Psychology Professor Phillip Zimbardo and Social Studies Teacher Ron Jones

In 1971, Stanford University Psychology professor conducted the now-famous Stanford Prison Experiment in which simulated jailer/inmate relationships actually generated many of the very behaviors recognized as being characteristic of real-life situations where group identification and blind obedience to authority release the profound capacity for morally horrendous and brutal behavior that lies within most us on different levels (Zimbardo, 2007). Similarly, several years earlier, Palo Alto high school Social Studies teacher conducted a one-day demonstration intended to explain the Nazi phenomenon. The exercise took on a momentum of its own, duplicating the principal behaviors of Nazi fanaticism over a fictitious movement called "The Wave" (Macionis, 2008).

Application in My Teaching Approach

Both educators conceived of original ways to examine and illustrate the specific conceptual ideas they hoped to convey to their students...

Since then, they and many other contemporary educators, particularly in the fields of social psychology and sociology, have used the video records of those educational exercises to deliver lessons about the double-edged sword of obedience to authority and about the immoral impulses in many of us that can be brought to the surface under the right sets of environmental circumstances. In my teaching approach, I try to deliver lessons, whenever possible, in such a way that they might conceivably result in life-long retention of the lesson in the manner that these three educators have in their respective academic fields.
Sources Consulted

Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed Penguin Books: New York.

Macionis, J. (2008). Sociology. Prentice-Hall: Upper Saddle River.

Small, R. "Educational Praxis" Educational Theory; Vol 28, No. 3 (1978): 214-22.

Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House: New…