Teaching as a High-Risk Profession

Teaching as a High-Risk Profession
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Teaching is a highly challenging and highly rewarding profession. It's also a high-risk one.

Think of the attributes we most admire in teachers: a caring demeanor, willingness to go above and beyond time spent in the classroom to help students, an ability to reach children who are disconnected, and the personal knowledge of their students that can help each one find his or her passion.

It turns out these same attributes are also commonly found in teachers whose behaviors cross a line - whether in a legal sense, or through the kinds of unintended consequences that wind up damaging the trust that connects students, families, teachers and schools. These kinds of situations don't usually make headlines, but unintended consequences happen every day, creating risks for educators and students that are unlike those confronted by professionals in other fields. Consider these key differences:

  • Other professionals typically provide a narrow service to address a singular problem - a legal challenge or an illness, for example. As a society, we expect teachers to address not just learning, but also a broad range of societal issues, including extreme poverty, discrimination and the negative consequences of relationships that exist outside of the classroom.
  • In professions like law and medicine, the practitioner typically interprets knowledge to help the person he or she is serving. In education, teachers help students meet, and at times exceed, their own knowledge base, typically by becoming active partners in learning.
  • Doctors and attorneys aren't expected to develop personal relationships with clients as part of fulfilling their duties - in fact, it's discouraged. From the beginning of their training, educators are taught that strong interpersonal relationships are at the heart of effective teaching and learning.
  • Other professionals typically provide services to one client at a time. Educators do so for entire classrooms of children at once, each with different academic, social and emotional needs that must be addressed simultaneously for learning to take place.

Other professions work through these kinds of issues by creating a culture of social distance — which is why you don’t invite your therapist to a birthday party or ask your dermatologist to look at a rash in the grocery line. But teachers don’t hold weekly sessions with students — they’re integral parts of their daily lives for the entire school year. Unlike doctors and counselors, we also expect teachers to spend time with students outside of the classroom as coaches and club sponsors, as mentors, as counselors and, often, as the adult they can come to with the problems they’re struggling with in and out of school. Teachers who take on these additional roles are often the ones who find themselves in the most vulnerable spaces.

Time and proximity aren’t the only reasons the role of educator is a risky one. As every educator knows, the relationship between teachers and students becomes a shared space very quickly. Think of a coach who pushes a student-athlete to dig in and find the untapped strength needed to break a record or win a game, or an English teacher who draws highly personal writing out of a reluctant student. Most of us can think back to our own time in school to an educator that reached us on a much deeper level than the subject he or she taught. There’s an intimate connection in all teaching relationships that’s highly nuanced, highly dependent on the individuals involved and very powerful. The shift from a student passively receiving knowledge to becoming actively engaged can blur these boundaries even further. That can be dangerous. The irony is clear. Those educators whom we have long considered as being most influential in our own development may have faced the greatest danger.

That’s not to say that educators should step back from extracurricular activities or caring for students. Few committed teachers would be willing to do so, and as a society we value the teachers who go above and beyond the classroom the most. But what we, both individually and as a profession, need to do is to acknowledge the vulnerabilities we face as educators. The uncomfortable truth is that we are in a high-risk position where seemingly insignificant missteps can, over time, cause irreparable damage to our students, our careers, our schools and communities, and the integrity of the profession — whether we break laws or school policies, or not.

Research tells us that educators make more than a thousand decisions a day, the vast majority of which involve interactions with individual students that are often made reflexively. We rarely have time to step back and think through the potential long-term implications of our actions and reactions to student behavior. And most teachers aren’t   trained to do so, as they study to become educators or are mentored in their first years in the profession. 

This is why teaching — like law, medicine and counseling — needs a framework that recognizes the challenging situations in which educators often find themselves. A professional code of ethics and related training can help educators recognize these difficult gray areas when they arise. More importantly, such a framework can provide a collective understanding of the challenging situations teachers face, and a mechanism that allows teachers to articulate and make decisions about those challenges individually, through conversations with peers and as a profession. 

As I’ve written before, too often these kinds of difficult issues go without discussion because we don’t have a way to separate them from our personal beliefs and biases. A professional code of ethics can not only give educators the framework to guide us through the thousands of routine interactions that make up our days, but also the permission to discuss sensitive issues with each other in a professional context.

This brings me to perhaps the most important reason teaching is such a high-risk profession:

As educators, we're trained to value and even relish the idea of professional autonomy ... that once school starts and the classroom door is closed, we're on our own." That may work well in terms of pedagogy, but it also puts us in a position where we are even more vulnerable when serious problems arise. As we will explore in subsequent articles, professional ethics connect us to each other as educators, and as professionals, in ways that shatter that isolation when it matters the most.

Troy Hutchings, Ed.D., provides thought leadership to research initiatives and practical applications in educator ethics at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, NJ.

 

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