College Teaching Methods & Styles Journal – Third Quarter 2005 Volume 1, Number 3 Successfully Teaching Ethics for Effective Learning Ronald R. Sims, (Ronald.Sims@business.wm.edu ), College of William and Mary Edward L. Felton, Jr., (Ed.Felton@business.wm.edu ), College of William and Mary Abstract This paper is concerned with identifying keys to successfully teach ethics. The keys are: addressing the relevance challenge; striving to achieve a balance between the active engagement of students with issues and a critical analysis of choices in to be made in real-life situations; attending to or managing the learning process to include learning styles and experiential learning; debriefing experientially-oriented learning activities; and institutionalizing outcomes of ethics education objectives. The paper discusses results of a study that attempted to answer the question “What is required to successfully deliver experientially-oriented ethics education Introduction appeared he academic study of ethics is at least 2,300 years old. Questions of right and wrong were discussed at length by both Plato and Aristotle during the classical period in Athens and have been treated by Western philosophers since then. In Oriental philosophy, such discussions first even earlier. Ethics has been interwoven with every aspect of professional education since the first professional schools were established in the great river civilizations of China, Egypt, and Sumeria. These were schools of administration and not business administration. The point is nevertheless the same. For five millennia, professionals have defined their role and standing in society in part by their relationship to society, and that relationship entails ethical obligations. g Moral education was the primary goal of the first United States colleges, and “the central goal of the curriculum and even the entire college environment was to develop sensitivity to moral responsibilities, to teach ethical thought and action, and to develop students’ character” (McNeel, 1994, 27). A whole-person education best describes higher education in the United States in its original form (McNeel, 1994). The colleges that were founded during the colonial period focused on building character to prepare students for leadership roles in civil and religious organizations (Boyer, 1990), and as far back as 1749, Benjamin Franklin linked education with morality and service (Fleckenstein, 1997). Boyer (1994) goes so far as to posit that “Higher education and the larger purposes of American society have been, from the beginning, inextricably intertwined” (p. A48). One of the basic premises of this paper is that ethics can and should be taught (and learned) in institutions of higher education, even though it may be difficult in some situations to do so. This paper will first speak to the issue of whether or not higher educations should and can teach ethics before turning to a discussion of the importance of addressing the relevance challenge in teaching ethics. The focus then turns to the need to continuously strive to achieve a balance between the active engagement of students with issues and a critical analysis of choices in our teaching ethics efforts. Next the importance of attending to or managing the learning process in schools is highlighted as the section takes a look at the 31