Teacher Leadership Standard 1 Reflection: Modeling ethical and moral behavior

Standard 1 Reflection: model ethical and moral behavior

Background

Modeling ethical and moral behavior is a necessity for teacher leaders if they wish to be credible and trusted.  I am a rule follower (first born) so I think this has come somewhat naturally. I also think that it is important.   As I also try to live by Jesus’ commandment, “Love your neighbor as you would like to be loved”.

As teachers we are asked to model ethical moral behavior toward  our students. One of the ways I do this is by treating each students as an individual and I try to resolve any problems between students and students, or students and myself by using ideas from Positive Behavior Interventions Systems (PBIS).  If needed, I will ask for help by bring administrators and parents into the discussion. Additionally, I try to focus on the behavior rather than the student. For example, when a student is rolling around in one of our chairs with wheels in the library, I will say, “Oh, I am sorry.  This chair appears to not remember that it not supposed to roll around the room, do you need a new chair or do you think you can train this one to behave in the library for me?” Students may think I am a bit crazy when I say this as they know the chair can not obey rules, but they get the point and it focuses on behavior, not on a student.  I also try be fair to students by having consistent rules and consequences in my classroom yet at the same time treating each student as an individual. Lastly, I keep information about students confidential except in those cases that the law requires me to report something.

We also need to model ethical and moral behavior toward our colleagues in order for students to see what good relationships look like.    I try to do this by listening to all stakeholders during meetings and supporting my colleagues as needed. When asked about decisions made by a team, I will tell them “After listening to all of the perspectives as a team we decided . . . .”.  If I am asked why, again I will start by saying “The team based this decision on . . . . .”. I will do this even if I voted against the decision. I believe that I am seen as a trustworthy person by staff members in our building and throughout our district.

Additionally, I model ethical and moral behavior with parents.  I send home emails to parents as necessary as well as a weekly newsletter at the end of the week to let parents know what we have been doing for the week as well to let them know what is coming up.  I also try to learn more and respect those who are culturally different than me. I also participate in community events and committees since I live in the community I work in.

Lastly, I  do my best and take pride in my work.   When I was a classroom teacher, I often would work late hours, meet with students after school, attend all IEP and 504 meetings.  I would also often work during the weekends to get grading accomplished in a timely matter and be prepared for the next day or week.  Even in my new position I work hard and I am willing to work extra hours if needed. Additionally, I continue to take advantage of opportunities to grow in this profession by attending and presenting at conferences aimed at educators and by asking for help from others as needed.

Learning and Applied Practice

For this standard most of my learning came from my Morals and Theology class.   In this class we read three books and responded to them. The first books was Religion in the Classroom.  In this book we were reminded about the separation of religion and state, as well as the “Lemon Test” which helps to know what we can and cannot discuss in our our classrooms in regard to religion.  It also reminded us that democratic education, religion and politics are intertwined, therefore

connected. One of things that stood out to me is that we all come from different cultures which includes a variety of religious backgrounds, so we need to be willing to look at things from a variety of perspectives in order to be able to understand and respect one another.  The second books we read, The Charged Classroom reminded us that we should have high expectations of students and be focused on discussions of provocative topics by students, and meets the curricular demands while still nurturing our students.  We also need to balance the conflicting curriculum demands that we face everyday as we are asked to “cover the curriculum, raise test scores, and investigate complex topics, while maintaining classroom order and engaging individual students” (Pace, 2015, pg. 69).  Our last book, Way of Love,  discussed how the understandings of creation, fall, redemption, and heaven are all Christian beliefs, but they are interpreted differently among the denominations which causes division in our world    It talked about we need to support each other and focus on our commonalities instead of our differences. Lastly, while in this class I investigated and wrote about character education.  As I worked on this paper, I was reminded that we need to lead as example.

We also talked about modeling moral ethical behavior in my Leadership in Education class as we discussed what a good leader looks like and sounds like throughout the course, but particularly as we discussed and reflected on the book Leadership and Self-Deception and the concept of giving grace to others.

Issues Encountered/Problems of Practice Addressed

While I taking the  Moral and Theological Issues in Education class I was still in the classroom teaching ancient civilizations.  One of our concerns we had with the curriculum we adopted was how much it talked about the different religions and were concerned how our dominantly Christian community would react to it.   But, I as I went through the class I was reminded that we need to introduce our students to other world religions and their beliefs as well as their influence on politics so they can broaden their knowledge and deepen their understanding of the world around them in order to discuss issues with respect toward others which we find in “democratic education”.

One implication of charged classrooms for teachers is the need to keep a balance of high expectations with the attention to nurturing students.  This balance is really hard to keep as the pendulum has shifted from using a bell curve when it was expected that you would have the same number of F’s as A’s and most students would be in the middle.  But, now we expect all students to get A’s and B’s and we as teachers are failures if our students get D’s and F’s. With this philosophy, not only do we need to have the high standards, but we also need to provide scaffolding for our students in order to  get them to those high standards. The question is how much scaffolding should we provide. I know we deal with this frequently, not only in our social studies department, but across curriculum and we often ask ourselves “How much help is too much help and lowers the expectations?”

The next implication of a “charged classroom” is to have thought provoking discussions in your classroom to engage and deepen the knowledge our students have of our subject, yet as a teacher you need to maintain order in your classroom.  Again, this is difficult to balance. We want it to be student centered, yet still on the topic of the curriculum we are teaching. Therefore, we need to prepare our students by giving them background knowledge and choose questions that don’t have right or wrong answer.  It is often hard for us to find those questions. In addition teachers are concerned about losing control of their classroom.

How Modeling Ethical and Moral Behavior is Supported  by Research

By modeling ethical and moral behavior ourselves we are providing a place where student and staff feel safe, an environment where excellence, respect, responsibility and acceptance of others are the norm.  As a result schools that do promote this have found that academic scores and attendance have increased while disciplinary issues have decreased.

Overall Impact

As a teacher I have always tried to focus on the positive that happens in my classroom as I have found that not only does it cause my students to do their best for me, but it makes me a happy and energizes me.  In my new position, as our Future Ready Librarian , it is my job to support both staff and students. The best part of my job is that I get to ask “How can I help you?” which shows others that they are more important than me and keeps me out of the box of self-deception.  They feel valued as a result they value my role and abilities.

As I went through my master’s program, I was also reminded that as a teacher we need to remember that our students’ knowledge about religion can come from several sources, so as teachers we need to provide opportunities to asking more questions and digging deeper to find out where our student’s beliefs around topics come from so that we can foster “democratic education” in our classroom where students are able to learn about themselves others similarities and differences.

One of things I had been doing in my classes for a few years was Socratic Seminars.   I think they are great way to make students look at things from different perspectives. As a result of doing these I have taught others how do set up and run Socratic Seminars. This year in my position I have been setting up websites with resources for students to use to prepare them for Socratic Seminars in both science and social studies to help teachers create these experiences in their rooms.

Additionally, I have also been reminded how important it is to explicitly teach our expectations for our classroom as well as for any activities we have students participate in our classrooms so we can provide them a safe, nurturing place. We also need to look ahead at our lesson plans and look at places we can build in scaffolding to help all of our students to be successful and meet our high expectations.  This summer I will be looking over curriculum that we use for our STudents REaching Toward new Challenges (STRETCH) and will be looking for places where we can be putting in additional scaffolding and teaching strategies to improve those lessons.

References

James, J. H., Schweber, S., Kunzman, R., Barton, K. C., & Logan, K. (2015). Religion in the classroom: Dilemmas for democratic education. New York: Routledge.

Leadership and self-deception. (2018). Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Pace, J. L. (2015). The charged classroom: Predicaments and possibilities for democratic teaching. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Sharkey, C. (n.d.). Association of American Educators. Retrieved from
https://www.aaeteachers.org/index.php/about-us/aae-code-of-ethics

Wirzba, N. (2016). Way of love: Recovering the heart of Christianity. New York, NY: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins.