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What is Responsible Decision Making?
According to CASEL, it is the abilities to make caring and constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions across diverse situations. This includes the capacities to consider ethical standards and safety concerns, and to evaluate the benefits and consequences of various actions for personal, social, and collective well-being.
Such as:
Demonstrating curiosity and open-mindedness
Learning how to make a reasoned judgment after analyzing information, data, and facts
Identifying solutions for personal and social problems
Anticipating and evaluating the consequences of one’s actions
Recognizing how critical thinking skills are useful both inside and outside of school
Reflecting on one’s role to promote personal, family, and community well-being
Evaluating personal, interpersonal, community, and institutional impacts
For more information and some sample lessons for teaching RDM, check out this website from Positive Action.
Frayer-style Well-being Analysis
Students may not consider the impact of their choices on themselves or the people around them. Yet, the CASEL Framework points out that students should reflect on their role in promoting personal, family, and community well-being.
You can use a Frayer-style reflection to get students thinking about how they are positively impacting their personal and academic well-being as well as the well-being of their families and communities. This exercise encourages them to think about their actions and decisions and how they influence important aspects of their lives.
From: https://catlintucker.com/2022/08/sel-responsible-decisions/
The Colorado Education Initiative put out this great step by step decision making guide to help model what this process might look like for our students. It breaks down the process into five steps. Check out this link for the complete guide!
Supporting students in their development of RDM:
Review the responsible decision making model which is: identify the problem, analyze the situation, brainstorm solutions, solve the problem, consider ethical responsibility, evaluate and reflect
Present a scenario that presents a problem or a decision that needs to be made, some ideas (suggested to start with one scenario and all the steps as an entire class and then go through rest of the scenarios and steps in small groups)
Have discussion to identify the problem or choices
Ask guided questions to help analyze the situation- What are the different options available? How do you think the student feels about choice A vs choice B? What are the pros and cons of the choices? How would the different choices affect others?
Brainstorm solutions by making a list
Instruct students to pick a solution or choice they feel is the best one for the scenario
Discuss their responsibility to themselves or others with the choice they made- Why is it important to make a choice for yourself?
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