A Thinking Skills Approach to Values:A Teaching Strategy with Student Handouts Excerpted from: A. Tiatorio: Freedom and Equality: The Human Ethical Enigma |
|
In the early 1970’s when a rising urge to select subject matter in the light of student’s lives and interests seemed to be challenging adherence to traditional classical disciplines education, my colleagues and I believed it was critical to resist this and to emphasize the scientific mode of inquiry used by the disciplines to prepare the flexibility for change necessary in what was a rapidly changing world. It certainly seemed that if thinking skills development were to be a primary aim of social studies education, the disciplines must remain central to the process, since they formed the only complete bodies of organized abstract learning. It also seemed certain that change would make the given state of any field obsolete and that stressing the mode of inquiry would pay far more dividends than would simple content accumulation. We never deviated from this belief that traditional cultural content is the common denominator among educated people and is the only legitimate foundation for the social studies. We refused to replace the classic texts and topics with what happened then to be timely. We wanted to consider ethical concepts in their historic context, rather than to simply dive into the dilemmas of the day without adequate academic preparation. In pondering an ethics input for the high school social studies curriculum, I became convinced that the student must be encouraged to reflect on the ramifying aspects of material change in order to develop a coherent ethical philosophy of life. This meant conscious examination of human nature itself, which is the source for what we call our values. Although the disciplines alone could not satisfy this affective need, they were the only bodies of organized knowledge sufficient to be a basis for thinking skill development. We needed a curriculum design which could combine the cognitive and the affective domains. This of course ran counter to the prevailing popular view that the cognitive and affective were separate entities, with the former being rational, and the latter essentially emotional. We felt from the beginning that this was nonsense, probably generated more by political pressures to stay away from values education than from good science; and we rejected it. To solve this problem, we created a format that integrated values analysis within a cognitive study of traditional disciplines content. We, as educators, would arbitrarily determine what was important among the affective questions confronting us and which of our values needed assessment in the light of rapid changes in material conditions. These would then be examined through traditional disciplines content and be applied to contemporary ethical problems. In this way, the curriculum would be structured of time-honored subjects, but be approached in ways which succeeded in forcing the kinds of values considerations necessary for relevancy. The value issues would be determined initially, and arbitrarily, in organizing the curriculum. Classical content from the disciplines would then be structured to best examine those value questions in ways which would work key concepts through the range of thinking skills. … It seemed obvious to us that training a critical thinking citizen capable of making rational decisions based on evidence should be a main aim of education in a democratic society. It also seemed obvious, in our era of global interdependence, that the decisions made by those individuals must be ethical ones made with respect and consideration for the rights and needs of all those involved in or impacted by them. Ethics defined as prima facie equal rights seemed a sound foundation for curriculum development and a basis for making rational moral choices. It was apparent to me that basic morality was consistent with ideal democracy, and that this must become fundamental to education in and for a free society. … So, we set out to devise a method to effectively organize the content of the social studies curriculum in a way which could achieve the highest levels of critical thinking skill and also attack the most crucial axiological issues. We decided to begin with the survey courses required for all students, grade 9 Western Civilization and grade 11 United States History. Each instructional unit in these programs would be composed of a series of behavioral objectives in a hierarchy from the lowest to the highest thinking skill and would work traditional content in a way that illuminated and examined the important ethical questions of our time. We based our work on several premises. Values are normally formed in two ways, by the process of environmental conditioning and through abstract, empirical education. There is no fundamental difference in kind between a value internalized through conditioning and the same value arrived at through rational thought. The latter, however, can include empirical validations while the former can not. In a mutable technological age, many values need reassessment within a given material reality, and even though that material reality will, through conditioning, eventually produce change in the out of line values, the process is slow and inevitably leaves dangerous gaps. The implications are obvious as are the ubiquitous examples. It could be said that to some degree at least, society is always partially psychotic because it functions with some values that have not kept up with changing material reality. It is the job of education to overcome this deficiency. Values are not mystical matters, unassailable and unverifiable, with everyone entitled to his or her own opinion. They can and should be subjected to rational thought and analysis. Unfortunately, this axiological fundamental had not filtered very far into the general curricula thinking of the time which had begun to embrace an ethically problematic idea borrowed from self help psychology called “values clarification.” This method asked students to reflect on what they already believed in order to “clarify” and thereby better understand their own values. This seemed counterproductive to me and only likely to support and further entrench some fundamentally unethical views. How would values clarification deal with a racist or a free rider I wondered? We rejected this notion that ethics education should concentrate on clarifying and in essence rationalizing and justifying an existing belief system. Values clarification may have been useful as a psychological counseling tool but it was not appropriate as an educational strategy when applied to young students with little life experience. Values clarification reinforced the already rampant relativism that accompanied the extreme individualism that we saw growing dangerously around us. We weren’t interested in clarifying but in challenging the prevailing ethical shortcomings of our time which seemed to be dangerously permissive and self-regarding. Education must address these problems by testing prevalent social principles against empirical evidence through logical, scientific study to help determine their validity. Values decisions should be examined as hypothetical alternative courses of action to predict their likely influence on future real material conditions. The affective questions must be organized and integrated with the cognitive content of the disciplines and that content selected in the light of the future life needs of both the individual student and society as a whole; and this must all be done in a way that promotes critical thinking. It seemed like a Herculean task but it in fact resolved itself quite readily. We concluded that in order for behavioral objectives to actually reach the highest levels of thinking those objectives should be based on the taxonomy of Benjamin S. Bloom. According to Bloom and his associates, thinking occurs through a regular, identifiable pattern of increasing complexity, with higher levels of thinking dependent for their achievement on the ability to reach those skills lower in the hierarchy. Any intellectual activity, educational goal, or outcome, no matter how lofty, can be precisely stated in behavioral terms once the hierarchy is mastered. Bloom’s taxonomy, devised in the mid 1950’s, provided educators with an ingenious framework for organizing and classifying educational objectives that has not been surpassed. Allow me a brief review of the taxonomy in order to later illustrate how we first attempted to integrate ethics concepts into the cognitive content of the two history curriculums. According to Bloom, the lowest, most basic thinking skill is the memory of factual information. Although all higher thinking skills must be based on the recall of data of some kind, the process of knowledge accumulation alone is the lowest level of thinking. Rote recall from memory does not ensure, or even indicate, any understanding or comprehension of the meaning of that remembered knowledge. The comprehension of knowledge is a level two thinking skill according to Bloom. At level two the student understands the remembered knowledge and can recognize the implications of it, interpret it, or translate it into another form. The student has not, however, yet demonstrated an ability to use it for anything. The next higher level of thinking skill, level three, according to Bloom, is the application of this comprehensive knowledge to some new situation which results in the useful functioning of the knowledge. The comprehension and application of a given content of knowledge is followed in the hierarchy of thinking skills by the ability to break the data down into its functioning parts and to reveal, through analysis, the working relationship between the parts which makes the knowledge worthwhile. This analysis is level four and its achievement is necessary before the student can create a new arrangement of knowledge capable of achieving some new purpose. Any new design for new functions is a level five synthesis. The highest thinking skill, level six, according to Bloom, is the evaluation or judgment, by internal or external criteria, of whether an arrangement of knowledge or synthesis intended to achieve a given purpose does or does not actually achieve it. Before I present an example of unit objectives that manipulate an ethics concept through the thinking skills using classic historical content, it is important to define exactly what a concept is. Having once asked a high school class to look this up for me and been told that a concept was a generic idea generalized from particular instances, I began to better appreciate the teacher’s art. Standing at the blackboard I remarked that a concept is simply a way to make sense out of discreet facts. It is an organizing idea that renders otherwise useless bits of information useful. The important general characteristic of concepts is that a given set of facts can be organized conceptually in many different ways, thereby rendering different meanings. I held up my broken piece of chalk and told them that it was in fact a soft grayish white limestone substance. This fact can be conceptually organized in several ways. Formed into a stick, as it was in my hand, it became a writing tool, while if ground to a powder it could be used as a lubricant on gymnastics apparatuses. Tool is a concept that organizes limestone substance, which is a fact. Lubricant is a concept that organizes the same factual attributes of limestone differently. It is not possible to think about facts without organizing them conceptually and therefore concepts are the key to the design of thinking skill development inputs. Boom’s taxonomy is the framework that ensures that those objectives reach the highest levels of thinking. The objectives package based on Bloom for a typical unit of instruction in 9th grade Western Civilization would begin with a level one accumulation of knowledge. I have not described the wide range of lesson plan strategies that could be employed to achieve each objective. Level #1 Knowledge The student will recall significant facts about the Peloponnesian War. At Level Two the student would be introduced to the key concept and helped to comprehend it. Level #2 Comprehension The student will translate into his or her own words the meaning of the concept of values and will give an original example of a value motivating an action. Next, at Level Three, the student would be expected to apply this concept to a new and not previously studied problem. Level #3 Application The student will infer some of the values inherent in Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” from Thucydides The Peloponnesian War. At Level Four the student must use the values of fairness and tolerance identified from Pericles to analyze new and not previously studied data. Level #4 Analysis The student will analyze the actions of the Athenians as reported by Thucydides in the “Melian Debate” from The Peloponnesian War. Level Five, synthesis, is the creation of a new organization of conceptual knowledge and in classroom settings usually requires the writing of an essay that demonstrates an excellent understanding of both the historical data and the concept. Level #5 Synthesis The student will write an essay which explains the inconsistency between Athenian values and actions during the Peloponnesian War. Level Six Evaluation requires the application of criteria and is generally an unfinished process furthered by a Socratic Seminar discussion in which the ethical issues are considered. Students are expected to defend their conclusions as well as to seek to understand those who disagree. Level #6 Evaluation The student will judge the actions of the Athenians to be good or bad, right or wrong. The Peloponnesian War, a death struggle between Athens and Sparta, sapped the energy of the entire Hellenic world. Events of the war, as well as the motives of its military and political leaders, were dispassionately chronicled by the Athenian historian Thucydides, who often exposed the gap between ethical ideals and the realities of human behavior. In a Memorial Day speech at the end of the first year of the war, the Athenian leader, Pericles, honored the sacrifices of those who lost their lives. Thucydides was there and reported his words saying that the Athenians were a great people because they lived under laws that secured justice for all and because they protected the weak and helpless. He praised the Athenians for their open society saying that they were not suspicious of their neighbors and were tolerant of the actions of others, even if they disapproved. The student should recognize these values from reading this excerpt from Thucydides. In the war between Athens and Sparta, the island of Melos tried to remain neutral but was attacked by Athens. Athenian envoys delivered an ultimatum to the defenseless Melians that was reported by Thucydides. This “Melian Debate” shows that the values for justice and tolerance, trumpeted by Pericles, did not apply to the Melians, who were, in the end, brutally massacred. The thinking skill strategy requires students to establish criteria by identifying key Athenian values from Pericles and then applying them to the analysis of new data in the Melian debate. The ethics aspect builds on this by asking students to synthesize their thoughts into an original essay expression that grapples with the ethical concepts of fairness and tolerance. Finally, a Socratic seminar discussion based on the study explores why the Athenians obviously lived by a double ethical standard. This of course is fundamental to the study of human ethics which sets different standards for different people. Students are asked to think about how this applies to their own lives.
Student Handouts: Ancient Greece: The Search for Justice
|