The Study of Constructing the Code of Ethics of Teaching for Elementary School Teachers

[[abstract]]Teaching is an action of morality. The ethics of teaching is the core of the teaching frame in the scene of education practice. Teachers need to be aware of the ethical aspects of their behaviors while teaching and teach morally. During recent years, the conflicts between teachers and students became more frequent and the events of hurting students physically as well as psychologically also happened frequently. These phenomena revealed that teachers were lacking in the cognition and practice of the ethics of teaching. This study aimed at constructing a code for elementary school teachers to apply the ethics of teaching to practice, hoping it might help and provide guidance for them. Based on the aim, this study intended to reach five goals: first, to discuss the ethical issues and dilemmas with which elementary school teachers are confronted in the teaching scene; secondly, to understand the process of ethical decision making when teachers are confronted with ethical issues or dilemmas; thirdly, to construct an ethical code for teachers to follow while teaching; fourthly, to discuss the practical feasibility of the code from the practitioners’ viewpoints; fifthly, to offer conclusions and recommendations to practitioners, educational institutes or professional organizations for their reference. To achieve these five goals, this study collected data by means of the interview method, Delphi technique and focus group interview. According to the research outcome, this study came to the following conclusions: 1.The issues of the ethics of teaching which teachers were commonly confronted with included improper punishment, equal treatment, privacy, grading, setting a good example, safe environment, knowledge instructing, honesty, benefit conflict, education neutrality, and the right of receiving instruction. Among these, the right of privacy was often being ignored. 2.The probable factors of dilemmas of the ethics of teaching were derived from the significant third persons beyond the relationship of teachers and students, and the ambiguousness of teachers’ duty and service scope. 3.The procedure of teachers’ ethical decision making contained two forms: one was intuitional decision making; the other was non-intuitional decision making which included problem confirmation, deciding and then acting, reflecting and evaluating, and action modifying. 4.The nine principles teachers adopted while making ethical decision were fairness, patience, equal treatment, consequences of behaviors, the goodness of human nature, harmlessness, kindness, love, immediate prevention and caring. 5.The major factors which influenced teachers’ ethical decision making were parents’ different way of nurturing, reproduction of the previous experience of being a young student, the inspirations from readings, the responses of students, the shock of how easily students mimic teachers’ behaviors, the supports and advice from colleagues, the pressure of being an inexperienced new teacher, the conceptions of parents, the teaching experiences, the impact from important events, empathy of being a parent, and the status of marriage. 6.The construction process of the code of the ethics of teaching was, first, based on documents of ethical issues of teaching plus the practical exercises which formed the initial questionnaire of the code; then through the process of Delphi technique and focus group interview; finally, finishing the construction of the ethical code. 7.The content of the ethical code in this study had three parts: preface, regulations and illustrations. There are fifteen regulations which had six dimensions including punishment and due process, equal treatment, relationship of teachers and students, respecting students’ privacy, students’ right of receiving instruction and the democratic process inside classrooms. 8.Teachers had positive and active identification toward the code of the ethics of teaching. The following six functions of the code gave the reason: restricting and reminding, modifying teaching behaviors, judging the teaching, resolving the dilemmas of the ethics of teaching, discovering and correcting the unintentional mistakes, creating the relationship of caring between teachers and students. 9.The viewpoints and opinions of teachers toward the application and practice of the ethical code included four categories: cognition reinforcement, practical exercising, professional community restriction and teacher education.