Lawrence Kohlberg

Lawrence Kohlberg studied moral development in people.  Moral development involves many aspects of right and wrong such as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  Through explaining to people a moral dilemma and then asking follow up questions, Kohlberg was able to theorize about how people develop morally.  His theory breaks morality down into three levels of two stages each.  The first level, preconventional reasoning, contains stages one and two, punishment and obedience orientation and individualism, instrumental purpose, and exchange respectively.  The second level, conventional reasoning, contains stages three and four, mutual interpersonal expectations, relationships, and interpersonal conformity and social systems morality respectively.  Lastly, the third level, postconventional reasoning, contains stages five and six, social contract or utility and individual rights and universal ethical principles respectively.  Each stage only describes the moral thinking behind an action and not the actual morality associated with the action.  By high school, most adolescents are in stages three or four (Colby and others, 1983).  Between late adolescence and early adulthood, there will be only a slight change in moral development (Eisenberg and others, 2009).  This implies that high school teachers are some of the last influences in adolescents lives on moral development.

Moral development is not a topic that will directly affect my classroom management; however, it will be important for me to know that most students will be mostly focused on relationships and social systems and therefore may be more focused on how they look in relation to others than on the well-being of others (5.1).