Developing ethical competence in future teachers

Ethical training for teachers is an increasingly urgent issue. In recent years, American reviews, such as Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan and the Journal of Teacher Education, which deal with the professionalization of teachers, have increasingly focused on this aspect of initial and on-going teacher training. In this paper we will argue for the need to provide teachers – including Italian teachers – with specific training in issues of ethics (personal and professional ethics as well as students’ ethical development). We will therefore give an account of international studies conducted on the subject and illustrate the results of an experimental research product conducted over three consecutive years on different cohorts of students, with a total sample of 45 future preschool and primary school teachers, in the final years of the academic curriculum. The study verified the effectiveness of a university teaching initiative in values education. The initiative in question was a complex workshop, conducted using ethical dilemmas, group discussion, film viewings, reflective writing practices and production of teaching materials. Experimental verification makes it possible to highlight the effective elements of the model adopted.