Deliberation in the Secondary School Classroom Project
A Project Conducted in Partnership with the Kettering Foundation
January – May, 2010
This Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service (WIPPS) pilot project , supported in part by funding from the Kettering Foundation, tested the hypothesis that teaching deliberation in the classroom improves student civic engagement, individual leadership skills, academic proficiency, and group decision-making, and helps students become better citizens who make decisions that value the collective good of society.
This project posited that “character development” is a benchmark not only of leadership (both social and personal), but also an indicator of moral development and correlates with tendencies towards civic engagement. Character development literature reflects distinct moral “languages” that arise from different theoretical perspectives:
1. COGNITIVE-STRUCTURAL – This approach assumes that the moral dimension of self develops over the life span. Moral development is viewed as primarily cognitive in nature and therefore centers in processes such as moral reasoning or judging. Development can be traced through progressive stages in the direction of increasing complexity, and development occurs in global schemas and thinking, and therefore is independent of the specific content of an individual’s belief system. The major models of development arising from this theoretical stance include those of Lawrence Kohlberg. In Kohlberg’s scheme, people are motivated according to six stages of moral development, summarized as follows:
Stage 1: Punishment and Obedience – The individual makes choices that circumvent physical punishment and demonstrate deference to power.
Stage 2: Instrumental Change – The individual does what is necessary and makes concessions only as necessary to satisfy his own needs. Right action is determined by the pleasure principle.
Stage 3: Interpersonal Conformity - Right action is conformity to the behavioral expectations of one’s society or peers. The individual acts to gain approval of others.
Stage 4: Law and Order –The individual has integrated a respect for the rules and laws of a properly constituted authority and demonstrates a defense of the given social and institutional order for its own sake.
Stage 5: Prior Rights and Social Contract – The individual believes that moral action in a specific situation is not defined by reference to a checklist of rules, but from logical application of universal, abstract, moral principles, and acts or behaves out of mutual obligation and a sense of public good.
Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principles - The individual acts out of universal principles based upon the equality and worth of all human beings and buys into the philosophy of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
2. PERSPECTIVES FROM DOMAIN THEORY – This approach primarily addresses the experiences and development of children. An individual’s judgment on moral matters would not change from situation to situation, but judgment on conventional matters are changeable in different contexts.
3. AFFECTIVE PERSPECTIVES – Instead of cognition, affective theorists of moral development view emotions as the building blocks of moral development. Empathic capacities in the developmental process make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another’s situation than with his own. Moral principles such as caring, desire to help others, justice, and a desire for equality can help balance the individual’s empathic responses.
4. SOCIAL LEARNING PERSPECTIVES - This approach posits that all behaviors – including those that are moral – are learned through observation of others, as well as through cognitive processes such as the observer’s capacity for attention to modeled events, capacity for self-observation, and incorporating accurate feedback in learning. This general social learning theory places a strong emphasis on social consequences in shaping moral behavior.
5. INTEGRATIVE PERSPECTIVES - This approach takes into account the importance of cognitive, social context, empathic response, and behavioral consequences in moral development. Character is conceived as three interrelated parts: moral knowing, moral feeling, and moral behavior. All three are necessary for leading a moral life and reaching moral maturity.
The question of how middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities might enhance personal and social responsibility can be considered from the five perspectives described above. With regard to the WIPPS deliberation project, the focus was on the assessment of civic engagement, leadership skills, academic proficiency, and group decision-making, while paying particular attention to moral development and the affective quality of empathy. More specifically, the project aimed to assess if a particular group moved toward decision-making that took into account the collective good of society.
For this pilot project, two secondary charter schools of the Wausau, Wisconsin school district were identified as participants for the second semester of 2010: The New Horizons School, serving middle school students, and the Enrich Excel Achieve Learning Academy (EEA), serving high school students. The curriculum devised for the pilot program engaged students in public deliberation methods, as learners, participants, moderators, framers and leaders of public dialogue efforts. A report was issued to the Kettering Foundation, and the pilot project was redesigned for customized implementation in other school settings.