posted by Karen Frain, Head Teacher, Letham Primary School

Ethical Sophistication and Intrinsic motivation – – – to do the right thing for the right reasons.

As part of our ‘Relationships with Learning’ here at Letham Primary, we have for many academic sessions been striving towards helping our children acquire the skills set to develop what Alfie Kohn tells us about Ethical Sophistication.  For too long we had felt that with the rewards and sanction systems actively promoted within our schools we were in some ways allowing our children to rescind the responsibility for ‘doing things the right way for the right reasons’. We recognised that the carrot and stick approach may encourage compliance and ‘doing the right thing’ within our school environment, however we also recognised that this did not result in them being able to make the ethically correct decisions and choices for themselves and the outside world. The children have articulated to us that they did in effect abuse rewards and sanctions by accepting the consequence thereby rescinding responsibility, and fudging their true potential to achieve rewards more readily.

We strive to create the ethos to promote self-efficacy, self-regulation and intrinsic motivation, whereby our children do things because the reward at the end of the day is that it makes them feel good inside (a statement we use on a daily basis)

We were rewarded (intrinsically) by an example of real life ethical sophistication last week from a group of our Primary Seven Pupils – – who did in our opinion show the way, doing things the right way for the right reasons is reward in itself.

The children noticed

• A vulnerable person in distress
• They recognised members of the community were being disrespectful
• They sought to provide comfort, care and compassion and practical support
• They recognised the differences and advantages in life they had.
• One member of the group initially reacted inappropriately, both he and the rest recognised this was inappropriate and talked through it and he sought to make amends
• They did do what they could do, however their feelings of inadequacy and having to leave the situation partially unresolved really impacted on them.
• The profound impact on their realisation that life was unfair and that inequalities and imperfections in society can’t so easily be resolved. However, they also recognised the role and responsibility each of us has in creating a caring community that appreciates and supports differences.

We are committed to continuing to develop ethical sophistication as opposed to compliance in all our pupils.