How do we teach empathy? The 6 Stages of Moral Development

Effective teaching leads students not to an understanding of material but rather a way of thinking, learning, and doing. Character education is no different - we want our students to be better people, not just understand what being good means.

Two weeks ago I introduced Lawrence Kohlberg's 6 Stages of Moral Development. The research has been around for four decades now, and used by educators for just as long. After reading about them in Rafe Esquith's Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire, I was drawn to their alignment with the 'growth mindset' that we hammer home with our students - that they have the power to affect change in themselves, in this case with what kind of a person they are. Taught with a reminder about malleable intelligence, I began down the road with my students with the understanding that we are all on individual levels, joined by our common desire to be better.

The 6 stages are remarkably simple and straightforward.  which is why many of my colleagues seemed intrigued by the experiment I was proposing. Teaching them, however, has not yet made the impact I'm hopeful it will have.

We began with the connection to malleable intelligence (or the 'growth mindset' as we call it) - Want to get stronger? Lift. Want to get smarter? Work harder. Want to become a better person? Think of others. Reviewing the stages, I asked the students to consider what stage they themselves were on, but also to try to identify people in their life who are on the respective stages. I used the following Prezi to give a basic overview:



After our discussion, as part of their homework, I asked the students to self-select their current level and explain why. The responses gave me hope. While determining how to invest them in the stages has and will continue to be tricky, it became clear that my students understood how they could be better. Their responses (or some of my 7th graders), viewed here, provide a glimpse at how my students currently operate.

Many of them are able to articulate that they follow the rules and look for guidelines; that they like to please their parents and others; and generally that, as is common for a 7th grader, they're not always thinking of others over themselves.

In class, I continually reference the 6 stages. "Quiet down" is replaced with a reminder to be considerate of others around you while you're working. When they need another reminder, I'll remind them that those of us operating below a Level 5 need to remember that the rule is to talk quietly for those Level 4s, or that I really like it quiet for the Level 3s. The question then can become, "how many of you need a specific reward or punishment to stay quiet?" My students know that, by 7th grade, they should be beyond Levels 1 and 2, but most importantly, they can see that we're still coming back to the why. Don't be quiet because of a consequence, be quiet because it's the right thing to do.

The next step for us is to find ways of motivating the students to move up. Selling them on "stages of moral development" is not easy, and incentivizing would defeat the purpose. So instead, I'm constantly looking for examples and nonexamples (the latter of which is always easier to come by), and reminding the students to be considerate of others.

What it comes back to, for me, is why are students behaving the way they are. Rafe explains how his students are quiet in the hallways, for example. But unlike my students, they're not quiet because they might get yelled at, or because it's the rule. They're quiet because they understand they might disrupt another class. They understand why being quiet is the respectful, responsible thing to do. They get it.

Have you taught Kohlberg's 6 Stages? Do you have a different way of teaching character? Would love to hear feedback on how to make this really stick with my students, and to help them strive for level 6.

For more information, check out this slideshare:

Lawrence kohlberg's moral development theory from Virginia Sevilla

Skip to 21 minutes to hear Rafe describe the 6 stages.

My links page: http://goo.gl/tqQivr.
6 Stages document: http://goo.gl/wIhh3V.

Why I'm using Mailbox for Gmail

The goal of Mailbox: "Inbox zero"

Disclaimer: I do not do paid endorsements, nor am I paid to write anything on this blog. My posts are my views and nothing else.

Teaching leaves minimal time throughout the day to check email. Most average days go by with barely enough time for a snack, let alone a full meal, or a chance to purge your inbox. So this week I decided to try out the Mailbox app for the first time - an iPhone and iPad app for gmail that leads you to deal with your email every day in a smart, effective, and uber-efficient way. It came highly recommended by a teacher I have great respect for, Dave Crumbine. After my first week using the app, I'm starting my weekend with a grand total of 9 emails between both personal and work accounts - a ridiculously manageable number that pails in comparison to my average weekend load.

With Gmail's new tabs layout, those of us hyper-organized, folder-and-tab loving users found a solution that weeded out the social updates (Facebook, Twitter) and daily deals (Groupon, Gilt) from the more important emails of the day. But instead of ending up with a clear, constant flow of important emails, it allows for a lot of piling up.

Mailbox's key feature is getting you to "Inbox zero." Instead of letting that meaningless sale offer sit in a "Promotions" inbox, Mailbox forces you to read, delay, or trash immediately and easily with a single swipe on your phone. No need to check a box or open the email. Just swipe it directly from your inbox - and it's gone. 

There's a strong argument for getting rid of tabs and folders altogether, and Mailbox demonstrates the beauty of it. The need for organizing your emails is unnecessary in Gmail given its search function (let's not forget where Google's roots are). Mailbox keeps all your old, read emails in Gmail's "All Mail" folder. Swipe across in the Mailbox app, and the green arrow puts the email in the "All Mail" folder immediately. Gone from my inbox, but not gone forever. 

Where Mailbox really nails it is in its ability to let you delay or "put off" emails for a later time. If I get an email in the middle of the day from a parent, I want to respond thoughtfully, after school's out. Swipe the email to the left, and I can choose "later today" to have the email put back in my inbox later that day. This allows me to get to "Inbox 0", without needing to respond immediately to every email all day. Can't deal with it until tomorrow? The weekend? Next week? Next month? Just swipe to the left and choose - it'll stay in your "Later" folder on Gmail until the time is right.

As a teacher, time is your most valuable resource. Instead of spending it slogging through emails, use it to improve your teaching. Mailbox is a great app for those of us who use Gmail. Any ideas for the rest? How do you get to "Inbx zero"?

Taking the 'Do Now' to the next level

Word cloud of responses to our text-to-text connections
with a current events article from the BBC on banning slang in school.

The "Do Now" might have been the first teaching strategy I ever was subject to in teacher-training. While many of the strategies and activities I learned early on have since been left by the wayside, the "Do Now" has remained. It's impact on classroom management cannot go understated - how you start class is how you'll spend class, so the saying goes - as it pushes students to urgently dive into an academic task that gets their mind humming and spirals in and reinforces prior lessons. 

Allowing for students to share, compare, and relate their work on the do now, however, is typically limited to turn-and-talks and share-outs. To take this a step further, I wanted two specific outcomes - to allow students to see their classmates responses to a question on the projector (without getting out of their seat and walking up to the board to read a sticky-note, which could have been effective in their own right), and to examine the answers we developed together as a whole body of students. 

To do this, we used a combination of old-school and new-school: annotate a short article using text codes with paper and pencil, and identify a text-connection to the title of the article on Polleverywhere.

Polleverywhere is a web-based assessment/inquiry program that allows students to respond to a prompt via the web, a smartphone or device, or even via text message. It runs similarly to Socrative, another such assessment program. What makes Polleverywhere really stand out, however, is how it allows the teacher to use answers in more useful ways. Instead of discussing answers individually, we’re able to aggregate answers and analyze at a deeper level. 

For our do now, as the students' answers came rolling in each one appeared on a large screen on my laptop, each with its own box. When most of the class had contributed their thoughts, we looked at the board of answers now being projected for the class to see. Students shared out what connections they made to other students' answers, and we identified themes among all the answers. 

Beyond making connections to each other's answers and identifying new answers to the prompt, we were also able to easily export a word cloud of the entire group's answers via Tagxedo. Many students connected the article (about censoring the use of slang in a school) to our study of Banned Books, specifically with Nat Hentoff's wonderful novel The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. 

Unfortunately, since we were moving into the next activity, I waited until the end of class to create the word cloud - a missed opportunity, in my view. However, there was an obvious next step that we will take on Monday (which would have been made all the more effective had it followed the activity immediately): analyzing why certain words were used by the class more often than others. What connections were classmates making? Which ones were they missing? One wonderful feature of Polleverywhere is the ability to have students simply go back to the same question and answer again given their discussions. Asking students to identify a second connection they had not noticed, or pushing them to fill in the 'missing connection', could have pushed us even further up Bloom's. And all that in just the do now.

One piece of caution here is obviously timing. Do nows are meant - in most classes, on most days - to take up no more than 5 minutes of class time. I believe this number to be a pretty smart limitation. This activity can easily push 20 if you're taking it that far. But who knows, maybe that's exactly where you want to take your lesson.

What do you think of this activity? How would you change it? How are you taking your do nows to the next level?

We can do better

There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people... realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts. 

Rafe Esquith  

Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire

Before beginning to discuss the ins and outs of my teaching life through this blog, I'd like to start with Rafe - and a dose of humility. I have much n common with the 'charlatans' described above (minus the clever slogans and lecture circuits), and I can't help but address the inherent complication that arises when non-experts such as myself decide to promote their beliefs and experiences to the world at large. 

As Rafe explains, "true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort", all of which can only be achieved through experience and time - two areas lacking in the 'teach for a while' world I've existed in thus far. My father is a testament to this, a teacher of 40-odd years in the classroom, a man with volumes of sacrifice, mistakes, and effort on his shelf. It is only through the true grind that we actually come to understand - a lesson, I've learned, that applies quite well to our students, of course. 

And yet it's just that reason that I find myself not-so-humbly publishing my (not-so-genius) thoughts to the web. While I feel that my years in the classroom have thus-far given me a small wealth of experience and knowledge to at least fill a short chapter of my father's volumes, I write instead in an effort to be better. Reflecting on my experiences as a young teacher will only push me to be better (as it's been shown time and again the importance of taking the time to reflect). And perhaps in the process, my sacrifices, mistakes, and efforts can benefit others reading it.

"We can do better." I couldn't agree more.