Teaching Moral Character: Two Strategies for Teacher Education

The importance of character education is gaining momentum among politicians and educators. Over a dozen states have mandated character education and hundreds of schools have incorporated it into their programming (e.g., L.A. Times, 2003). Moreover, in the last several years three top education periodicals (Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, Journal of Teacher Education) have stressed the importance of character, ethics, and spirituality in education.
The relative neglect of moral character education in the formal preservice teacher curriculum has at least two proximal causes. The first is the daunting surfeit of training objectives that already crowd the academic curriculum of teaching majors. When faced with the reality of finite credit hours available for teacher education, along with the demands of NCATE accreditation and state licensing requirements, many teacher educators assume that the preservice curriculum leaves little room for training in moral character education. The second cause is the puzzling phenomena whereby stakeholders---parents and school boards---expect schools to address the character of students, but nobody wants to be caught teaching values. The allergic fear of moral education is that one should be asked “whose values?” are being taught.
Yet values are embedded inextricably in school and classroom life (Campbell, 2003; Hansen, 1993; Fenstermacher, 1990; Tom, 1984). Teachers implicitly impart values when they select and exclude topics; when they insist on correct answers; when they encourage students to seek the truth of the matter; when they establish classroom routines, form groups, enforce discipline, encourage excellence. Teachers mold certain forms of social life within classrooms, and influence students’ experience of community and school membership. Moral values saturate the daily life of classrooms (Bryk, 1988; Goodlad, 1992; Hansen, 1993; Strike, 1996). Character formation is intrinsic to classrooms and schools and an inescapable part of the teacher’s craft (Campbell, 2005; Hansen, 1993; Jackson, Boostrom & Hansen, 1993; Lapsley & Narvaez, 2006).
The dilemma that faces teacher educators, then, is whether it is acceptable to allow character education to remain part of a school’s hidden curriculum, or whether advocacy for the value commitments immanent to education and teaching should be transparent, intentional, and public. Our sympathy is with the latter option, but how do teacher educators equip preservice teachers with the skills to take up their task as moral educators? What would training for character and ethical development look like?

Two alternative approaches are presented here. The first approach views character education as immanent to best practice instruction. This approach argues that there is little need for specialized instruction in ethics or in the design of distinctly moral education curriculum. Rather, character development is an outcome of effective teaching. It is a precipitate of best practice instruction. Hence, in order to be assured that the moral formation of students will be in good hands the teacher educator need only ensure that pre-service teachers are prepared to be outstanding teachers.

The second view is that best practice teaching is necessary but not sufficient for effective moral formation of pupils. Perhaps at some point in the halcyon past it was sufficient, but in the present cultural milieu children are reared increasingly in toxic environments that pose special challenges for their moral and social development (Garbarino, 2004; Quart, 2003). As a result teachers are called upon to offer a counterweight to the malformative elements permeating children’s lives, a responsibility that calls for a more intentional and deliberate approach. This intentional strategy is committed to the view that students flourish in classroom communities, and that children are best equipped to take on the challenges of development when they master the skill sets required for responsible membership in a democratic society (Guttman, 1987).
Option 1: Best Practice Instruction is Sufficient for Moral Character Formation


Effective teaching for moral character aligns with best practice instruction for academic achievement. The knowledge base that supports best practice instruction is coterminous with what is known to influence the moral formation of students. Making explicit this linkage should be a clear goal for teacher education. Preservice teachers should consider not only how instructional practice influences academic learning but also how it shapes student character development. As we will see, schooling and teacher practices that promote achievement overlap with practices that support student prosocial development (Sebring, 1996). Effective teaching promotes both moral and academic excellence (Solomon, Watson & Battistich, 2001). Here we will focus on two domains where best practice instruction pays dividends for moral character education: the importance of both socio-emotional skill development and caring classrooms and schools.

Option 2: Best Practice is Necessary but not Sufficient

The first option does not require significant revision of the standard teacher education curriculum. It requires no specialized curriculum, no tool box of specialized instructional strategies. It requires only reflective intentionality about the dual implications of best practice instruction—that it advances the cause of both academic achievement and moral character formation. The second view agrees that instructional best practice is necessary, but that it is not sufficient to equip student with the skills necessary to negotiate the demands of modern life. There is no guarantee that students will experience positive moral formation outside of school, let alone experience guidance broad or explicit enough to prepare them to be morally competent adults. For example, in poor urban neighborhoods, there are often few positive role models (Jargowsky & Sawhill, 2006) and young people receive very little coaching for moral citizenship. The task of preparing morally adept individuals requires, according to this view, a more intentional programmatic instructional focus (Lapsley & Narvaez, 2006). The framework presented here addresses specifically the issue of what and how to teach for positive character formation.1

Integrative Ethical Education. The Integrative Ethical Education (IEE) model blends several key findings from empirical science to provide a step-by-step framework for cultivating moral character (Narvaez, 2006; in press). The steps may be taken one by one or all at once. Within a context saturated with high expectations for behavior and achievement, educators deliberatively build the following within the classroom and school:

Step 1: Foster a supportive climate for moral behavior and high achievement.
Step 2: Cultivate ethical skills.
Step 3: Use an apprenticeship approach to instruction (novice-to-expert guided practice).
Step 4: Nurture self-regulation skills
Step 5: Build support structures with the community

The first step has been described as best practice above under Caring School Community, and so will not be addressed further. The second and third steps, discussed together, are rooted in an expansion of Rest’s Four Component Model (Narvaez & Rest, 1995; Rest 1983) and expertise development. The Four Component Model describes the psychological skills or processes that a person uses in order to complete a moral behavior: ethical sensitivity, ethical judgment, ethical focus, and ethical action. Ethical sensitivity refers to perceiving the moral issue cognitively and emotionally, identifying courses of action, affected parties and reactions. Ethical judgment entails applying a code of ethics to make a decision about the most moral choice. Ethical focus involves prioritizing the moral choice, and ethical action is the ability and strength to carry through on the ethical choice.