These activities relate to all of the standards of ethical learning and teaching.

Supervisors can work with groups of teachers (either at the same grade level or focused on a particular academic discipline, such as developing good writing skills and habits). The teachers might be asked to focus on one or more students who are having difficulty with a particular subject area and its attendant curriculum standard. They might then be asked to list the various background variables of that student (e.g., ethnicity, first language, class, parental education level and occupations, family composition, neighborhood where the student live; student’s friends, interests and talents of the student, etc.)

The exercise may reveal that some teachers in the group do not adequately understand the learner’s backgrounds, talents, and interests. Their assignment would be to find out such information. Next, the teachers and supervisors can brainstorm, finding a variety of ways to scaffold the learning activities with this knowledge in mind. Included in these discussions would be the various ways the teachers can build a more caring and trusting relationship with those students, a relationship that communicates expectations of untapped potential in those students. Then, the supervisor and teachers can design learning activities that will create a dialogical learning relationship with the curriculum material, in which the student will listen to the material talk back to him or her. Lastly, supervisors and teachers can develop potential learning outcomes, along with rubrics that reflect a personal appropriation of the material under study, as well as a public application of that material within the context of the learner’s context (e.g., working with a parent on how that curriculum material might be used in the parent’s job, or how it might be useful in dealing with a family or neighborhood issue).

Another possible professional development activity would involve the supervisor with a group of teachers in discussing how a particular curriculum unit with its attendant standards speaks to them of particular personal and civic values, values that are important and useful to them, to their expression of themselves and their participation in public life. As teachers share what values they find embedded in the curriculum unit, they can build a base for bringing these values to the fore as they introduce this particular curriculum unit to their own students. In this exercise, teachers should be challenged to find something personally valuable in the material. Otherwise, why should they be teaching something that does not appear to have any particular value for them? The exercise may reveal that some of the teachers have not engaged the curriculum at this deeper level of moral dialogue and the mutual relationships to the world revealed through this curriculum. The supervisor and the group of teachers can collaboratively explore how those worlds engage their human identity and sense of agency, and communicate the privileges and obligations of members in those worlds. These discussions could then lead to additional strategies for designing learning activities that bring the learner into a similar level of dialogue with the curriculum unit. This process of designing learning activities can lead to the design of appropriate rubrics for self-assessment by the learner and assessment by the teacher.

By discussing the various dynamics of this model of the moral character of teaching and learning with groups of teachers, supervisors can cooperatively develop an ongoing agenda of reflective practice and professional development with the teachers.

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