University and school preparation of new teachers should include work on the ethical and policy quandries of professional work. As it is, teacher education institutions too rarely tackle questions of protocol, ethics, policy, principles, and procedures. Professors may discuss matters of protocol, especially ethical conflicts arising from school and university practices and routines. But they rarely give in-depth treatment to ethics and policy in the teaching life. Moreover, treatment of these matters is often sparse in ethical theory or in reasoned (...) analyses of protocol and policies. This leaves the new teacher without initiation into centrally important elements of teaching. The appropriate treatment of protocol, ethical, and policy matters in education programs warrants a separate course of instruction. Here, students would be encouraged to improve their ethical reasoning and to learn ethical theory. They would learn various ways to assess protocol and policy problems likely to arise in classrooms and schools. Minimally, teacher education professors should draw attention to important protocol, ethical, and policy aspects of course content and do so in vigorous, educationally sound ways. In this article, I show how my treatment of protocol, ethics, and policies would apply more widely in general postsecondary education. (shrink)

Authors deal with theoretical and social contexts of the teaching profession as a starting point for empirical research into ethical relationships among Slovak primary and secondary school teachers. They surveyed the opinions of teachers at that level regarding their relationship with students, parents, colleagues and superiors. According to the research results, more than 80% of respondents positively rate the behaviour of teachers towards their students and parents from the viewpoint of realising ethical values, based on which they could be an (...) ethical model for their students. The level of relationships among colleagues received a less optimistic rating. They were, however, much more critical in evaluating their superiors. Only approximately 60% of the members of school management could be an ethical model for other teachers. (shrink)