Teachers' Choice of Teaching Strategies for Dealing with Socio-Moral Dilemmas in the Elementary School

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.