How Do We Teach Personal Responsibility and Accountability?

Accountability and ethics are on my mind this week. Our seniors are turning in the final drafts of their research papers, and I am once again amused by some students’ incredulous response when we hold them accountable not only for completing the paper within length and source guidelines, but also completing the paper within ethical guidelines. Somewhere along the line, my kids have been taught (or have come to understand) that plagiarism involves only the use of exact phrases.

The large majority of them are not dishonest; they just don’t know how to practice ethical behavior with regard to information. How can I teach them about personal responsibility and ethical behavior when I have so many other goals to accomplish? I read some research about teaching abstract concepts (such as ethical accountability) to third graders. The author mentioned that kids already have the ability to think abstractly, so it is not as if the concept is beyond their understanding; they just aren’t sure how to apply it. Possibly, they aren’t given enough opportunities to test their ethical responses due to the recent NCLB focus on what I call “sit and get education” (pronounced “git” in NC, so, as you can plainly see, it rhymes . . .).

Students sit in class and get information from their teachers or the textbook resulting in acceptable scores on standardized tests. If the educational focus in the early years continues to be on literal, finite information, how will our kids ever become well-rounded thinkers capable of practicing the concept of personal responsibility with confidence? I guess we will just close our doors, accomplish all of our curricular goals with creativity and finesse, achieve excellence on standardized tests, mentor any number of students, listen to and empathize with every cockamamie situation, grade thousands of research papers, fix many a broken floppy disk, chaperone dances and field trips, greet parents with a smile no matter what, and still manage to sneak in some opportunities for ethical decision making through Senior Project.