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 educ ational systems worldwide. This study examines 480 elementary school teache rs' strategies for coping with socio-moral conflicts which arise in the cla ssroom. Based on Oser and Althof's (1993) models for decision-making in int erpersonal conflicts in the classroom and school contexts, we examined seve n teaching strategies: avoiding, delegating to parents, delegating to schoo l authorities, unilateral decision-making, incomplete discourse, complete d iscourse 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 cha racteristics. There is a case for developing teachers' educational and soci al belief systems within learning communities and enriching their ways of t hinking about and competencies for dealing with socio-moral conflicts, in t he contexts of classroom, school and societal culture, in keeping with peda gogical concepts arising from the constructivist approach to learning and d evelopment.