Ethics for Teachers and Middle Leaders

A Practical Guide

Trevor Kerry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000370973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación secundaria

Every school has a mission statement based on values and ethical beliefs. Ethics for Teachers and Middle Leaders sets out a way of thinking through the key issues of ethics in teaching and shows how a school's ethical values can be translated by students and staff into action. It is designed to help rehearse certain ethical dilemmas and guide teacher leaders in helping others to think through and develop appropriate behaviours.

Chapters consider the role of ethics in all aspects of school life including teacher professionalism, teaching methods, lesson planning and assessment. This book not only examines everyday concerns such as class management and presenting curriculum ethically, but also touches upon emerging issues in e-learning, career building, leadership and school governance.

Packed full of real examples from schools and opportunities to reflect, the book will help readers to understand how their behaviour, decisions and advice to others might be guided and to avoid some of the common pitfalls in school. This insightful book will instil confidence in teachers and middle leaders as they face such ethical dilemmas in their daily work.

1

Ethics

In schools, in life, in education

Introduction: Ethics and How They Apply to Everyday Life

This is a book about ethics as they impinge on our work as educators. Ethics affect us in our daily lives, and in our professional lives. To set the scene, let's begin somewhere else:

I will choose the location and you can choose the venue. The location is a four-star hotel. You can put it anywhere your fantasy takes you. It's breakfast time.

Freda and Fred (like all the other couples in this little narrative) have signed up to the half-board tariff; they have come down to breakfast, and then will while away the day (on the sun loungers, at the nature reserve, on the beach, in the amusement arcade, surfing, camel riding – you choose) until they return ready for pre-dinner cocktails. (Don’t know about you – I’m liking this place already.)

Breakfast is a veritable feast, the choices of hot food are augmented by a groaning buffet.

Freda and Fred enjoy a hearty breakfast; something they don’t have time to linger over at home. Over the second pot of coffee Freda disappears to the buffet and returns with a sweet, pink apple and a chunky banana: she secretes them (having first surreptitiously looked around the breakfast room) in her capacious handbag under the table. She says to Fred: ‘If you were to go and get a slice of that nice Madeira cake and a Danish pastry we wouldn’t have to buy any lunch’. He does. They don’t.

At the next table are Joyce and Dick. They observe, unobtrusively, the actions of Freda and Fred and disapprove. They enjoy the breakfast, and after the hot course make sure they eat plentifully of the buffet. She enjoys two pears; he manages three croissants. It is way beyond anything they would eat at home, but it will keep them going until dinner is served tonight.

Further along the row of two-seat tables sit Arthur and Arthena. They eat their normal cereal choices, then enjoy a hot course, and he tops it off with an indulgent slice of toast.

Later, in the local town, all three couples encounter, at various times, two engaging students from the local university sociology department who are conducting a survey. Each couple answers independently all the questions on the survey. One question is: Have you ever stolen anything? They all answer ‘No’.

Action

Consider the extent to which you agree with their individual answers.

I hope you enjoyed that brief vacation at the beginning of this book, but it is time for work now.

The story above raises the everyday questions of ethical behaviour.

Freda and Fred, as deduced from their behaviour, thought they were doing something wrong, but they still did it. They might have felt that they were breaking some externally imposed norm about not stealing (because the food was not for their breakfast, but they used it as a way of saving money later); the hotel may even have had a published policy about taking food from the breakfast room as opposed to eating in the breakfast room (some hotels do, to circumvent just such an eventuality as has been described). They both answered ‘No’ to the sociologists. Since they both seemed to have felt that they were flouting a norm, they were both dishonest in this. Fred may have felt that he was less culpable than Freda ‘because it was her idea’ and he was just a passenger (his middle name was, coincidentally, Adam). In both cases, the food was not theirs to take – for the purpose for which they took it. Secretly Fred justified the action of his partner with the thought that ‘the hotel cost an arm and a leg, so all's fair in love and war’. At the end of the interview, he chatted to the pretty girl about this and that while he was waiting for Freda, and said he was interested they were doing a survey on theft because only last week, back home, he had had his Rolls taken off the drive and he felt bastards like that ought to be locked up somewhere where the key would go missing. They all parted on very good terms. The girl sociologist said to the boy sociologist: ‘Nice couple. It's wrong when honest people like that get their goods removed by criminals’.

Joyce and Dick enjoyed their encounter with the sociologists, too, secure in the knowledge that their consciences were clear.

For Arthur and Arthena – well, for Arthur anyway – the encounter was a bit less happy. When it got to the question about stealing he had to admit, to his shame, that as a kid he had been in trouble for scrumping – so he couldn’t answer ‘No’. What he didn’t say was that he was the child of a one-parent family with minimal income who spent much of the time not just hungry but half-starved.

Now, you have had an everyday introduction to the problems of ethics in daily life.

Clarifying Some Simple Terminology

We ought to clear up here and now some issues in terminology. The key words are: ethics, morals, norms, values.

There is a distinction between ethics and morals; but it is hard to discern the difference in much that is written or spoken on the subject. In this book I am going to make a valid (but personal) distinction and try, for consistency's sake, to stick to it.

• Ethics – refer to the carefully thought-out, well-articulated, theoretical principles or philosophies on which a person's behaviour is based. It is not that behaviour, it is the rationale or philosophy on which that behaviour is built.
• Morals – refer to the individual's standards of behaviour which he/she chooses or attempts to adopt as a result of the beliefs he/she holds about the principles that should govern behaviour (ethics). Morals are personal, individual standards or aspirations that operationalise ethical beliefs. (If you wanted to be cynical you might say that ethics are the high ideals of personal behaviour, while morals are frequently failed attempts to achieve them.)
• Values – it seems to me, are the habitual morals by which one lives and judges others. I will use the term in this limited sense and attempt to avoid the ambiguities which are often associated with the word. Above all, I will not use ‘values’ and ‘ethics’ interchangeably: they are not the same thing. That might mean I use the word ethics rather a lot – but better repetition than lack of clarity.
• Norms – are slightly fuzzy at the edges conceptually, but are the generally accepted standards and behaviours adopted by a society or Society (I use the word society to denote the people among whom we habitually live, work and socialise; Society for the more amorphous and impersonal concept of the wider group within which we claim identity, e.g. a Nation). They will probably overlap with the categories above but may not be identical with them. For example, an individual may accept all the usual precepts of the Society not to kill, steal, lie and so on; but acting on different compulsions (maybe those of their religion) they may feel it reasonable to discriminate against certain classes of people – recently publicised cases of shop owners refusing on religious grounds to supply goods to gay people epitomises this conflict.

The distinction made above between ethics and morals, if sustained, will iron out quite a lot of ambiguity in the discussion about ethics generally and, later, about ethics in education specifically.

So where do ethics, and thus morals, come from? Most favoured candidates are religion, society and/or some group, sect or similar body which adopts specific ways of behaving based on identified belief systems. We’ll take a glance at all these options:

Religion: Most religions claim to have a knowledge of the divine which includes injunctions on how humans should behave – this would be true of Buddhism, Islam, the Bahai faith and so on, and in the United Kingdom, traditionally, Christianity. The religious doctrines provide the theoretical underpinning (ethics), from which emanate the codes of behaviour (Ten Commandments in the Jewish faith, for example), which in turn form the morality the religion tries to adopt. To complicate matters, there is a substantial overlap between religions on ethical issues but no consensus; and even within religions, sectarianism often splits opinion on even quite key ethical issues (cf. the attitude of Protestants and Catholics towards birth control, outlined later in the chapter).

Society: Religions may influence a Society's ethical and moral stances; and many behaviours are enshrined, subsequently, in the law of that particular nation or ethnic group. So religion and law inter-play with Society's role in forming an ethical position, i.e. about what is right and wrong. But there are pragmatic considerations, too. Generally (but not universally), not killing people on a routine basis is seen as a pragmatic solution to a more secure Society. This might become a ‘norm’ – i.e. behaviour we would expect of fellow citizens. Secular codes of ethics or ‘moral’ behaviour often look suspiciously like the religious ones, but that's because, at root, they are all striving towards the same or a similar goal.

Groups, cults, sects: Any widespread and influential collection of people might, over time, influence the way society thinks about problems we class as ethical issues. Socrates tried to analyse ‘the good’ and attempted to envisage Utopia. There is a growing Humanist movement in the UK, and this eschews religious values – yet its ethical stance is not a million miles different from Christian religious principles on the majority of issues.

To reject wholly any ethical position at all and its resulting moral behaviour – whatever that is – is tantamount to anarchy; and anarchy is usually destructive of Society and gets its wings clipped. But we have seen that to say that ethics are ‘broadly similar’ across many religions and cultures does not rule out some very major differences of view, differences of motivation, or disputes about detail and sometimes even about fundamentals. Hence, ethics are not as clear-cut in practice as they might appear in theory. Things can be ethical but not legal; legal but not ethical; ethical but not in tune with specific religious morals; in tune with religious morals but not ethical; ethical but not in step with the norms of Society, and so on. In ethics (at least in their practice), there are no black-and-white images of life, only shades of grey.

Action

Think about an ethical conflict you may have experienced in your own life, maybe within your own family. Such conflicts can be very distressing. How was the conflict resolved? Was it, indeed, resolved? If so, what was the path to successful resolution? If not, why not? What barriers could not be overcome?

Ethical Dilemmas Illustrated

The conflicts relating to an apparently ‘simple’ ethical issue can be demonstrated even in relation to the most fundamental principle of ethics, the prohibition about killing:

• First, we make a distinction between killing in cold blood and killing with a (justifiable) cause – i.e. between murder and killing in extenuating circumstances
• That distinction is further blurred by the notion of manslaughter (unintentional killing)
• Even murder attracts the views that there are ‘degrees’ of culpability, e.g. killing while the balance of the mind is disturbed; killing with and without motive or intent
• Then there is ‘legal’ killing – e.g. in war

Individuals are often presented with scenarios:

• Would you kill someone if they were seriously threatening your life (self-defence)?
• If they were threatening someone else's life?
• If failing to defend your country might mean enslavement of you, your loved ones and your fellow citizens?
• Then again, there are the issues around euthanasia …

I could go on – but you get the point.

It is not hard to appreciate that, in life, what seems at first glance a simple prohibition is surrounded by the fog of uncertainty and the miasma of complicated debate: not least, because ethics in practice (morals) involve motivation – and that's a highly contentious area.

Some Approaches to Solving Ethical Problems

The rest of this text is primarily concerned with ethics in education contexts: with those things which impinge on teacher professionalism, teachers planning curriculum and teaching it, and with teacher ethical behaviour against the background of classroom, school and career. Ethical debate is a concern for all teachers, and for those who manage and lead teachers in carrying out those activities. We have seen that it is a complicated and multifaceted affair. The book is not about how to teach ethics to students, but much of what is said will impinge on the notion that teachers are role models for students in the ethical sphere as in others; so the issue will be re-visited briefly in Chapter 11. Before we end this chapter, we shall look at some generic examples of ethical dilemmas in education settings, and you will have the opportunity to practise some skills in analysing the situations painted in the scenarios. First, though, it will be useful to sum up the argument so far. What have we learned to date about gaining ethical insights into problems and issues, especially those in the sphere of education?

Begin with an open mind: First, it is better to begin with an open mind that is with questions, not answers: what, when (i.e. in what context), who, how, why, to what ends, with what intentions?

Ethical decisions are often messy and compromises: Second, we have identified that, while in some cases, an ethical decision may be clear-cut, usually it can be couched only in what are really shades of grey. While, when we look at the ‘big questions’ of right and wrong, goodness and evil, love and hate, killing and not killing, answers may appear relatively easy and obvious, in reality the smaller ethical dilemmas are more ‘messy’ and less tractable. In the cold light of everyday, it is not possible always to attain the absolute Good and we may have to accept the best that can be achieved.

The key skill lies in deconstruction: Leading from this insight, my third proposition is that a critical skill is that of de-construction: we need to learn how to pull a situation apart to understand it fundamentally. The questions we ask – as well as those above – must include questions about what we know of the situation as well as what we don’t know; often these questions will take us into the realms of motivation of those involved, too (even our own in making judgements about the situation).

Avoid predetermined schemes: The f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• About this book
• Foreword
• 1 Ethics: In schools, in life, in education
• 2 Ethical professionalism in social context
• 3 The ethical school’s approach to class management
• 4 Ethical curriculum
• 5 Ethical pedagogy
• 6 Ethical lesson planning, assessment and homework
• 7 Ethics and e-learning
• 8 Ethical career patterns
• 9 Ethical middle leadership
• 10 Ethical governance
• 11 The only way is ethics
• Finis
• Notes and references
• Index