This document discusses incorporating virtue ethics into supplemental instruction programs to help students develop skills and dispositions. It argues that expertise involves cultivating virtues like knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Specific virtues like honesty, justice and courage are important for SI leaders to develop. For virtues to take root, SI leaders must be led well through instruction and modeling by their teachers. Developing virtues requires practice in real situations and resisting societal pressures that undermine character development.

1. Teaching (With the) Virtues Through
Incorporating Supplemental Instruction
Gregory B. Sadler, Ph.D
President and Founder, ReasonIO
Adjunct Instructor of Philosophy Marist college

2. Skills and Dispositions
 What skills and dispositions go into making an
SI leader effective as an SI leader?
 3 intuitively evident answers
 Disciplinary knowledge
 Pedagogical expertise
 “People skills”
 These are bodies of skills and dispositions
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3. Introducing An Aristotelian Understanding
 These are all examples of what in classical philosophy of
education are termed: hexis (in Greek) or habitus (Latin)
 Prevalent misunderstandings among students:
 Education as mere production of knowledge, understood as
information
 Expertise is simply having more knowledge
 Learning is just acquiring more knowledge
 Basic Problem: That’s not what expertise is – not even what
knowledge really is
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4. Deeper Dimensions
 Disciplinary and pedagogical practice and reflection
 Learning, expertise, education, real knowledge involves:
 Development of Skills
 Some general, some specific
 Can be scaffolded into higher structures, transferred to other
contexts
 Cultivation – sometimes change – of Dispositions
 Habits, attitudes, affective orientations, patterns of desire and
emotional response
 Skills and Dispositions are complex, interconnected
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5. Example: Critical Thinking: Skills
(from APA Delphi Report)
Skills Comprising Critical Thinking
Analysis Evaluation Inference
Examining Ideas
Assessing Claims Querying Evidence
Identifying Arguments
Assessing Arguments Conjecturing Alternatives
Analyzing Arguments
[Assessing Information Sources] Drawing Conclusions
Interpretation Explanation Self-Regulation
Categorization Stating Results
Self-examination
Decoding Significance Justifying Procedures
Self-correction
Clarifying Meaning Presenting Arguments
Supported and Integrated by set of roughly 19 Dispositional
Traits, rooted in habits, affectivity, attitudes, practices of the
Critical Thinker
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6. Ideal Instructor
 Has highly developed Disciplinary Knowledge
 Has (at least implicit) Pedagogical Expertise
 Has “People Skills” (communication, empathy, capacity to
reach students, size up cases well)
 Each of these is a well-established habitus
 These sets of skills and dispositions interpenetrate and
inform each other
 [Key questions for non-ideal instructors:]
 How did we get as far as we have come?
 How do we keep improving?
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7. Situations of Education:
Superficial Student Learning
Information from Discipline is Conveyed
Teacher Student
has Habitus: Disciplinary
Knowledge Does not develop Habitus of
Disciplinary Knowledge
maybe Pedagogical Expertise,
People Skills Acquires knowledge as
Information
Student provides Information from Discipline back
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8. Situations of Education:
Deeper, Retentive Student Learning
Information from Discipline is Conveyed
Skills from Discipline are Introduced, Modeled and Practiced
Teacher Student
has Habitus: Disciplinary
Knowledge Dispositions are Does develop Habitus
fostered, examined, of Disciplinary
has Habitus: Pedagogical modeled, improved Knowledge
Expertise, People Skills
Integrates Information,
Skills, Dispositions
Student provides Information from Discipline back
Student provides evidence of Skills in Practice and Performance
ReasonIO

9. Adding an SI Leader Makes Situation of
Education More Complex
 Like this?
Teacher SI Leader
Student
has Habitus: developing
Disciplinary Habitus of Does develop
Knowledge Disciplinary Habitus of
Knowledge Disciplinary
has other Knowledge
Habitus Has or develops
other Habitus
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10.  Or it is – or should it be -- more like this?
Student
Teacher
Does develop
has Habitus: Habitus of
Disciplinary Knowledge Disciplinary
Knowledge
has other Habitus
SI Leader
developing Habitus of
Disciplinary Knowledge
Has or develops other
Habitus ReasonIO

11. Let’s Be Honest
 How do we – or imagine some other Instructor! – employ SI
Leaders?
 Well?
 Poorly? (I admit I’ve done that sometimes!)
 How do we know?
 What do we want to have occur through SI?
 Change the question:
 What kind of person do we need for SI Leader?
 What has to happen for the SI Leader to develop well?
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12. Virtue Ethics enters the Conversation
 Virtue Ethics: family of approaches in moral theory
 Western examples: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas
 Non-western examples: Confucianism, many tradition-based
Ethics
 Also includes contemporary interpreters of these thinkers
 Focuses very closely on issues of skills and dispositions
 Focuses on intellectual and moral virtues and vices
 Questions about SI involve moral questions, practical
reasoning – Virtue Ethics holds out best prospects for useful
dialogue
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13. Distinctive to Virtue Ethics
 Reframes thinking in terms of horizons of human
flourishing, excellence, and happiness
 Thinks out the (often taken for granted) relations
between means and ends
 Identifies and analyses specific range of virtues and vices
that need to be cultivated or rooted out
 Determines how virtues and vices are to actually be
cultivated or rooted out in actual practice.
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14. The Big Picture I’m Proposing
Virtue: Virtue:
Generosity Habitus: Habitus: Moderation
Disciplinary Pedagogical
Knowledge Expertise
Virtue: Virtue:
Honesty Habitus: Justice
People Skills
Virtue: Virtue:
Educational Situation: Classroom, Course
Friendliness Courage
Design, Feedback, Assessment, etc.
Intellectual Virtue:
Virtue: State: Good
Phronesis Self-Control Temper
Broader Concerns and Horizons: Moral Life, Development of the Person, Relationships

15. What I’m going to do here with Virtue
Ethics
 Very brief overview of Virtue Ethics as a moral theory.
 Look at the purposes or ends of SI within that
framework.
 Discuss which virtues (and vices) are important to focus
upon in order to ensure effective use of SI.
 Discuss conditions necessary for developing virtues and
integrating them with the three other sets of skills and
dispositions.
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16. What are Virtues?
 Habitual dispositions gradually by practice established within
a person’s character or personality.
 Take the form of typically and characteristically acting,
feeling, and making use of things like property, relationships,
pleasures and pains, even one’s time in good or right ways.
 Virtuous person right assessments and attitudes towards what
is to be done, what goods are at stake and how they ought to
be best ordered, pursued, produced, or preserved.
 Virtues are really sets of dispositions and skills, having
interconnected practical, affective, and intellectual
dimensions.
ReasonIO

17. Virtues/States Needed in SI Leaders
 Moral Virtues:
 Justice
 Moderation
 Courage
 Generosity
 Honesty
 Good Temper
 Friendliness or Compassion
 State: Self-Control or Perseverance
 Intellectual Virtue: Practical Wisdom
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18. How are Virtues Understood and
Cultivated?
 Teaching, progressively acquiring, building, and synthesizing
knowledge as information – e.g. actually studying Virtue
Ethics texts, thinkers, etc.
 Even more through practice, through acting, feeling,
choosing in determinate situations – we become what we
do and choose repeatedly
 We have to resist societal and cultural pressures to
misunderstand virtue and vice, practice the wrong things
 We also have to model virtues for our students and SI leaders
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19. Reversing Aristotle’s Dictum
 To lead well, one must have followed well: taking direction,
understanding , then meeting and then exceeding
expectations reasonably placed upon one.
 In order for this to occur, they must not only have followed
well, they must have been led well -- to be taught
 If virtues are needed by SI leaders, instructors will have to
take on the task of instructing them and guiding them
 This in turn will require that instructors, if not virtuous, be
at least on the way to virtue and have an adequately
developed degree of knowledge of virtue
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20. Follow-up
 Questions, concerns, comments, further discussion?
 Email: greg@reasonio.com
ReasonIO