Designing an Outcome‐based Ethics Curriculum for Professional Education: strategies and evidence of effectiveness

Goodlad and colleagues argue that teacher education curricula do not include rigorous discourse about the moral dimensions of teaching. This paper offers guidance for developing such curricula drawn from the author's experience devising and implementing a professional ethics curriculum for dentistry. Grounded in Rest's Four Component Model of Morality, the curriculum includes methods and measures for assessing (1) ethical sensitivity; (2) moral reasoning and judgement; (3) moral motivation and commitment; and (4) moral implementation outcomes as well as instructional strategies to facilitate their development. Evidence drawn from the extensive literature on the psychology of morality, and from outcome studies of the effectiveness of the dental ethics curriculum, illustrate that a curriculum of rather modest duration can influence ethical development in measurable ways.