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Decision-making skills and coping with dilemmas are among the goals of educational systems worldwide. This study examines 480 elementary school teachers' strategies for coping with socio-moral conflicts which arise in the classroom. Based on Oser and Althof's (1993) models for decision-making in interpersonal conflicts in the classroom and school contexts, we examined seven teaching strategies: avoiding, delegating to parents, delegating to school authorities, unilateral decision-making, incomplete discourse, complete discourse and dialogue. Teachers felt responsibility for dealing with socio-moral conflicts in the classroom. The choice of a strategy varied according to the content of the dilemma and the teachers' personal belief systems as well as teaching contexts and, to a lesser extent, personal background characteristics. There is a case for developing teachers' educational and social belief systems within learning communities and enriching their ways of thinking about and competencies for dealing with socio-moral conflicts, in the contexts of classroom, school and societal culture, in keeping with pedagogical concepts arising from the constructivist approach to learning and development.
Nava Maslovaty (Fri,) studied this question.