Helping Adolescents Respond with Integrity to Defensive Teaching

Abstract

Integrity in student-teacher interaction is more likely when students and teachers tactfully disrupt the pacing of efficient, but fragmented lessons. Yet, teachers sometimes cling to fragmented, oversimplified definitions of knowledge, and defensively manage classroom behavior by controlling students’ access to information. Ironically, adolescents who support such defensive teaching strategies inevitably devalue course content. We detected this epistemological gap in student-teacher communication by aligning adolescents’ beliefs about an ideal school with existing teacher quality models. Teacher quality models did not include evaluations of teachers’ knowledge choices. And, youth who accepted fragmented curricular priorities were less willing to work hard and address justice, and more willing to cheat or take shortcuts than adolescents who endorsed multiple forms of knowledge. Adolescents can function with integrity when they and their teachers pressure one another to explore complex forms of knowledge.