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Introduction
Many incidents in schools present ethical dilemmas for educators. For example, a colleague of a fifth grade teacher overhears that teacher's students' talking about how they received inappropriate assistance from the teacher on an end-of-year standardized test. Should she report her colleague, confront her, or ignore what she overheard?
Perhaps a school board member wants his child placed with a particularly well-respected teacher in an already crowded classroom. Should the classroom teacher acquiesce and give preference to the child if she knows that the principal is under pressure from that powerful parent? Or, let's say, the class clown does not listen to instructions, and his teacher, in frustration, constructs a strategy to embarrass him in front of the class. Such examples are not unusual and may occur at any school. Responses to such incidents deserve consideration. What should be the teacher's professional duty toward her students and their parents? How do teachers come to be aware of their professional obligations?
Ethically charged situations such as these are rarely discussed openly in professional group settings such as teacher meetings. Although teachers may complain or gossip privately about pushy parents, unruly students, or perceived injustices in their school environment, public air- ings of professionally ethical concerns rarely find their way into teacher preparation programs, school faculty meetings, or inservice development sessions. Nevertheless, such issues cry out for discussion and deserve to be addressed head-on.
One common dilemma faced by many teachers, and probably the most frequent ethical dilemma in any workplace, is the problem of balancing professional obligations with private, family matters. Consider the predica- ment of Callie Smith, a third-year teacher with a second grade class.
Callie Smith was a newly tenured, pregnant teacher with a troubled marriage. She was, however, determined to keep her family relationship intact and left school at 3:30 p.m. each day to spend as much time as possible with her unemployed husband and their three-year old son.
It was generally possible for Callie to leave at this time because her class was composed mainly of cooperative and attentive seven-year-old children. But Sarah was an exception.
Sarah was not disruptive, but she was inattentive and slow in getting her work done. She had difficulty writing and misspelled more words than...