Abstract

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.