Values and Ethics – Professional Teacher training

Overview

Values and ethics

What indicates the competence in values and ethics in vocational teacher’s actions?

How are the values and ethics present in the following:

• Planning
• Assessment and feedback
• Teaching and guiding methods
• Special needs education
• Legal issues
• Intercultural and international issues

As a teacher or a human being one must follow certain values and ethics. Values and ethics are different in different culture, job places and in homes. Values and ethics play important role in making our behaviours. Values and ethics are present all the time it is us who follow them or not. Teachers follow the rules of ethics and values that they learn as a human being and through laws of the country and their work places.

Teachers have a huge responsibility to work as ethically as possible for the safety of work culture as well as for students who are being entrusted to us as teachers. It is the responsibility of the teachers to forward and teach values and ethics to the students. A teacher can only do that if he/she is knowledgable and practitioner of values and ethics. With ethics and values a student can understand the differences between right and wrong. Therefore, teachers must be fully prepared in teaching as well as obeying the rules of values and ethics.

Universities and schools or any other working and house hold environment will not work without some principles of values and ethics (See references). 

Whether it is planning, assessment, feedback or simply day to day teaching and guiding a teacher must always focus on values and ethics. In planning a course teacher must consider both ethical and values. Teacher should spend time in making a course and not just come in to teach without preparation. Teacher must plan according to the target audience, their age, cultural background, religion and so on. In Assessment as teacher observes learning happening in the classroom so, a teacher must be aware of different factors. Such as special needs students needs. Every students learns differently so a teacher must be able to ready to deal with students. values and ethics play important role in assessment and taking care of special needs students needs. In case of special needs education and assessment teachers will prepare different schedules and will have different curriculum. So in order to plan all this a teacher must have motivation to do so. Teacher’s personal ethics and values should be able to play important role in helping a teacher to plan for teaching. For feedback it is very important to remember so common rules. Feedback is always given for work and it is never a personal thing. Feedback is given on timely basis and always comes with positive and negative combination. A teacher must consider giving feedback and should be part of his ethics and values. A positive feedback goes together with teaching and guiding methods of a teacher. teacher’s ethics and values play important role here. If a teacher is not guiding and teaching students properly and is not prepared about the topic then this goes against ethics and values of teaching. This brings us to the legal issues. If a teacher is not teaching properly and is falling short of curriculum and deadlines then there will be certain issues. One of those issues will be legal issue. Parents can come and ask that why their child was not given proper education and why the curriculum was not fully covered and a teacher can lose the job. If a teacher have a romantic relationship with a students that is against values, ethics and laws as well. We all know and read about this in news. Many of the times as we now live in multicultural societies there will be students from different cultures, countries, religion and age groups. A teacher must fully be prepared to deal with the ethical and any issues that can come out of multiculturalism. 

Reflection

I think that at this stage of my studies this topic is very important to summarize the learning so far. I know I have just written few lines of text but while writing i have learned a lot of things in theory. However, as I have mainly dealt with very few students I have very little experience of my own. Surely I will implement my learning in practice when ever I will get a chance of teaching.

Ethics is a huge subject and responsibility for a teacher. Students will learn from authority figures especially young ones. Therefore, a person with proper understanding of values and ethics will teach the next generation the proper way. I will try my best to be that person by considering and implementing rules of ethics and values in every aspect of teaching from planning to implementing and from assessment to giving feedback.  

Feedback by Kimmo: You think? How have you taken the values ​​of your institute into account? What are they? Write a blog post on this. 05.05.2020 / Kuortti

Answer:

I would like to discuss few things here. First, I was unable to find any mission statement or values statement from the Lapland university website. Second, I was teaching as a student teacher and I did not get any Values instruction from the original course teacher. Third, I just made sure that the course that I was teaching should be able to accomplish the course objectives. The objective of the course was to teach students concepts of diversity such as Social diversity, Cultural diversity, Multiculturalism, Social Cohesion and Super Diversity in the realm of Media education.

Therefore, as I was not given any instructions, I will here talk about my own values as a teacher. For the sake of this post I have found values of Lapin AMK and Arctic Center.

LAPIN AMK (from the website)

Trust

• We are a trusted partner.
• We are profitable and responsible.
• We trust in our competences as well as
  the competences of our partners.

Open-mindedness

• We foresee the future.
• We see changes as opportunities.
• We experiment new ideas and learn from mistakes.

Sense of community

• We are open and interactive.
• We respect ourselves and each other.
• We share our knowledge.

Arctic Center (from the website)

INDEPENDENT – We conduct independent and critical research and science communication.

RESPONSIBLE – We advance sustainability in society through our own activities. Our work is socially and environmentally responsible.

INCLUSIVE – We maintain a supportive, fair, creative, and transparent working community and have constant interaction between our different functions.

RELIABLE – We are a committed and reliable collaboration partner, in constructive dialogue with our partners and stakeholders.

MULTICULTURAL – We are an international work community with local, national, and global networks.

As you can see above both LAPIN AMK and ARCTICE CENTER have stated their values and I pretty much agree to all of these. Earlier I have talked about Trust. So, again I will point out that as a teacher trust is something that I value a lot. Creating trust in the classroom is always in my mind. I also want my students to have open-mind and ready to learn from each other.

I am sure the university of Lapland also have same values as these other institutes. I think that because it is a university, so the focus is mostly on conducting research. I know that the university lack in teachers. All my master’s degree courses were taught to me by researchers. So, if I can point out one value of this university than that will be to focus on research. This is the value for the university and its employees. For students I do not think that they have set any values other than setting course goals for each course. The ironic part here is we teach students to become teachers and this university produces primary school teachers in abundance but never hire an actual full-time teacher whose priority is to teach full time.

So, when I was teaching, I had my own set of values. I wanted to finish the course without any blunders on m end. I wanted students to learn and practice course objectives. I wanted at the end to see if the students have managed to obtain said objectives. All in all, I did see that my students showed significant improvement in obtaining said objectives. Now that the course has ended, I am satisfied with the results and I am happy that I worked hard during the course and I achieved my goals. I took responsibility of the course. I taught responsibly. I listened to the feedback from the students as well as from the supervising teacher. I acted accordingly. I changed my plans according to the feedback.

Finally, I think that I am only as good as my weakest student. I remember this statement all the time while I am teaching. So, I want to be good I need to train my students to be better than me.

Reference

Davis, M. (2002). Ethics and the University. Routledge.

Marcuse, P. (1976). Professional ethics and beyond: values in planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 42(3), 264-274.

Strain, J., Barnett, R., & Jarvis, P. (Eds.). (2009). Universities, ethics and professions: Debate and scrutiny. Routledge.

Wachs, M. (2017). Ethics in planning. Routledge.