How to Help Students Think in Morally Complex Ways

Consider this moment in history from a teenager’s perspective. The world inflamed by wars, hatred, and conflict. Social media platforms that encourage individuals to affirm one correct answer to every problem and assume a posture of aggressive self-righteousness in response to every challenge. No one believes anything can really change, and time seems to be running out.

What’s missing from this dire picture is what psychologist Darcia Narvaez calls “moral complexity,” or mature moral functioning. This includes practicing emotional regulation to allay reactivity and avoid impulsive judgments; holding multiple, often competing viewpoints in mind while deliberating between them; and, over time, developing head-and-heart expertise through ethical engagement with a specific community or cause.

In other words, being a complex moral agent means being resilient, flexible, pragmatic, and kind. As Narvaez notes, citizenship scholars agree that the skills needed in the 21st century include “critical thinking, cooperation, tolerance, conflict resolution,” and “the skills of a positive, mature moral functioning.” Practiced collectively, these skills could change our world for the better.

Yet it goes without saying that there aren’t enough adult exemplars of these skills visible today. In countless ways, adolescents are led to believe that what’s on offer is what moral maturity looks like. So the cycle repeats, cynicism deepens, and little does change.

Can educators help change that situation? Yes, but the first step is to take students seriously as moral agents.

Learning to “stay human”

Young people are naturally interested in the future they will inherit. For several years at the Millennium School of San Francisco, I co-led an eighth-grade capstone project in which students chose real-world problems to research and ultimately offer some contribution to addressing. We spent about seven weeks developing topics before culminating presentations, where family members, teachers, and fellow students got to see eighth graders share their work and raise awareness about important social issues. Some version of a capstone project can fit within eighth or ninth grade English, Social Studies, or STEM classes, and encouraging students to think in interdisciplinary terms helps broaden opportunities for engagement.

In my capstone classes, we started by watching Michael Franti’s terrific documentary, Stay Human. In the film, Franti, a long-time musician and activist, travels the world and profiles ordinary people struggling with poverty, systemic racism, and environmental devastation. For students, this global survey builds empathy and makes distant others feel more relatable. The throughline that unifies each story is the search for hope and resilience amid the world’s many diverse challenges. Yet Franti himself wrestles with his own inner tension between optimism and cynicism, which presents students with an all-too-human model of moral maturity.

As we watched, I periodically paused the film to ask students to reflect on their own identities, values, and how they connect to the people Franti interviews. As an English and humanities teacher, I find journaling one of the best ways to prompt thinking beyond immediate assumptions. In the context of any class in any discipline, it’s also a great way to explore and clarify the moral dilemmas we all face every day.

According to Narvaez, “moral self-reflection is similar to moral imagination but turned inward.” For example, encountering the history of Apartheid in South Africa, as students do in Stay Human, can prompt them to reflect on how racism still affects their own neighborhoods, as well as what solutions might be possible today. Ideally, Narvaez writes, this kind of thinking and writing evokes “a self-critical attitude that seeks to avoid self-deception and distortions of facts and events,” so that a truer picture of reality emerges.

Looking inward to look outward

At their best moments, students are clearly capable of this kind of self-reflection. And as with other skills, it helps to have regular chances to practice. Daily journal prompts encourage writing proficiency and the development of metacognitive skills, all of which contribute to moral maturity.

I want to share one particular journal prompt I used, which Lindsay Berk and the late great Stephen Lessard developed in earlier iterations of the capstone class we taught:

• Are you more of an optimistic person or more of a cynical person? How do you know?
• Provide an example that illustrates which way you (typically) lean.

This came soon after we started watching Stay Human, in response to Michael Franti posing these same questions to himself. As an opening mindfulness practice at the start of class, students wrote silently in their journals then shared out with their peers. The movement from individual writing to organized sharing and listening works well with middle and high school students, and making this an everyday routine fosters a classroom culture where self-reflection and group deliberation are respected and valued.

I remember a class in the fall of 2021, soon after my school resumed full in-person learning, when the prompt above took us in an unexpected direction. After their share-out, I usually call on a few students to reflect back something they heard at their tables, then we move into a wider discussion or the next activity. But that day students quickly fell into a debate about the meaning of our two key terms. We used Google to establish some definitions: Optimism is “hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something,” while cynicism is “an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest.”

To provide a further common reference point, I drew a glass on the whiteboard with a water line at the midpoint. After apologizing for my poor drawing skills, I asked if they saw the glass as half empty or half full. Again, the room was divided. Several students pointed out that optimism is often unrealistic, and they identified as more cynical because its definition seems closer to reality. In their view, the glass wasn’t full; that’s what mattered.

With this distinction in mind, I asked students if a cynical outlook makes hope for the future futile, and some said yes. To push this line of reasoning further, I picked up a globe and asked them to think of another real-world example: global warming.

“We know our species is in peril,” I said to dramatize the dilemma. “Scientists offer different estimates of how long we have, and what we can do, to limit the worst effects of human-caused climate change. So, do you take the optimistic view that we can and should do something to try and save our natural habitat, or do you take the cynical view that nothing can be done because people are too self-centered to make the effort worthwhile?”

At this point, just about every student said they were willing to do something to limit climate change, but they didn’t trust the rest of humanity to join in. Earlier, I’d introduced the terms egoism and altruism, and a lively discussion sprung up about whether it’s possible to do good for others without trying to benefit oneself. As we moved into our next discussion, this same question resurfaced in the context of global warming.

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Conceived at Phillips Exeter Academy, the Harkness method makes the whole classroom into a student-centered space for listening and discussion. Typically the teacher or another student tracks participation using a variety of data gathering devices, which they share with the class during a debrief following the discussion. The purpose of Harkness is to promote student leadership and peer learning as well as accountability and self-reflection, so that one’s participation in discussions grows more thoughtful over time.

On that particular day, I sat outside the circle and let students talk freely. Speaking politely through their masks of different shapes and colors, these pandemic-era eighth graders seemed to have a genuine thirst for moral knowledge. They clearly wanted to know what was true, and within the Harkness container, they engaged each other respectfully. Instead of jumping toward judgment and yelling at each other, as can happen with adolescents in less structured contexts, this group had practiced well enough to regulate their emotions and deliberate carefully.

Think of the contrast here to the discussions that happen on cable news, talk radio, and social media. As Narvaez notes, “truncated moral metacognition occurs when a person follows an ill-informed gut reaction” and takes that as their final conclusion “with little reflection, commitment, or responsibility.”

Too many adults follow that pattern, and they consciously or unconsciously model it for the young. Yet Harkness and other deliberative discussion frameworks create a form of community dialogue that builds moral metacognition and encourages deeper reflection. Particularly for adolescents, doing so collaboratively with peers is one of the best means of inching toward moral maturity.

Over the years of discussions that followed watching Stay Human, students often said they came away from it feeling less cynical. They got to work on capstone projects related to climate change and the environment, antiracism, food justice, political polarization, and many other topics. By beginning to study and ground themselves in these issues and the communities they affect, these eighth graders learned to think in morally complex ways. I hope they also touched on a formative experience that will shape their actions for many years to come.

As Narvaez emphasizes, the skills of moral maturity “can be marshaled for moral innovation and moral actions that transform lives for the better, increasing flourishing among the underprivileged, and improving equality and well-being of society as a whole.”