What’s Fair from a Student’s Standpoint?
An Exercise for Teachers

Students in the middle grades vary widely in their ideas about fairness and social responsibility. Some kids still see a dilemma solely from their own point of view. Others have begun to balance competing claims and perspectives. Still others have reached the point where they appeal to a social norm to decide what’s fair to all.

At any point in the school year, you can gain insight into the spectrum of how students in your class think about fairness by presenting a dilemma for them to discuss, then noticing what kinds of answers students give and how they share their ideas about working out agreements.

You can use dilemmas that emerge directly from your class experiences, like this one on eating in the classroom:

• Should we allow eating in the classroom?
• If we do, and some students do not clean up after themselves, what should we do:

— Suspend the privilege of eating?
— Ask the whole class to clean up their mess?

• Who is responsible for keeping the class clean—students, teacher, or janitors?

You might also use dilemmas from your curriculum. For example, you could present choices by historical or scientific figures, or by fictional characters, in order to achieve a goal or outcome that had negative consequences for someone else. Ask students:

• What decision was made?
• Was it fair? To whom was it fair?
• Who might have thought it wasn’t fair? What other decision could that person have made? Would it have been more fair? To whom? Why?

For every action students suggest, make sure to ask them to explain clearly why it seems fair to them. Make clear to them that no one right answer exists, and encourage them to share their opinions, even when they disagree with others. At the end of the discussion, ask students to help you summarize the discussion:

What things does the class agree about? __________________________
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What things does the class disagree about? _______________________
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Reflecting on such a discussion, a teacher might reflect on what it reveals about how individual students think about fairness. Answering the questions below could help you later, when other issues of fairness come up in class.
           
Which students took an individual point of view and had trouble thinking about fairness from multiple perspectives?
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Which students thought of fairness in terms of a tit-for-tat reciprocity of benefits and injuries?
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Which students appealed to social norms of leadership, generosity, responsibility, promises made or broken, group loyalties?
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Now think about the students as a group. Which reasons seemed to sway the class more than others?
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Excerpted from Fires in the Middle School Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from Middle Schoolers (New Press, 2008), by Kathleen Cushman and Laura Rogers, Ed.D., with the students of What Kids Can Do.