What Professional Ethics Mean

When we hear the word “ethics,” we think we understand what the term means. And as educators, when we’re confronted with ethical issues, we generally try our best to act… well, ethically. But the difference between being an “ethical” person and following a code of ethics can be very different.

Consider a scenario familiar to many educators: An exemplary teacher in your building is having a bad year — in large part because of personal issues. What do you do?

• Do you confront the teacher about his or her performance, knowing it ultimately impacts the students he or she cares so much about?

• Do you, knowing the severity of the teacher's personal issues, recognize that even the best educators cannot be at the top of their game at all times, and assume that he or she will go back to being a great educator once the out-of-school problem is resolved?

• Do you think it's presumptuous to bring the issue up with the teacher at all, given that the principal is more likely to hold the teacher to task in ways that will improve his or her performance?
  

Chances are, most teachers will say “it depends.” And the best response does, in fact, depend on a variety of factors —the teacher, the situation, the students and the school. But in any given scenario, each of these courses of action could conceivably be seen as “ethical” by a teacher — and probably for good reasons. More importantly, we as a field haven’t created an environment that allows us to have conversations that acknowledge these kinds of problems in the first place and discuss collectively what I like to call the “least worst option.” After all, if a solution to a situation was clear cut, it wouldn’t be an ethical dilemma. 

The misperceptions blurring the lines between personal and professional ethics become even more difficult to address when we think about the ethics of education. I personally believe the reasons why these misperceptions exist go back to the roots of public education in this country. We’ve long thought of teaching as being an extension of parenting — a moral good that has seemingly obvious guidelines for what should be done in any situation. As a result, teachers, like parents, are expected — and expect themselves — to follow their own personal morality and life experience as they make decisions. We’re often expected to innately know the best way to address to any problem that involves the children we serve.

Of course, teaching, like parenting, is rarely so clear-cut. And that’s why professional ethics — as opposed to a personal sense of morality — is so necessary. Consider the kinds of issues that codes of ethics in other fields largely focus on, such as conflicts of interest and the idea of “multiple relationships”— the idea that a professional, like a doctor, must avoid relationships with patients that stray from his or her professional role in order to protect the doctor and the patient. 

Most professions address these situations by imposing social distance. As an extension of their code of ethics governing multiple relationships, psychologists generally don’t socialize with their clients outside of therapy sessions and doctors don’t offer medical opinions during social gatherings, for example. That kind of strict separation doesn’t exist in education, where instead of seeing a patient for an hour a week, we’re major parts of our students’ lives for 180 days each year. In this setting, emotional bonds with students and parents are expected — and largely unavoidable. Nor would imposing rules requiring strict separation be desirable. In fact, it goes against our job descriptions and a century’s worth of expectations about teachers and teaching.

That’s why we, as a profession, need to shift away from the idea that our personal sense of ethics —driven in large part by our upbringing and our life experiences — is enough to help us navigate all the situations we face in the classroom. Even the expectations and norms that evolve in each school vary so much that they alone can’t serve as the sole guide to our decisions. And along with the need for collective understanding of the challenges we face as professionals, we need to acknowledge the inherent risks — ethical, practical and often legal — teachers face on a daily basis, which we’ll explore in more detail in our next column.