Thursday, 12th November

Today I finally enjoyed the opportunity to experience how to teach a lesson to English students in a British classroom. As the reference teacher had to give individual feedback to Year 12 students, she asked me to give her class. It was a session about Situation Ethics, an interesting approach to morality based on Christian values which was developed by the American theologian and philosopher Joseph Fletcher in the 1960s. According to this particular approach to Ethics, what is right or wrong cannot be rigidly derived from a strict set of absolute rules, as the context and the situation should always be taken into account. Fletcher considers that the only intrinsic good is love, so love should be the only central rule for Christian decision.

As the teacher had a slideshow presentation for this lesson, adapting it to my own teaching style was not a difficult task. I introduced a punchy starter activity, including a short excerpt from the last sequence in the classic film 'High Noon'. I thought that this scene could help me to show how Situation Ethics considers that sometimes rules can be overridden in specific cases. Later, I prepared a simple test to revise the basic concepts and ideas the students had already studied in their previous lessons. Finally, in order to present the central core of the lesson, I asked them to work in teams. Each team had to focus on one of the six different principles of Situation Ethics. They were encouraged to write a clear explanation of this principle, and to find an example which may clarify its meaning. I also asked them to think about the strong and weak points of each principle, so that they could have arguments to decide by themselves how sound this particular Ethical Theory is.

The class seemed to be quite successful, as all students were engaged, discussing their personal ideas in their groups and producing interesting and relevant examples for the six principles. All of them copied the basic contents of the lesson in their books, and seemed to understand the main rationale of Situation Ethics. However, I found that they were not very participative. It was hard to make them share their personal opinions. Maybe they were caught out by my presence in the class, as the lesson was supposed to be taught by their reference teacher. It might be hard for a 17 year old student to behave in a natural and spontaneous way in front of a new, foreing, unknown teacher who just appeared out of the blue. Nevertheless, I felt that at the end of the class most of them were satisfied with the lesson, and I had the impression that all of them learnt what Situation Ethics is about. This probably means that my teaching objectives were hopefully achieved in this lesson, the first one I ever teach in front of a full class of 28 British Sixth Formers!

The interesting point is that, at the end of the day, during the fifth and last period, I had the opportunity to teach another class to the same group of students. This second lesson was about euthanasia, so I thought that a debate could be an interesting way to address this tricky and controversial topic. I designed a rather complex lesson, including video clips and several examples of well known people who fought to get the right of putting an end to their own lives. I also presented the students a difficult moral dilemma: the case of Frances Inglis, who killed her son in order to prevent him from suffering. Students were divided into two different groups, depending on their personal position about euthanasia. I asked them to find, working in teams, different arguments to defend their opponents' positions. Later, I asked them to find adequate rebuttals for these arguments. Finally, the debate was put into practice. I asked them to sit in rows, facing their opponents. Each student had 2 minutes to defend his/her own position with sound arguments. At the end of this brief dialogue, each pupil was asked to grade his/her opponent in two different aspects – the soundness of his/her arguments and the respect with which he/she considered differing arguments and reasons. After these 2 minutes, students had to move one position, and this process was repeated 7 times, so each pupil had the opportunity to debate with 7 different people. This part of the activity was quite noisy and I had some difficulties when trying to explain the instructions to the class. Its obvious that I am far from mastering these new teaching techniques, and that I need a lot of practice before I can run them as smoothly and effectively as I would like to. But, generally speaking, I think that the students had fun and learned a lot. Hopefully this lesson helped them to understand the ethical complexity of euthanasia, and to identify arguments for it and against it. After watching the impressive final sequence of 'The sea inside', we still had a few minutes for a final activity, in which students had the opportunity to compare their previous opinion about euthanasia with the more sophisticated and rich arguments that they learnt during the debate. I think it was a quite successful and interesting experience, and I am looking forward to putting it in practice when I go back to my own school in Madrid!