Influence of Law and Ethics in Practice

For this week’s activity – exploring an ethical dilemma, I plan to use Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model to reflect on a situation that occurred a year or so ago at our school and to make some decisions in order to be prepared for similar situations, in the future.

What?

Last year, my relieving teacher had set up buddy sessions between our class and the class she teaches in at the other local school. During one of these sessions, the children were able to share any work they wished to with their buddy.  One student (Student A) shared his google document with his buddy (Student B) from the other school, giving him editing rights.

Later that afternoon, I received an email from google to inform me that Student B  had edited the document, giving his full name. This had occurred after the class had returned to their school.

As the name on the google email was unfamiliar to me, I opened the document to discover a swear word written across the work of Student A. I took screenshots, checked the revision history to establish when this had happened and then deleted the comments, before Student A could read them.

So what?

Most of my actions were based on a duty of care for the student of my classroom, for my colleagues at another school and on my professional responsibility in the area of digital citizenship and device use.

Our school has a clear code of conduct in which we need to act.

“The board supports the right of the school to check communication technology related work or data of staff or students at any time, and to carry out a comprehensive investigation of any breaches of the school’s cyber safety procedures. Such breaches will be taken seriously.” (2017)

It was important that I let the other school, teachers and principal know what had occurred and shared the evidence I had with them. I also informed our own principal. This all became important as Student B refused to acknowledge that he had done anything that violated device use.

It is important in these situations that staff are empowered with the ability of how to gather more information on breaches of our code of conduct. They need to, as part of their professional ethics be able to base their actions on a duty of care for students, colleagues and themselves.   

Now what?

After reflecting on this issue and using Rolfe et al.’s model, I think that as a  leader of our school and the teacher in charge of digital technology, I need to inform and guide my teachers on what to do in regards to breaches in cyber safety and digital citizenship. These need to be clearly unpacked and talked through with teachers so that they can do so with students, and some clear guidelines in particular situations needs to be established to go alongside our code of conduct.

With students, as part of our initial classroom expectations, we need to unpack a range of  situations and establish what expectations would be of a number of scenarios.  

I also know we need to be clear about the reasons why we share documents with others, and even if our students are not being taught how to do this for collaborative purposes, teachers need to be aware that they will be doing it anyway.

Ehrich, L. C. , Kimber M., Millwater, J. & Cranston, N. (2011). Ethical dilemmas: a model to understand teacher practice, Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 17:2, 173-185, DOI: 10.1080/13540602.2011.539794

Goldfields Board of Trustees (2017)  Code of Conduct Cybersafety . Internal school document

University of Cumbria, A. Liason, (2016) Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model - https://my.cumbria.ac.uk/media/MyCumbria/Documents/ReflectiveModelRolfe.pdf