What Next?

The Building Decision Skills curriculum focuses on the nature of ethics and ethical decision-making. It has been designed for use at the middle- and high-school levels. It is based on Rushworth M. Kidder’s book How Good People Make Tough Choices the Dilemmas of Ethical Living. The curriculum takes students through a series of logical steps so they can learn to independently apply specific decision-making tools to any ethical issue they might encounter. The process works best in a small-group or classroom setting.

Goals of Building Decision Skills

• To cultivate an awareness that sound ethics is essential to survival
• To provide a language for talking about ethics and to encourage discussion of ethical issues
• To provide practical experience in negotiating a set of values that reflects a group’s common ethical ground
• To promote Ethical Fitness® by providing practical tools to use in dealing with difficult dilemmas

Intended Learning Outcomes

Students should be able to:

• Understand the changing role of ethics in a technologically driven world
• Use ethics terminology in a clear and consistent manner
• Develop an understanding of the difference between right and wrong and of the concept of right-versus-right ethical dilemmas
• Analyze right-versus-right dilemmas using four paradigms and develop and ability to resolve them using three decision principles
• Define moral courage and identify how moral courage plays a part in decision making

Building Decision Skills as a stepping stone

Using the Building Decision Skills curriculum in your classroom is a great way to increase awareness and develop ethical decision-making skills for students. But what if you could participate on a team of other ethics champions at your school to enhance the culture of your school to a “culture of integrity.” A culture where:

• Students and adults in the learning environment know and readily articulate the ethical values of their school and readily recognize conflicts in these values as they arise.
• Participants in the learning environment consistently strive to demonstrate their shared ethical values, to resist right-versus-wrong temptations, and to conscientiously address right-versus-right ethical dilemmas.
• Students and adults in the learning environment engage in an ongoing, lively, and innovative exploration of ethics concepts across the curriculum, the extra curriculum, the hidden curriculum, and interpersonally.
• The ethics exploration is focused not solely on students but also drives professional development, parental relations, and other adult learning experiences.
• The ethical basis of all decision making is clearly and appropriately utilized and communicated, at all levels of the school’s hierarchy.
• Students and adults actively experience and reflect upon acts of moral courage.

The Institute’s Ethical Literacy® approach can help you do just that, learn how your school can get involved now, call 800-729-2615.

Not ready for Ethical Literacy® at your school but are looking for ways to build support and interest, you might consider:

• Engaging your school in a free School Culture Assessment and using the results to have a conversation about school culture
• Holding a Building School Culture™ Workshop to help teachers, staff and administrators build awareness about why ethics matters, come together around their core ethical values and their common purpose in schools, and consider ways to forward ethics across their school culture
• Contact the Institute to brainstorm your school’s best next step, email education@globalethics.org or call 800-729-2615