The Moral Anxiety of Education
How to manage an ethical dilemma without losing your identity.
Originally published May 12th, 2021 (Blogger)
Consider this fictional teacher dilemma. “Mr. Green” is a first-year English teacher at “Newbrook SS”. The school has a great reputation and the students are excellent, although the “helicopter parenting” is annoying.
Mr. Green is enjoying his first experience teaching — except for one particular student. “James” is annoying. Very annoying. He doesn’t do his work; he talks constantly, distracting other students; he randomly leaves the class or wanders around; he pays no attention in class. Mr. Green does his research and learns that James takes Ritalin for ADHD, but only after English class. Why? He likes his other classes. He doesn’t like English. Mr. Green calls James’ mom and, lo and behold, she agrees with her son. English is boring, he doesn’t need it, and his other courses are more important. James can wander around as much as he likes.
Despite Mr. Green’s efforts, James is failing English. His mother doesn’t seem to care, until one day Mr. Green is called into an emergency meeting with James’ mother, other teachers, and the principal of Newbrook SS, “Ms. Carpenter”. Everyone is extremely concerned. It seems that James has been hospitalized due to an episode of self-harm. He’ll be coming back to school next week but can’t handle the stress — so Ms. Carpenter wants all of James’ teachers to waive any remaining work and give him a passing grade.
The other teachers have no problem with this; James was doing well in their courses and would pass anyway. Mr. Green, however, has a problem. He would have to make up an additional 30% out of nothing. James wouldn’t be ready for next year’s English course. Passing him would send a message to the other students that dangerous behaviour gets you free marks, and that this English course doesn’t matter.
Yet how can Mr. Green refuse? If James failed, would he hurt himself again? As a first-year teacher, can he really afford to go against what his principal tells him to do? Mr. Green’s moral compass is spinning wildly.
What should Mr. Green do? What would you do?
Building a Mental Map
Educators are faced with moral dilemmas like these far too often in their careers. Researchers call these critical incidents — make-or-break moments that can define your career. Handled properly, they lead to professional growth; handled poorly, they can permanently stunt you as you keep making the same wrong decisions over and over again.
It’s impossible to tackle each ethical dilemma from a blank slate. We need a cognitive shorthand to rely on, a moral map we can call up to guide our decision making. This is a schema, a “conceptual cluster we create to help organize environmental information”. A well-developed moral schema is a shortcut to understanding the world around us. It’s a “conceptual tool or weapon” that helps us make difficult decisions based on what we already know, instead of starting from scratch each time.
Moral Anxiety
Swedish behavioural scientist Gunnel Colenrud researched the stress teachers face when making difficult ethical decisions. Many times a teacher will know the “right” thing to do, but has to weigh that against their own morals, the standards of the school, and the high moral standard society expects of educators. When these don’t line up — which they rarely, if ever, do — it leads to a “moral anxiety” that cripples effective decision-making.
It’s impossible to tackle each ethical dilemma from a blank slate. We need a cognitive shorthand to rely on, a moral map we can call up to guide our decision making.
Unlike other professions, teachers are distinctly “ethically sensitive”. When their students feel bad, they feel bad. Teachers have to juggle equality, merit, need, and equity; these do not always play nicely together. This balancing act is applied to not only assessment and evaluation, but personal interactions with colleagues, administrators, and students. It’s a messy calculus of care that has few, if any, clear avenues for solving ethically murky problems.
Colenrud’s research shows that teachers cannot rely on external principles to guide their decision making. They have to create their own schemas to deal with tricky moral issues.
Great. So…how?
Creating An Ethical Identity
Broadly speaking, a teacher’s career can be subdivided into three categories of concern:
- Preteaching — The teacher has a schema similar to a student; moral specificity isn’t important
- Early Teaching — The teacher’s identity is based on their own performance
- Late Teaching — The teacher’s identity is based on their students’ performance
As “Mr. Green” is in the early teaching stage of his career, his schema will be based around the ethics of his own personal performance.
Now that we know where to start, how do we build a schema? We need to build our identity as a teacher. This is much more than just “I’m a Biology teacher” or “I wear funny socks on Friday”. This is about understanding your limits and navigating a space between them.
John Caughey, from the University of Maryland, outlines a four-point dialectic that teachers have to navigate. My crude representation is below:
Feared Identity (ex: Failure) — — — — — Idealized Identity (ex: Perfection)
Personal Identity (ex: Son) — — — — —Social Identity (ex: Teacher)
Who “Mr. Green” believes he is — where he puts himself on this continuum — will define his critical schema, and thus his solution to the ethical dilemma he finds himself in.
Bend The Rules, Not Your Values
The crux of this quandary is whether or not James will pass the course. Most ethical dilemmas in education are based around marking, assessment, and evaluation — this is “not surprising, given the current climate characterized by increasing accountability, high-stakes testing and pressure to improve student learning scores”. Failure to properly navigate these dilemmas results in “grade pollution”, marked by purposely misrepresenting the students’ mastery of the assessed material.
This is about understanding your limits and navigating a space between them.
Now that Mr. Green has developed his identity, and thus his critical schema, how should he move forward to avoid “grade pollution” ? The solution, based in an Australian research study, lies in several levels of interconnected ethical decision-making:
- First, Mr. Green must apply his own schema to the problem. What are his personal values and morals? With no restrictions, what would he do?
- Next, he must recognize the morality of the organization (the school). Where do its morals and his align? Where do they conflict?
- Mr. Green must now work to find a solution that appeases both his own schema and that of the school. He has to compromise.
- In this solution, Mr. Green must acknowledge that the results will have impacts on both himself and the organization, and must consider those ramifications.
- The solution will also impact the ability of Mr. Green to make future decisions — his relationship with the student, and the school, have to be considered.
While this will likely not totally satisfy everyone, it will still work towards the common goal of student success while maintaining intact values for all parties.
So after all this, what should Mr. Green actually do? One possibility is that he gives a modified assignment to James, which he could use to justify the mark increase.
That’s it. Pretty simple, right? Ultimately the question isn’t, “How do I pass this student?”, but “How do I do this without violating my personal values?” We can bend the rules as much as we want; it’s not getting bent along with them that is the struggle. Having a strong teacher identity and moral schema will allow teachers to make difficult moral decisions with more clarity, less anxiety, and better results.
Mario Mabrucco is a educator with almost 20 years experience teaching literacy, arts, and social sciences to youth in Canada, Greece, France, Italy, and Monaco. He has a M.Ed in Curriculum and Education Policy from the University of Toronto, and designs curriculum for the National Film Board of Canada. Read more of Mario’s work on Medium or follow him on Twitter: @mr_mabruc
