| Creating a Positive Moral Culture in the School |
Creating a
positive moral culture in the school: Developing a caring school community
that promotes the core virtues.
Key Ideas:
- The school is a community with a moral culture.
- The moral culture of a school is defined by its
operative values, ones reflected in actual school practices and the
behavior of the school's members (do people respect each other? is attention
paid to moral concerns?) Operative values are true norms -- what people
expect of everybody else and are willing, to some meaningful degree,
to enforce.
- The school's moral culture is important because:
- It has a powerful effect on the moral behavior
of the members of the school community (a positive moral culture pulls
behavior up, a negative culture pulls it down).
- It affects the character development of the
members of the school. (If the school is a caring and honest environment,
students more readily develop those character qualities. It's easier
to become a good person when you are surrounded by goodness.)
Strategies
- Creating a positive moral culture in the
school involves defining, communicating, modeling, teaching, celebrating,
and enforcing or upholding the school's professed core virtues.
- Six elements are important parts of a positive
moral culture:
- Moral leadership, typically from the building principal
but also from other staff and students themselves
- Schoolwide discipline that upholds the school's
values in all parts of the school environment
- A schoolwide sense of community
- A feeling on the part of students that "this is
our school, and we are responsible for making it the best school it
can be" (participatory student government contributes to this as well)
- A moral climate of mutual respect and cooperation
that pervades all relationships, those among adults as well as those
between adults and students
- Time spent on moral concerns — reflecting
on the quality of moral life in the school.
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