At the heart of positive school climate are strong relationships. Schools with positive climates have students and staff who are caring, respectful, and committed to their communities, both their immediate communities (e.g., school and neighborhood) and the broader world. These practices become part of the fabric of the school, permeating day to…

The importance of moral courage to teaching and learning has been recognized by a number of authors. The process pedagogy of Alfred North Whitehead proposes that emotion is central to experience and to the imaginative questioning which enables learning and the ability to stand up for one's beliefs. Faculty who wish to connect with their students…

In this article, the authors lay out the basic foundational concepts and assumptions that will guide the reader through the chapters to come as the chapter authors explore "how" moral growth can be facilitated through various initiatives on the college campus. This article presents a brief review of the theoretical frameworks that provide the…

The purposes of this study were to conceptualize moral identity as moral ideal self, to develop a measure of this construct, to test for age and gender differences, to examine links between moral ideal self and adolescent outcomes, and to assess purpose and social responsibility as mediators of the relations between moral ideal self and outcomes.…

For over 30 years, Ken Ponds has served as Chaplain to thousands of children of color at Starr Commonwealth. This school was founded in 1913 by Floyd Starr with the legendary motto "There is no such thing as a bad boy." Starr Commmonwealth sees their mission as "discovering greatness" in every young person. In this interview…

Games and other forms of play are used in today's libraries to attract underserved patrons, to introduce patrons to other library resources and services, and to facilitate engagement between library patrons. While many perceive gaming as a new library service, gaming services have been part of librarianship since the nineteenth century through…

To increase school psychologists' understanding of school contextual culture in China, this study used a qualitative research method to investigate 30 Chinese elementary school teachers' evaluation criteria as reflected in narrative student evaluations. In the study, 450 narrative student evaluations were coded and analysed. Overall, results…

As the United States has struggled to answer the question of what education for the 21st century must look like, most states have now responded by signing onto the Common Core Standards. Drawn from lessons learned from a generation of standards-based education and research on what high-performing countries do to enable young people to prosper, it…

Purpose: The public expects school leaders to be moral exemplars, yet prior research indicates that teachers and, more recently, school principals may score lower than other career groups on a widely used measure of moral reasoning, the Defining Issues Test. Moreover, little empirical research has been conducted on educators during leadership…

This quantitative descriptive study identified the differences in the moral reasoning development levels between undergraduate teacher education students enrolled in methods courses and graduate teacher education students enrolled in an alternative certification education program using the Defining Issues Test-2 instrument. Based on Kohlberg's…

Developments in neurobiology are providing new insights into the biological and physical features of human thinking, and brain-activation imaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging have become the most dominant research techniques to approach the biological part of thinking. With the aid of neurobiology, there also have been…

It goes without saying that character development occurs in school. However, it is necessary to make that very premise an object of analysis regarding the issue of school articulation. This article will reveal the establishment of character development through schools by focusing on the formation of elementary education as well as the expansion of…

Understanding lay conceptions of morality is important not only because they can guide moral psychology theory but also because they may play a role in everyday moral functioning. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine adolescent conceptions of moral maturity. Study 1 (200 adolescents 12-18 years) involved a free-listing procedure to…

Given the way that student, teacher, principal, and school testing and accountability measures are currently leaning, it is understandable why a child's moral development sometimes gets less attention than her aptitude in algebra. Yet even with nearly all major accountability incentives heaped upon the tests in math and English, there are still…

The intention of this paper is to make a contribution to religious education (RE)'s constant search for a rigorous curriculum identity. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)/Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project "Does RE work?" has recently reported its findings, in which it concludes that RE suffers from too many…