Week 29 Influence of Laws and Ethics on professional practice

Week 29 Influence of Laws and Ethics

The Education Council Code of Ethics for Certficated Teachers 

The professional interactions of teachers are governed by four fundamental principles:

• Autonomy to treat people with rights that are to be honoured and defended
• Justice to share power and prevent the abuse of power
• Responsible care to do good and minimise harm to others
• Truth to be honest with others and self.

The NZ teachers council has a site about teachers and social media

'Social media can be an effective tool for engaging with learners and communicating with parents, whānau and communities. Teachers who model good social media use will grow learners who apply positive, respectful values in their interactions on social media platforms.'

As teachers we use social media in our personal lives as will as within a school context. We need to watch what we put on and what we share with our students. 

• Explain the dilemma and discuss either: an actual situation that you have knowledge of, and how it was resolved.

I work in a school that is fully digital. We have rules and expectations in place for our students when using the internet. The students also sign an internet agreement and know the consequences for breaking the rules.

At school I have a  year 5/6 girls only class. A while a go I had a parent come to me to inform me that another child had been sending mean messages through animal jam, which is an online game. This is not a program that we have approved  during school time and this incident occurred out of school hours. I informed the parent that I would go  over how we behave on the internet and what had happened was not appropriate. All had been good for sometime. then a couple of weeks ago at night an email popped up from one of my students saying 'mean'. I opened the email to find a google doc which had screen shots of emails that had been sent to this child. As we have the haarapa teacher dashboard I could open this up and see if the child had been doing this. I opened her emails and saw the sent emails. I contacted the child's parents to arrange a meeting the following day. At this meeting I first talked to them about what had happened and showed them the emails. We also looked at the child's history and could see she had been on the emails during this time. The parents did confirm she was on her computer at this time but thought she was on minecraft. When we asked the child about it she said she had not sent any emails to another child and would not send anything so mean to another child. We showed her the emails that were sent from her email and her history. She still said it was not her. As a consequence at school she had a reflection and also had to write an apology letter to the other child. At home her parents have stopped her from using her computer at home and it has to stay at school. If students do this during school time or are on sites that we have not approved we take their computers off them for a certain length of time. We did not this time as this incident had happened out of school hours. I also contacted the other child's parents to inform them of what we had happened and what we had done. 

In class we once again went over our school internet guidelines and discussed about keeping safe on the internet. 

Even though these incidents happened out side of school hours they still happened using a school account. I feel we dealt with the incident well

Class notes

Ethics are learned behaviours shaped by a range of societal influences such as school, work, community, family, church, the arts, culture and sports. Our individual interpretation of ethics helps shape our ideas about justice, morality and virtue.

Ethics are not a single topic you can study in isolation but are a foundation upon which you live and practice. Everything you do, every decision you make, has ethics at its core, driving or motivating your actions and decisions.