School Leadership and Management,

Vol. 25, No. 4, September 2005, pp. 399 411 /

Cultivating the moral character of

learning and teaching: a neglected
dimension of educational leadership
Robert J. Starratt*
Boston College USA

This essay intends to examine the moral character of learning and teaching and the concomitant
implications for educational leaders. With the academic curriculum in mind, I ask the basic
question: why should young people learn the standard academic curriculum that schools confront
them with? Although the expected answer might be, in the present policy context, to prepare them
for the increasingly complex and competitive world of work, I answer that it is to prepare them to
engage the cultural, the natural, and the historical worlds represented in the academic
curriculum*/to engage those worlds as members whose identities are shaped by those worlds,
whose futures require skillful and satisfying participation in those worlds, and whose membership
impose responsibilities to those worlds. The analysis presents a critique of the decontextualized,
abstract, depersonalized learning expected of learners, a learning of right answers to test questions,
without any clear understanding or justification of why these answers are ‘‘right’’*/a learning that is
inauthentic, posed, dishonest, and disrespectful, simply a response to the imposed playing of
school. I offer a virtuous approach to learning, an approach that seeks the good inherent in the
dialogue between the learner and the worlds he or she is studying, a goodness that creates both the
intelligibility of the knower as well as the intelligibility of the known found in their mutual
interdependence and relationality. The essay concludes with some implications for both teachers
and administrators in school that promote this moral, as well as, intellectual character of learning.

Introduction
This article will propose some perspectives that might guide educational leaders
(whether they be administrators or teachers) to address a neglected dimension of
their work, namely the cultivation of the moral character of learning and teaching. I
say this is a neglected dimension for two reasons: (a) the literature dealing with the
preparation and professional development of educators is, by and large, bereft of a
treatment of pupil learning as a moral activity, although we may find such treatments
of the moral character of learning in the more general literature on education (see, for
example, Dewey, 1916; Dunne, 1995; Hogan, 1995; Starratt, 2003); (b) this initial
effort is seen as starting a conversation among scholars in the field of education,

*Lynch School of Education, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02468, USA.

Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1363-2434 (print)/ISSN 1364-2626 (online)/05/040399-13
# 2005 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13634230500197272
400 R. J. Starratt

those practitioners who engage in the supervision of teachers, as well as those

teachers they supervise. That conversation will fill out, refine and improve upon this
initial argument as well as generate further perspectives and practices that cultivate
and enhance the moral character of pupils’ learning.
At the outset we need to clarify the focus of our argument. My focus is not
concerned here with moral issues within the relationship of supervisor and teacher or
teacher and pupil (issues such as sexual harassment, authoritarian bullying, racial
stereotyping, psychological manipulation, arbitrary and unfounded criticism, etc.),
although my argument would imply a prohibition against the above behaviours.
Neither is the argument about explicitly moral instruction (as might be embedded in:
processes of classroom management; articulation of rules against and reasons for
prohibiting cheating, bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating in the classroom;
explicit curriculum units devoted to character education or sex education;
curriculum units dealing with the moral implications of religious teaching, such as
the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes), although the argument might entertain
a focused engagement with any of the above instruction.
Rather, the argument is about the cultivation and enhancement of the moral
character of learning the formal academic curriculum. The argument asserts that
learning the formal academic curriculum can be and, furthermore, ought to be a
moral activity as well as an intellectual activity. We will proceed with an attempt to
explore what the moral character of learning might mean. We will then explore what
kind of teaching might incorporate this understanding of the moral character of
learning, not as a separate moment of instruction, but while in the very activity of
attending to the intellectual or academic character of school learning. We conclude
with some observations about how those holding administrative leadership positions
might support teachers’ attempts to cultivate both the moral and academic character
of their pupils’ learning.

The moral character of school learning

Let us start with the question ‘Why do we study what we study in school?’ Policy-
makers today tend to answer, ‘So we can get a good job, can compete in an
increasingly demanding and sophisticated work environment’. While preparation for
participation in the workforce is one important goal in education, it is by no means
the only goal. In societies dedicated to human rights and civil liberties schools are
meant to help young people grow toward a fuller humanity, to develop what Melanie
Walker refers to as ‘human capabilities’ (Walker, 2004). The question could be
rephrased as ‘What difference does attention to these subjects make in our efforts to
understand who we are, how we might live our lives, what we should value?’ The
question might be put conversely: ‘What do these studies tell us about the mistakes,
pitfalls, habits, perspectives, attitudes, self images that are self-destructive, harmful
to a sense of community, childish, repugnant’, in other words, contrary to what it
means to be a reasonably mature and socially responsible human being? The answer
 Cultivating the moral character 401

to these questions about the rationale behind the school curriculum is that these
studies have much to do with basic human concerns (Dewey, 1916; Broudy et al.,
1964; Dunne, 1995; Hogan, 1995; Carr & Steutel, 1999). These studies can
(thought not necessarily will) help us understand who we are: as natural beings
(situated in the world of ‘nature’ as represented by the natural sciences); as socio-
cultural beings (situated in the world of culture and society as described by the arts
and humanities, as well as the social and human sciences); as historical beings (as
belonging to communities whose traditions and journeys have a past, a present, and a
future, and whose members have built that past and are expected to build its future).
As human beings we are both embedded in and privileged by these worlds, bound
to and in partnership with these worlds. These studies bring to light the intelligibility
of these worlds and our own intelligibility as members of these worlds. These studies
illuminate our relationships to these worlds so that we may participate in them with
responsibility, integrity and purpose. Participation in these worlds obviously means
that the learning process involves not only an intellectual appreciation of the
architecture and grammar of these worlds (in the role of spectator, participant
observer or aesthetic critic) but also the gradual exercise of various practical skills to
negotiate and engage these worlds (as autonomous and intentional agents, as fully
functioning members of these worlds). These aspects of the learning process (both
understanding and personal engagement) constitute the ‘good’, the intrinsic value of
learning.
These studies can (but again, not automatically will) gradually and cumulatively
engage us in a conversation, both personal and public, with these worlds in which we
can ask: How do you work? How do you help me (us) understand how I (we) work?
How is my (our) immediate life world like your world? What do you teach me (us)
about my (our) possibilities, my (our) limitations, my (our) responsibilities? How are
you inside me and I inside you? With capable teachers these studies can develop into
ongoing conversations between the worlds expressed and interpreted through the
academic subjects that comprise the school curriculum, conversations where the
learners listen to the voices of those worlds talk back to them, where the learners can
become more fully present to those worlds and thus to the various relationships of the
learners to those worlds, relationships that gradually reveal increasing complexity
and responsibilities, relationships in response to which learners continue to shape
their self-understanding, both individually and communally.
Such a justification for engaging the school’s ‘subjects’ at this level of learning
seems to be lacking in the current articulation of the school’s learning agenda.
Instead, we hear other metaphors: the curriculum is ‘delivered’ by teachers to
students who, in turn, ‘master’ the curriculum, the mastery of which is revealed by
identifying or producing preordained ‘right answers’, which are then tallied as
numbers and percentages that reveal what the student has ‘achieved’.
Clearly, this understanding of learning refers to a one-way appropriation of a
prefixed menu of abstract right answers (no credit for left answers) that are presumed
to objectively correspond with the true and real state of affairs, uniformly and
universally agreed to by the adult world, if not the world of scholars (Shepard, 2002).
402 R. J. Starratt

There appears to be no concern in the process of preparing for these tests with either
the self-knowledge of one’s humanity in relationship to these worlds nor with one’s
responsibilities to these worlds. Achieving right answers seems an end in itself, a sign
of hard work and conformity to a dominant adult world that has constructed this
artificial obstacle course of puzzles, riddles, problems, abstract classifications,
formulae, definitions and technical vocabulary, the mastery of which is supposed
to predict a successful future.
The view of learning that is driven by mastery of right answers forces learning into
a uniform time-frame for all learners to learn a specific skill or understanding.
‘Mastery’ of such learning is equated with speed; how fast can one accumulate
sufficient information within the allotted class time in order to organize that
information into right answers to the test questions within the limited time-frame of
the test itself. The test questions, moreover, are assumed to represent a legitimate
sampling of the larger body of information delivered (though not necessarily learned)
during the circumscribed time of instruction and study.
This arrangement of curriculum units into limited, one size fits all time-frames
forces many, if not most, learners to hurry up, to scramble for some scrap of what it is
they perceive the teacher expects them to have learned, to parrot out a phrase or
definition just in time before the class or the test runs out of time, to guess at a right
answer without having any clue as to why this constitutes a right answer. More often
than not learners are forced to make believe that they know what they do not know.
Observe some students arguing with the teacher that they should get partial credit for
having a piece, however fragmentary, of the right answer. Within the game of ‘playing
school’ one might agree that they should indeed get the partial credit, for their
argument conforms to the simplistic logic of ‘getting the right answer’ as the
definition of academic achievement.
As I have argued elsewhere (Starratt, 2004), this test-fixated learning promotes an
unethical type of learning. This type of learning is inauthentic and irresponsible; it
promotes an attitude where the integrity of the worlds represented by the academic
subjects is of no importance outside of its instrumentality in providing decontextua-
lized right answers to someone else’s questions. This form of learning is posed
learning, phony, fake, superficial learning. Indeed, this learning is morally harmful
for it tends to programme students to approach their world in a thoroughgoing self-
referential and exploitative learning process that treats knowledge as the currency of
the school system, as a commodity to be traded in the free market of school
achievement. The learning process is thereby corrupted. Students are turned from an
authentic encounter with the physical, the cultural, the historical worlds to a pillaging
of texts in search for answers to the teacher’s or the test makers’ questions.

Learning as virtuous activity

We can better understand the morality implied in learning when we see learning
engage in three virtues: the virtue of presence, the virtue of authenticity and the
 Cultivating the moral character 403

virtue of responsibility (Starratt, 2004). Virtues are ways of responding to the moral
demands and opportunities proffered within the varying circumstances and settings
of associated living (Flanagan & Jupp, 2001). Gouinlock (1993) suggested that
virtues are responses organically related to actual problematic situations. Thus, there
would be specific virtuous responses to problematic situations in the practice of
architecture, engineering or teaching. The virtuous response would not only seek to
avoid or prevent harm in those practices, but would seek to promote the good
organically embedded within practice. In other words, the integrity of the practice of
architecture, engineering or teaching would imply certain virtuous ways of practicing
those professions and certain ways that would violate the integrity of the practice.
The practice of learning has its own integrity, which calls for certain virtues.
I propose that learning involves the virtues of presence, authenticity and
responsibility. One has to be present, as fully present as possible to the material or
topic under study. Presence implies a dialogical relationship between the learner and
the material under study. As with two persons, their mutual presence to each other
make a relationship possible, a relationship bonded by telling and listening. Each
person listens to the other’s words, takes them in, and with the words takes the other
person inside as one interprets what the other’s words mean. The listener then
responds to the other, presenting in the response both the listener’s interpretation of
what the other has said and also how the listener responds to what the other has said
according to his or her perspective or feelings. Thus the dialogue goes back and forth,
with people disclosing more of themselves and taking in richer and fuller under-
standings of the other.
If one of the parties to the dialogue becomes distracted and fails to be fully
attentive to the other person then the mutuality of presence is diminished, if not
broken; the integrity of the dialogue and the relationship that was developing is put in
jeopardy. Frequently humans have ways of signalling the withdrawal of presence.
They look at their watch, throw up their hands and declare that they must rush off for
an appointment, but they hope the dialogue can be resumed tomorrow or on some
other occasion. Most of us, however, have experienced talking to another person who
was barely half present to us, who was obviously preoccupied with something other
than our fascinating story. We feel somewhat offended by the other’s feigned
responses of interest when it is obvious their mind is elsewhere.
The practice of the virtue of presence in the process of learning is something that
itself is learned. Some teachers will explicitly teach it under the guise of study skills or
creating a readiness set at the beginning of class. There are ways of getting the
learners’ attention, motivating them to focus and concentrate in anticipation of
learning something of personal value to them. As the lesson progresses, teachers
increase the learner’s attention by posing new questions, ‘If x is thus and so, what
does that imply for y?’ or ‘What does this situation suggest for its resolution?’ The
point behind the questions is to encourage the learner to listen to the intelligibility
embedded in the subject matter talking back to the learner. The teacher is suggesting
ways for the learner to be present to that intelligibility. Vygotsky (1984) suggested, in
his theory of learning, that teachers bring the learners into the ‘zone of proximal
404 R. J. Starratt

development, i.e. bring their presence close to, bring their attention to the threshold
of dialogue with the subject matter. In scaffolding the students’ attention with earlier
learnings, the teacher gives the potentiality of dialogue a running start, so to speak.
While there are many nuances to being present, three seem particularly apropos in
the activity of learning: (1) affirming presence; (2) enabling presence; (3) critical
presence. Affirming presence accepts the person or the event as it is; in its ambiguity,
its incompleteness, its particularity and its multidimensionality. Enabling presence is
open to the possibilities of the person or event to contain or reveal something special,
something of deep value and significance. Critical presence expects to find both
negative and positive features in persons and events. People and events and
circumstances reveal unequal relationships of power and reciprocity. Critical
presence brings to light what is tacit, assumed or presumed in situations that reflect
human constructions and beliefs, rather than something prefixed as necessary, as
natural, as essential. All of these ways of being present to what is being studied enable
the dialogue between learners and one or more of the worlds under consideration in
that unit of the curriculum. Those kinds of presence of the learner enable those
worlds to be similarly present as affirming who the learner is, as enabling the learner
to realize her or his possibilities more fully and as critiquing appropriate assumptions
and presumptions about their mutual relationships.
A second virtue that honors the integrity of learning is authenticity. The virtue of
authenticity involves human beings in their most basic moral challenge, namely the
challenge to be true to themselves, to be real. The opposite of that virtue is
inauthenticity, playing false, making believe one is someone other than who one is.
As with presence, the virtue of authenticity is a dialogical virtue. One cannot be
authentic alone locked in a closet. One is authentic in relationship to another.
Authenticity is revealed in our actions, in our acting out the various social and
cultural roles we play. Actions reveal the being behind the actions. Most basically,
one is authentic as a human being in response to one’s own humanity and the
humanity of the other. One is also authentic as a son or daughter, as a friend or lover,
a father or a mother. In all of these roles one strives to be real, not a fake or cardboard
character. However, the expression of our authenticity has to take into account the
similar effort of others to be true to themselves as well. Authenticity supposes a kind
of social contract, namely that if I expect to be granted a certain latitude to be myself,
to own my life and my choices, so too must I afford to others the latitude to chart the
courses of their own lives (Taylor, 1992).
The practice of learning asks of the learner that he or she acknowledge the world as
what it is. Sometimes the world under study reveals beauty and harmony, sometimes
it reveals complexity, conflict, arbitrary irrationality, seeming cruelty or malevolence.
The learner’s integrity is connected to the learner’s relationship to the various
physical, social cultural, historical and religious worlds he or she is studying. These
worlds invite the learner into membership. Membership, however, imposes a
recognition of both the benefits and privileges, as well as responsibilities, of
membership. In other worlds one’s authenticity as a member of these worlds requires
 Cultivating the moral character 405

an acknowledgement (not necessarily approval) of the ways these worlds work, as

well as a commitment to value what is best and to fix what is broken in these worlds.
Authenticity, the way of being real, is a moral good. The learner always pursues
this way of being real, this way of expressing her or his goodness, in relationship to
the realities of the worlds he or she inhabits, the truths of which are revealed through
the activity of learning.
The practice of the virtues of presence and authenticity imply the third virtue,
which seeks the goods of the learning process, the virtue of responsibility. This virtue
is exercised by learners (and, by implication, teachers) by respecting the goods of
learning, namely the good of understanding and of participation in the worlds of
nature, society, culture and history.
This virtue is enacted in two ways. First, in the learning process itself, the learner
adopts an attitude of respect toward what the learner is studying. The material under
study, whether it be the genetic code, the physics of magnets, a poem of Wordsworth,
an historical account of the battle of Richmond or the industrial revolution, a novel
by William Faulkner or Katharine Ann Porter, the geography of Egypt or Brooklyn,
all have an integrity of their own, i.e. they reveal how humans have represented the
intelligibilities of the natural, the social, the cultural and the historical worlds. The
learner has a responsibility in the learning process to understand these worlds in
their various intelligible manifestations, as they are in themselves, not as the learner
would like them to be. These worlds are there not for the learners to posses them
as their private property, but as the habitat of their own humanity, so to speak, as the
physical, social, cultural and historical home for them, a home which supports
their lives in all its dimensions, a home where learners can come to know who they
are, a home which confers on them the important marker of membership in a
community which both shapes the learners’ identities and supports their necessary
quest for an agency that is distinctive and authentic. As with all homes, however,
there will be moments of pain as well as joy, moments of disappointment as well as
satisfaction. Living at home requires patience, compassion and commitment to
negotiate what it takes to make that home work as a human community. That
responsibility comes with one’s membership and the relationships such membership
implies.
The learner, therefore, does not enter into the learning process as a detached
tourist, cavalierly and arbitrarily deciding whether to pay attention to what’s in front
of him or her. Rather, the learner chooses to be responsive to, to respect the value
and significance of that world, to listen to the lessons that world has to teach him or
her. Thus, in the process of learning, the learner makes the effort to listen and
respond, to enter into dialogue with the worlds under study.
The virtue of responsibility is enacted in a second way, which flows immediately
from the learners’ effort to enter into dialogue with the world under study, and that is
to listen to and reflect on what lessons that experience of the worlds have to teach
them about living their lives, about defining themselves, about the obligations of
membership in those worlds, about the unfinished agendas of those worlds, about the
possibilities of agency within those worlds. Responsibility here is about responding to
406 R. J. Starratt

the many significant potential lessons offered in these focused learning experiences of
the physical, social, cultural and historical worlds. If learning does not implicate us in
those worlds, does not invite a response to these worlds, then why should we even
bother to study them in the first place? What purpose is served by accumulating an
encyclopaedic knowledge of the world if that knowledge provides no sense of who
one is, no sense of how to live one’s life, no sense of membership in the larger
communities that make up these worlds, no sense of moral purpose? Indeed, the
present insistence on accumulating this kind of encyclopaedic knowledge in both a
local and international competition for high test scores seems to ignore these
important questions and, thereby, eviscerates the moral character of learning (Carr &
Steutel, 1999).

The realpolitik of accountability

Obviously, the politicians who set policies in education and the local, state and
federal authorities who implement them are not about to change their test-driven
approach to school learning after reading this article. The present policy climate
defining accountability measures in schools has generated such a momentum both in
the USA and throughout many countries of the world that it will take time to play
itself out before the inevitable cultural and political pendulum swing eventually
brings a greater balance between national uniformity and local autonomy in
education (Shepard, 2002). Given the present policy climate, these virtuous
approaches to authentic learning and teaching cannot be enacted in a thoroughgoing
way. Rather, I suggest that educators shape some curriculum units to illuminate and
activate the moral character of learning within those units. Along the way, teachers
can show students both how to prepare for tests as well as to discover, at a deeper
level, how these curriculum units can speak to student issues of identity, belonging,
social responsibility and self-fulfilling participation in the adult world. By experien-
cing some curriculum units explicitly through the exercise of the learning virtues of
presence, authenticity and responsibility, say three or four a year, over the course of
812 years, learners would come to appreciate the activity of learning as serving both
/

extrinsic technical usefulness and intrinsic personal and civic moral purposes. I
believe most teachers would readily embrace such a modest effort to transform the
experience of learning from the tedious and exclusive emphasis on extrinsic and
technical knowledge into learning that can serve both extrinsic and intrinsic values in
learning.

A model of teaching that attends to the moral character of learning

Figure 1 presents a model of teaching and learning. In this model the three
ingredients of the moral character of teaching are highlighted. In one dimension of
the triangle the teacher establishes a working relationship with the learner based on
caring and respect. The teacher accepts the learner as who he or she is, with all the
 Cultivating the moral character 407

Student

1. Relationship of Caring & Respect 3. Learning activities illuminate

Teacher knows learner background, the intelligibility of both the
Interests, & talents learner and the world revealed
in the curriculum

Teacher brings knowledge of

Learner and teacher’s own
dialogue with the world of the
curriculum to design learning
activities

Teacher Curriculum

2. Teacher appreciates how this curriculum illuminates his or her

Identity & Membership in that world & the possibilities for agency &
participation in that world.

Figure 1. The moral character of teaching and learning

advantages and limitations, talents and interests the learner brings to the work of
learning. In the second dimension of the triangle the teacher re-encounters the
curriculum unit as revealing a world of significance and value to the teacher, a world
that illuminates and makes possible the teacher’s identity, sense of agency and
participation in that world. In the third dimension the teacher brings the learner and
the curriculum unit into mutual dialogue through the teacher’s careful construction
and scaffolding of a variety of learning experiences shaped by the teacher’s
knowledge of the learner and the teacher’s relationship to the world under study in
that particular curriculum unit. Through these learning activities the student
encounters the world revealed in that curriculum unit and is encouraged to
appreciate how this part of that world speaks to him or her about who he or she
is, about the possibilities for agency in that world, about the privileges and
obligations of membership in that world and about the unfinished agenda of that
world. In the process of learning these lessons the learner will, under the guidance of
the teacher, also learn to express the intelligibility of the subject matter in response to
expected types of questions on the state exam. Under the guidance of the teacher the
learners will also be encouraged to reflect on why these examination questions are
deemed to be important for public life.
By discussing the various dynamics of this model of the moral character of teaching
and learning, educators (whether teachers or administrators) can cooperatively
408 R. J. Starratt

develop an agenda of reflective practice and professional development with their

teacher colleagues. This agenda may begin with the teachers’ realization that they do
not adequately understand the learners’ backgrounds, talents and interests in order
to scaffold the learning activities with this knowledge in mind. The teachers can then
work out ways to gain that knowledge and appreciation of the learners as a necessary
step in engaging them in authentic and responsible learning.
Another possible beginning might flow from the recognition that the teacher has
not engaged the curriculum at this deeper level of moral dialogue and the mutual
relationships with the worlds revealed through the curriculum. The teachers might
collaboratively explore how these worlds engage their human identity and sense of
agency and communicate the privileges and obligations of membership in those
worlds. These discussions could then lead to additional strategies for designing
learning activities that bring the learner into a deeper level of dialogue with the
curriculum unit. Kay Tolliver, a dynamic teacher in the Harlem area of New York
City (Mikuriya, 1995), illustrates the colourful and creative designs of learning
activities that create such instructive dialogue. In turn, the process of designing
learning activities can lead to the development of appropriate rubrics for self-
assessment by the learner and assessment by the teacher.
All of the proceeding analyses of learning and teaching as both an intellectual and
moral activity suggest some criteria for administrative and supervisory leadership at
various levels of the school system. These criteria could guide the activities of
different administrative leaders in different ways, depending on the scope and focus
of their responsibilities. If embraced system wide, however, these criteria could go a
long way to re-establishing the moral integrity of the work of learning and teaching.

Criteria for promoting the morality intrinsic to teaching and learning

1. Establish good working relationships with teachers and support staff based on
respect for, and trust in, their professional and moral competence and based on
genuine caring for them in their intrinsic goodness. Teachers are under
enormous pressure to make the schooling process more effective. Research
studies indicate, however, that changing assumptions and beliefs embedded in
teaching practices for generations is a slow and often painful process. On the
other hand, the same research indicates the reservoir of goodwill and profes-
sional commitment that, under gentle but firm leadership, can energize the
effort and lead to genuine change. Teachers will respond if their leaders are
present to them and to the complexities of their own learning agendas
(Goodwin, 2005; Paul, 2005; Tracey, 2005; Wai, 2005).
2. Establish good working relationships with each student based on open
communication, understanding of the students’ cultural and immediate social
environment and with respect to the students’ present talents, interests and
potential. Unfortunately, many efforts at school renewal engage the teachers in
projects to improve learning but do not enlist the participation of students
 Cultivating the moral character 409

(Keough, 2005). Without such participation, students perceive the learning

process as something that is ‘done to them’, rather than as actively engaging their
ideas and experiences. Students need to feel cared for, to be thought of as having
enormous potential and to be needed by society, not simply to produce profits
for their employers but to heal the wounds, to carry forward the promise, to
participate in the struggles of their world. They need to be taught as though the
learning process was their sacred right and their civic responsibility, a right that
every human has to learn who they are and how they can participate
meaningfully in an adult world; a civic responsibility to know how to participate
in the fulfilling work of communal self-governance and community betterment.
3. Identify and articulate personal and civic values and meanings in the curriculum
being taught. Teachers need to recapture the enthusiasm of their own learning,
how their earlier studies opened up vistas of self-knowledge and meaningful
participation in the world. They need to look beneath the expository texts and
work sheets to ask how this material might have personal connections to the
learners’ experience and to their life world, as well as to the more public worlds
of their neighbourhoods and local communities. Sometimes there is a cultural or
racial disconnection between teachers and their students. Teachers will then
need to empathetically inquire into and discover what life looks like and feels like
within the multicultural communities their students inhabit, so they can scaffold
the learning activity with references to their family and neighbourhood
experience.
4. Translate various units of the curriculum into personally and publicly mean-
ingful learnings that connect with students’ sense of identity, membership and
participation in the natural, cultural and social worlds. Insofar as individual
teachers can gather with other teachers who teach the same material to probe the
personal and civic values and meanings of specific curriculum units, they would
be able to collectively generate a rich reservoir of various strategies to uncover
those meanings and values with their students. Each major unit of the
curriculum should be related to the personal worlds of the learners and address
the public applications of that learning. Throughout, teachers should commu-
nicate the necessary interpenetration of personal meanings and public applica-
tions of the material under study, thereby bringing self-identity and social
participation into mutually reinforcing relationship (Starratt, 1998).
5. Cultivate a sense of responsible participation in the worlds reflected in the
material under study in the classroom. In most, if not all, major units of the
curriculum teachers would encourage students to draw out three or more
examples of how the curriculum unit implies a particular form of participation in
public life, either at the level of interpersonal relationships, neighbourhood
concerns, possible careers for themselves or local civic affairs. From time to time
teachers would encourage comparisons of and debates about such examples.
6. Develop with learners rubrics for personally authentic learning. In order for
learners to demonstrate to themselves and to others the moral quality of their
learning they need to create, with their teachers, some benchmarks that provide
410 R. J. Starratt

reasonable assurances of such quality in their work. The practice of this kind of
self-assessment should gradually deepen their appreciation of how they come to
know themselves and their responsibilities to the worlds they are learning about,
as well as replace their exclusive reliance on the teacher’s judgement about the
quality of their learning. As students become increasingly adept at such self-
assessment they will be on the road to becoming more responsible for their
learning.

Conclusion
At the start of this essay, I asserted that the moral character of learning was a
neglected dimension in the theory and practice of school leadership. The burden of
most of the essay was to illuminate that moral character of learning through an
exposition of those moral virtues embedded in the very activity of authentic, integral
learning. These virtues, I argued, are not a kind of value-added, icing-on-the-cake
supplement to the more basic intellectual character of learning. On the contrary, they
are essential for the very intellectual quality of learning; without them what passes for
learning in schools is superficial, vacuous, artificial, make-believe, frivolous, and
possibly dishonest. If that argument is at all valid, then school leaders and all teachers
need to evaluate what they do in the light of the moral character of learning. The
argument suggests that they might need to develop the very virtues that support the
moral character of learning in their own roles as guides and facilitators of learning
(Starratt, 2004). Those who would lead in collaboration with teachers in cultivating
the many dialogical relationships implied in studying the worlds contained in the
academic curriculum, will need to nurture those virtues of presence, authenticity,
and responsibility in themselves, not only as adult models for the students, but in all
the organizational support activities they engage in to make learning come alive for
their young charges.

Notes on contributor
Robert J. Starratt, known to friends and colleagues as Jerry, began his work with
school administrators in 1973 at Fordham University, after earlier involvement
as a teacher and high school principal. He has served as chair of the Educational
Administration Departments at both Fordham University and at Boston
College, where he currently works. His books include: The drama of schooling/
the schooling of drama, The drama of leadership, Building an ethical school, Leaders
with vision, Centering educational administration, Transforming educational admin-
istration, Ethical leadership and seven editions of Supervision: a redefinition, co-
authored with Tom Sergiovanni. He and his wife, Ruth live in Newton,
Massachusetts, under the supervision of operatic birds, inquisitive squirrels and
cantankerous crows.
 Cultivating the moral character 411

References
Broudy, H. S., Smith, B. O. & Burnett, J. R. (1964) Democracy and excellence in American secondary
education; a study in curriculum theory (Chicago, Rand McNally).
Carr, D. & Steutel, J. (Eds) (1999) Virtue ethics and moral education (London, Routledge).
Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and education (New York, Macmillan).
Dunne, J. (1995) What’s the good of education?, in: P. Hogan (Ed.) Partnership and the benefits of
learning (Maynooth, Republic of Ireland, Educational Studies Association of Ireland),
60/82.
Flanagan, K. & Jupp, P. C. (Eds) (2001) Virtue ethics and sociology (Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave).
Goodwin, S. C. (2005) An analysis of school based professional development and its effects on the
teaching of intermediate elementary writing . Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston
College, Chestnut Hill, MA.
Gouinlock, J. (1993) Rediscovering the moral life; philosophy and human practice (Buffalo, NY,
Prometheus Books).
Hogan, P. (1995) The custody and courtship of experience: Western education in philosophical perspective
(Dublin, Columba Press).
Keough, A. W. (2005) Effect of student voice forums on a purposively selected sample of students in a
suburban high school . Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA.
Mikuriya, R. (Director) (1995) The Kay Toliver files (Video) (Los Angeles, Foundation for
Advancements in Science and Education).
Paul, T. (2005) The impact of collaborative computer software on the enhancement of learning in a
secondary science course . Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston College, Chestnut Hill,
MA
Shepard, L. A. (2002) The contest between large-scale accountability and assessment in the service
of learning: 1970/2001, paper presented at the Spencer Foundation 30th Anniversary
Conference , Chicago, IL, 24/25 January.
Starratt, R. J. (1998) Leadership in the morality of teaching and learning, Leading and Managing,
4(4), 243/255.
Starratt, R. J. (2003) Centering educational administration: cultivating meaning, community, and
responsibility (Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum).
Starratt, R. J. (2004) Ethical leadership (San Francisco, Jossey Bass).
Taylor, C. (1992) The ethics of authenticity (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).
Tracy, M. S. (2005) The impact of developing and implementing a standards-based grading and reporting
system on middle school mathematics teachers . Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston
College, Chestnut Hill, MA.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1984) Thought and language (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Ed. and trans.)
(Cambridge, MA, MIT Press).
Wai Wissman, G. (2005) Teacher research as an alternative to traditional evaluation: its impact on five
master teachers and their principal . Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston College,
Chestnut Hill, MA.
Walker, M. (2004) Human capabilities, education and ‘doing the public good’: towards a
capability-based theory of social justice in education, paper presented at the Annual
Conference of the Australian Association of Research in Education , Melbourne, 28 November/2
2 December.