the experience is about learning the moral community values appropriate for their particular students.
To maximize the impact of such off-site programs we must complement them with similar activities that can be implemented by teachers within the school building. By doing so we can create a stronger connection between what goes on in the classroom and what happened on the challenge course. In addition, we allow teachers to take ownership of these activities and implement them to address moral issues in real time. For example, teachers who sense that their students are not supporting one another in class do not need to wait until the next field trip. Instead they can import brief challenge activities that build teamwork within the class around this focus area. As a side benefit, teachers who are trained to facilitate challenge activities often find the skills they learn to be very powerful tools even within a regular class lesson.
The second type does not focus explicitly on team-building, but rather incorporates it as the meta-goal of all experiential programming. A number of years ago my colleagues and I were searching for an alternative to the traditional, teacher-made Hanukkah party for our junior high students. We chose to ask students to plan the party themselves. Based on their chosen preferences, students were divided into workgroups which prepared each aspect of our celebration, including musical entertainment, video presentations, a play, decorations, the meal (including sufganiyot), and divrei Torah. Each workgroup began the process by learning relevant background sources with a teacher-facilitator, who then guided them through the planning and creating of their chosen project. It was vital to the process that students were given the space to work together productively with the teacher acting as facilitator rather than director. Over the course of the program we were impressed at how each individual workgroup coalesced and learned valuable lessons about working together productively. We learned that when students work together for real purposes they build community in the process. Even more importantly, we learned that when students work together for purposes related to our key ethical and religious values, they implant those values within the community in a most meaningful way.
This approach of authentic, well-structured group work as a mode of building moral community should be implemented within the classroom walls as well. A previous volume (7:3) of this journal examined how student-centered approaches enhance learning by engaging students in a more active manner. Above and beyond the academic benefits, such approaches are powerful vehicles for moral education as well. In order to be effective from both an academic and moral education perspective, group work needs to be carefully planned and structured, and its routines and expectations need to be modeled by the teacher.
Debbie Diller’s work on literacy workstations provides a stellar example of group work that can build moral community in the classroom. Diller’s workstations are focused on the core curriculum (2003, p.5). Materials within the workstations are differentiated according to students’ needs and teachers model how to use materials before they are placed in the workstation. Once the teacher lays this foundation students are poised to work together in a meaningful, collaborative process. This allows the teacher to act as facilitator rather than instructor. As she watches the students struggle together to accomplish a given task, the teacher-facilitator can provide moral guidance within the context of this real life group situation. Rather than just discouraging negative interactions, the teacher should focus on encouraging positive ones while guiding students to navigate successfully through the social, moral and intellectual challenges of authentic group work.
In addition to the structure of learning activities, Jackson, Boostrom and Hansen (1993) identify a full list of items – ranging from class décor to teacher-student interactions – which contribute to the moral message in each classroom. In line with our goal of building moral community, the most important of these factors will be teacher-student interactions and the student-student interactions. As Alfie Kohn explains, popular classroom management programs often run counter to this goal, as their primary objective is to establish control not build community (1996). Of course we must be mindful of the need to create a safe and productive classroom environment, but if we want to build community we must always view classroom management first and foremost through a moral lens.
Ultimately, if we want to create a holistic moral community we must also look beyond the formal and informal educational activities to examine the way that the school as a whole is structured. Taking our approach to its logical conclusion we might suggest that the most effective mode of moral education is giving the students the final responsibility for guiding their own community. One example of this approach is Lawrence Kohlberg’s “Just Community” schools (Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg, 1989). In Just Community schools moral issues are adjudicated by means of an open forum discussion in school-wide community meetings, following which a committee of student representatives makes a final determination. This committee is given significant power, including the authority to expel students for disciplinary issues. At least one Jewish day school, the Talmud Torah of St. Paul under the guidance of Earl Schwartz (2001), has implemented this approach within the day school setting, and reports that it has been extremely successful.
It is clear that many educators would be uncomfortable, either from pragmatic or educational perspectives, with giving students this level of power and authority. However, there is much middle-ground on this continuum which can still serve to enhance a school’s moral community. For example, we can work to transform our school’s student council from its typical role of running sales and events to taking responsibility for setting the moral tone of the student community. We could set the framework for such a transformation by asking each year’s student council to work with the student body at large in order to create or enhance a “moral constitution” for the school community. This would set the stage for student council activities throughout the year designed to realize the goals set out in the constitution. Similarly, within this framework student council members could be asked to participate with teachers or administrators in discussions of moral import. Student leaders, and the student body as a whole, stand to gain tremendously from involvement in this process. Peer-leadership is often more effective than adult guidance when it comes to creating a positive moral culture.
Finally, the same guidelines which applied to classrooms apply equally to the broad school environment. Just as we hope that teacher-student interactions in the classroom model the moral environment which we hope to cultivate, we must ensure that interactions between all individuals within the school model our moral values. This includes, for example, the manner in which we treat support staff, maintenance staff and guests, as well as the manner in which coaches, athletes and parents approach athletic competitions and visiting athletic teams.
In examining the areas of informal programming, classroom teaching, and the overall school environment, we have tried to share several strategies for enhancing students’ moral growth. The underlying goal, however, is much more important than any of specific strategy. If we truly want to educate our students to be moral, ethical adults, we need to ensure that every aspect of our schools is designed to create an authentic sense of moral community. It is only by creating miniature moral communities in our schools that we can enable our children to build life-size moral communities in our society.
References
Dewey, J. (1990) The School and Society. Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press.
Dillers, D. (2003) Literacy Work Stations: Making Centers Work. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
Jackson, P. W., Boostrom, R. and Hansen, J. (1993) The Moral Life of Schools. San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.
Kohn, A. (1996) Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community. Virgina: ASCD.
Power, C.F., Higgins, A. & Kohlberg, L. (1989) Lawrence Kohlberg’s Approach to Moral Education. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schwartz, E. (2001) Three Stages of a School’s Moral Development, Religious Education 96 (1), 106-118.