A Dilemma of Moral Self-Efficacy

Last week, we discussed the difference between effective reinforcement in the classroom and our concept of “justice”. I particularly was struggling with the hypothetical examples of bullying we discussed, and the fact that puritanical “punishment” of behavior does not work to truly stop bullying or any other negative behavior. In order for reinforcement to be effective, it will not always seem fair. Upon reflection, I realize that the reason I am still having such a hard time accepting this is because of how intensely I have been indoctrinated into puritanical classroom culture (quite literally, as I’ve attended private Christian schools my entire life until my first semester at OSU). The concept of redirecting a bully’s behavior to something positive and productive without addressing what they were doing wrong in the hope that they might learn the difference between right and wrong is SO foreign to me.

Therefore, when we were discussing the example of the teacher pulling the bully aside and giving them comics to analyze, I was dumbfounded as to how that wouldn’t be perceived as a reward for negative behavior. I understand conceptually that yelling at a bully or punishing them creates a loss of trust that may never be reforged between the bully and that teacher, and therefore won’t create a lasting change in the bully’s behavior. However, if you walked into a traditionally educated classroom where the students are primed with a justice-oriented mindset and reinforced a bully’s behavior in this way, you may have maintained the trust of the bully but potentially lost the trust of their victims. This is because the victims could see your behavior as unfair, prioritizing the bully’s reinforcement over the victims’ hurt feelings.

This leads me to believe that while this teaching tactic is truly the most effective for reinforcement of positive and productive behavior, it needs to start from the beginning of educational experience in order to be effective for the learning community as a whole. As we discussed in class, people learn from any and every interactive experience they have with others, so parents and teachers alike must implement such reinforcement from the beginning. Otherwise, we face having to re-train students from a mindset of justice-orientation.

However, this opens up a whole new can of worms: to what extent should we ignore teaching moral self-efficacy in the pursuit of an “effective” classroom environment? (I’m not sure this is the correct way of wording this conundrum, but it’s the closest I’ve got.)