蜜桃影像

The 86th Aquinas Lecture

A Teacher's Dilemma:
Balancing High Expectations with Evidence
By Dr. Jennifer M. Morton, University of Pennsylvania

Friday, October 10, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Fr. John Naus, S.J. Room (AMU 163)

We expect teachers to have high expectations for their students鈥攁 teacher should 'believe' in her students鈥� potential to succeed. At the same time, educational policy is increasingly focused on 鈥榙ata-driven鈥� pedagogy. These two demands give rise to a central dilemma for educators, particularly when available data seems to undermine optimistic expectations. This paper explores this conflict, arguing that its resolution necessitates a reconceptualization of teaching as ethically motivated inquiry. However, the distinctive institutional context of teaching鈥攚here the salience, interpretation, and weighting of evidence are part of institutional design鈥攊ntroduces significant complexities. The paper examines the interplay between ethical and evidential considerations in shaping effective institu-tional frameworks for teaching.

Professor Jennifer M. Morton received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and her A.B. from Princeton University. She is currently the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education. She has previously held positions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the City College of New York, the Graduate Center-CUNY, and Swarthmore College. She has also been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow at the Princeton Center for Human Values. Her 2019 book, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility, published by Princeton University Press, was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She is the recipient of the APA鈥檚 Scheffler Prize and the Australasian Association of Philosophy鈥檚 2017 Best Paper Award. Her essay, 鈥淕rit,鈥� co-authored with Sarah Paul, was selected by Philosopher鈥檚 Annual as one of the ten best philosophy papers of 2019.