Ethics and the Good Teacher

Character in the Professional Domain

Andrew Peterson, James Arthur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367335885
• eBook ISBN: 9781000091656
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Ethics and the Good Teacher brings together reviews of existing literature and analysis of empirical data from three research projects conducted by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues – The Good Teacher, Schools of Virtue and Teacher Education – to explore the ethical dimensions of the teaching profession.

The book is premised on the idea that what constitutes a "good" teacher involves more than technical skills and subject knowledge. Understood as a professional activity, teaching involves an important ethical dimension, a fact that has come under increased scrutiny – and some would argue increased threat – over recent years as education and schooling have become shaped by market logic and accountability.

Addressing the influence of personal and professional character on teachers and teaching, and containing clear implications for policy, practice and research, this book will be of great interest to teachers and other professionals working in education settings, as well as those working in educational policy. It will also appeal to academics, undergraduate students and postgraduate students researching the teaching profession and ethics/morality in education more generally.

1 The professions and character

Introduction

Whether inspired by a desire to justify an occupation’s status as a profession (teaching and social work, for example) or by the need to re-assert precisely what lies at the heart of a long-standing profession in the wake of public concerns about standards (nursing and law, for example), the related questions of what constitutes a profession and what constitutes professional practice have received a great deal of attention over recent years. A core concern within this literature on the professions has been to highlight and seek to understand the ethical basis of professions, whether generally or specifically. Professions are deemed inherently ethical occupations because, and more so than other occupations, they place high moral demands on the conduct of workers. Indeed, these ethical and moral demands – which include care, integrity, fairness and diligence – are often viewed as the defining feature of many professions, including medicine, law and teaching, reminding us that professions are ultimately concerned with human actions and interactions. Aslo, and as Oakley and Cocking (2001) assert, the focus of professional work is typically the provision of goods – such as health, education and justice – that are fundamental to flourishing individuals and societies. Yet, and as various professional ‘scandals’ over the last 20 years have evidenced, every profession – and by extension professional – faces ethical challenges and dilemmas. Indeed, the very ethical nature of the professions entails that public mistrust and criticism results when conduct falls below expected or stated standards (Blond, Antonacopoulou and Pabst, 2015).

In order to examine the ethical nature of professions and the ethical dilemmas experienced by professionals, since its inception the Jubilee Centre has undertaken a number of empirical studies examining character, virtues and the professions. Some of these studies have concentrated on the professions generally (Arthur et al., 2019a), while others have focused in on specific professions: law (Arthur et al., 2014), medical practice (Arthur et al., 2015b), education (Arthur et al., 2015a), business (Kristjánsson et al., 2017a), nursing (Kristjánsson et al., 2017b) and the British Army (Arthur et al., 2018b). More recently, through its project Practical Wisdom and Professional Practice: Integration and Intervention, the Centre is building on this research within these professions to examine particular commonalities and differences across professions and professionals (Arthur et al., 2019a).

The purpose of this first chapter is to provide an initial survey of the existing literature on the professions. The first section considers briefly what constitutes a profession in general terms, before turning to the more specific ethical dimensions of professional activity. It does so in light of the now widespread trend towards managerialism, accountability and efficiency that has been witnessed across professions in a number of countries over the last 30 years. In the second section, attention moves to consider the value of a virtue-based account of professional ethics. In this section we draw on the Jubilee Centre’s neo-Aristotelian approach to virtues and character in order to argue that professional ethics not only involves, but also transcends, reliance on rules and duties, thereby requiring professionals to act with professional wisdom and judgement.

What constitutes a profession?

While definitions of what constitutes a profession abound, certain features seem to be generally, if not universally, accepted (see, for example, Carr, 1999). These are that:

• A profession is a paid occupation;
• A profession requires formal qualifications, a high level of education and a prolonged period of training/induction;
• A professional possesses high level theoretical and practical expertise in a given discipline;
• A profession provides a public service;
• A profession is, and professionals are, held in high esteem within society;
• A professional acts with integrity, care, honesty and trust, exhibiting a level of professional autonomy and judgement;
• Professional ethics is guided by a code of conduct specific to that profession.

The Australian Council of Professions,¹ which captures each of the features above, define a ‘Profession’ as:

a disciplined group of individuals who adhere to ethical standards and who hold themselves out as, and are accepted by the public as possessing special knowledge and skills in a widely recognised body of learning derived from research, education and training at a high level, and who are prepared to apply this knowledge and exercise these skills in the interest of others.

It is inherent in the definition of a Profession that a code of ethics governs the activities of each Profession. Such codes require behaviour and practice beyond the personal moral obligations of an individual. They define and demand high standards of behaviour in respect to the services provided to the public and in dealing with professional colleagues. Further, these codes are enforced by the Profession and are acknowledged and accepted by the community.

In the UK, various professions make clear the centrality of the ‘ethical’ to the nature of the profession. For example, in its Code of Ethics,² the British Association of Social Workers asserts that:

Ethical awareness is fundamental to the professional practice of social workers. Their ability and commitment to act ethically is an essential aspect of the quality of the service offered to those who engage with social workers. Respect for human rights and a commitment to promoting social justice are at the core of social work practice throughout the world.

The Law Society of England and Wales³ makes clear that

• The commitment to behaving ethically is at the heart of what it means to be a solicitor.
• Ethics is based on the principles of:
  • serving the interests of consumers of legal services
  • acting in the interests of justice acting with integrity and honesty according to widely recognised moral principles
• Ethics will help you respond in the right way to any moral dilemmas you might face at work.

Many more codes of conduct from other professions that similarly locate ethical conduct as fundamental to the profession could be cited. However, despite these reasonably well established and understood definitions, how best the ethical should be formulated conceptually and can be implemented practically remains both disputed and challenging. Clearly, ideas about what constitutes the ‘good’ professional transcend core technical abilities and encompass notions of judgement, wisdom and care. Questions remain about the extent to which particular cultures, discourses and practices can put pressure on how professionals, particularly those working in the public sector, can act with (or indeed without) ethics and integrity (see, for example, Furlong et al. 2017). Indeed, various studies evidence the impact (whether positive or negative) of workplace conditions on professionals’ ability to exhibit ethical conduct (see, for example, Oakley and Cocking, 2001; RPS, 2011; OfSTED, 2019a; Worth and Van Den Brande, 2019).

Discussions about the meaning and nature of ethical professional conduct and the effect of cultures, discourses and workplace practices typically concentrate around two particular considerations. The first is the impact, widely cited and critiqued in current literature on ethics and the professions, of the increased forms of managerialism and instrumentalism that are viewed as acting to detract from the ethical and societal role of professionals. According to critics, the turn to managerialism across and within the professions has led not to a renewed form of professionalism but to processes of de- and re-professionalisation through which the goals of general accountability (to service-users and to government) and efficiency have actively worked against professional autonomy and judgement (Holbeche and Springett, 2004; Carr, 2011; Dixon-Woods, Yeung and Bosk, 2011). The second consideration is the extent to which professions, such as nursing, teaching and social work, have come under increased public scrutiny and accountability in the wake of various ‘scandals’ (Seijts, Crossan and Carleton, 2017; Arthur et al., 2019a). Over the last 25 years in England, for example, high profile cases including the murder of Stephen Lawrence and resulting Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and Macpherson Report, the murder of Victoria Climbié, the death of Peter Connelly (also known as Baby P), the Mid Staffordshire hospital crisis, and the Rotherham Child Sexual Exploitation scandal have all raised serious questions about what were significant failures in professionals’ ethical judgement and conduct.

In the context of managerialism, accountability, efficiency, public scrutiny and increased workplace pressures, professions and professionals need to (re)envisage the ethical nature of their work. This (re)envisaging by necessity includes paying attention to what a profession aspires to be, what constitutes professional practice – whether generally or specifically for that profession – and how external factors shape the standing and work of professions today. In the next section, we start to examine these questions through a focus on a virtue-based approach to professional ethics. In doing so, we introduce key work in the field, particularly that which makes reference to the concept of professional phronesis.

A virtue-based approach to professional ethics

The last few decades have witnessed a groundswell of interest in virtue-based approaches to professional ethics. Though not the only variant of a virtue-ethical approach, the vast majority of this interest has drawn on Aristotelian roots, and this concerted interest in Aristotelian/neo-Aristotelian virtue has been applied across of a range of professional contexts, including accountancy (West, 2017), medicine (Pellegrino and Thomasma, 1993; Kotzee, Paton and Conroy, 2016), nursing (McKie et al., 2012), social work (Adam, 2009) and youth work (Bessant, 2009). In particular, two Aristotelian ideas have provoked significant interest among those concerned with professional ethics. The first is the idea that virtues represent ‘contextually appropriate traits… such as honesty, compassion and perseverance’ that contra rules ‘become habitually ingrained through deliberate and repetitive practice, predisposing practitioners to behave based on ethically sound habits’ (Arthur et al., 2019b: 2). The second idea – the main focus of this section – is the concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom (Pellegrino and Thomasma, 1993; Kinsella and Pitman, 2012; McKie et al., 2012). It is important to note, here, that while often cited, phronesis is not understood uniformly throughout the literature on professions (for a useful overview of phronesis in medical practice, see Kotzee, Paton and Conroy, 2016). Indeed, examining work on phronesis in professional medical ethics, Kristjánsson (2015b: 299) highlights the ‘considerable lack of clarity in the current discursive field on phronesis’

In line with its neo-Aristotelian philosophy, the Jubilee Centre advocates the following model of the Building Blocks of Professional Practice (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Building Blocks of Professional Practice. The Jubilee Centre’s A Framework for Character Education in Schools (2017) adapted to a professional domain. The model depicts the four domains of virtue and their conceptual relationship with practical wisdom and the purposeful professional practice.

In Figure 1.1, phronesis – or practical wisdom – is defined as ‘the over-arching meta-virtue, developed through experience and critical reflection, which enables a professional to perceive, know, desire and act with good sense. This includes discerning, deliberative action in situations where virtues collide’. In other words, professionals need a certain form of practical wisdom, or phronesis, which can be defined in the following way:

To practice with phronesis is to act with care, diligence and open-mindedness. To practice without phronesis would mean acting carelessly, indecis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The professions and character
• 2 Ethics and the teaching profession
• 3 Teachers and character education: motivations, roles and preparation
• 4 Teachers of character: personal and ideal character strengths and responses to ethical dilemmas
• Conclusion, recommendations and further research
• Appendices
• References
• Index