Breaking the Silence

Breaking the Silence
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It's a situation too many teachers face: after an all-day event like a debate tournament, the activities bus returns to school in the evening. All the students are picked up except one, who tells the debate team sponsor that he doesn't have a ride home. The district's policy specifically prohibits teachers from transporting students in their personal vehicles, but it's getting late and no one in his family is answering their phones.

So this teacher breaks policy, and not for the first time in this same situation. Every time she's driven a student home after a tournament, she's worried a little about what might happen if she was caught - would she receive a letter in her personnel file? Be fired? Would her peers wonder if she had other motives for driving students around? But ultimately, she knows that she has a moral obligation to ensure her students' safety, and not leaving a student alone in an empty school parking lot late at night trumps whatever ramifications might come out of violating the district's rules.

All too often, teachers are put in situations like this where they feel like they have no choice but to break policy. So, more often than not, they do so quietly - often without telling their coworkers and peers. And this can be as problematic as the policy itself.

If this particular teacher talked with her peers about this situation, she'd realize she wasn't alone. She would learn that the sports coaches and band director at her school do the same thing all the time, and are just as concerned about what could happen to them and their students. She might also learn that a teacher who transferred to another school a few years before was moved because a student took a selfie of the two of them on a similar ride home and posted it on Facebook®, prompting a complaint to the school board by her parents.

More importantly, if all the coaches and club sponsors at this school were aware of their common problem and comfortable with talking about it, they could acknowledge the collective risk they - not just the one teacher unfortunate enough to wind up on Facebook-all face. And they could come up with a solution that would keep teachers from being put in this situation in the first place.

In this series of columns, we've revisited many times the isolation teachers face as they navigate the complexities of their multiple and overlapping roles - as a teacher, club sponsor, mentor and role model. Introducing a structure through which teachers can safely discuss these complexities and the thousands of interactions they have with students, parents, peers and others is one of the true strengths of introducing professional ethics to education. But even more powerful is this idea that these conversations can bring about lasting change that improves the environment in which teaching and learning takes place for everyone.

We've talked about the challenges of introducing professional ethics to the classroom, but progress is being made. Developed by and for educators, the Model Code of Ethics for Educators identifies five core principles to guide the profession: responsibility to the profession, responsibility for professional competence, responsibility to students, responsibility to the school community, and responsible and ethical use of technology. Just as importantly, the Model Code builds on these principles by distilling them into 86 discrete standards. These standards, which provide added depth to each of the core principles, are the key to connecting the aspirations of professional ethics with the day-to-day realities of the profession.

The Model Code, which holds educators to a higher standard of professional conduct and responsibility than existing laws and regulations, also can help policymakers create similar expectations that can be embedded in their own licensure and certification programs in ways that reflect the needs of their own states. In this way, codes of conduct can be replaced with broader - yet more demanding of individual educators - professional expectations. But that's just the beginning.

Establishing a professional code of ethics is one thing. Ensuring that all teachers are immersed in it so it can ultimately become second nature and a regular part of how teachers go about their many duties is another thing altogether. Already we're seeing incoming teachers being exposed to professional ethics in several states. Georgia has made them a key part of its pre-service training on professional conduct, using a training and assessment program called the Georgia Ethics Assessment. Delaware also has incorporated training into its induction and mentoring processes using ProEthicaTM online ethics training. Both states have made a commitment to introducing new teachers to professional ethics during a formative point in their careers, at the same time they are learning to master content and pedagogy, so they can become an equally integral - and engrained - part of their practice.

Doing so more broadly will require states, individual districts and schools, and teacher preparation programs to provide focused, intentional training that supports educators at all stages of their careers. This training can't be a simple "one-and-done" PD session - it must immerse educators in the kinds of ethical challenges they face and how they connect to the core principles of professional ethics. We've seen firsthand how this training - and the discussions among teachers that come out of it - can help educators understand the complexities of teaching and approach decision making with a solid understanding of the principles of professional ethics. Once training on professional ethics becomes widely incorporated into teacher preparation, licensure and ongoing professional learning, we'll see teaching become a much less isolated, much more aware, and much more empowered occupation - by which I mean a profession in the true sense of the word.

Although this work is just beginning, one surprise has been an early ally in the cause of professional ethics and training. The insurance companies that cover schools and districts were among the first to recognize that empowering teachers in this way has a far greater impact than adding additional layers of regulations and monitoring. That's because professional ethics and training put responsibility back in the hands of the individual - but with an important twist. By encouraging teachers to discuss issues in an atmosphere of collective understanding, that individual teacher is no longer alone. The silence has been broken.

 

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