Journal of Moral Education

ISSN: 0305-7240 (Print) 1465-3877 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjme20

Ethical dilemmas in education: standing up for

honesty and integrity

Laura Rogers & Nancy Faust Sizer

To cite this article: Laura Rogers & Nancy Faust Sizer (2010) Ethical dilemmas in education:
standing up for honesty and integrity, Journal of Moral Education, 39:2, 243-248, DOI:
10.1080/03057241003755093

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057241003755093

Published online: 26 Apr 2010.

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 Book reviews 243

This is a well-intentioned and provocative book, allegedly rooted in the ‘moisture

and grit of human psychology’ (p. 223). Yet it is also a dry, wordy and humourless
book, blissfully uncritical of the situationist findings presented; completely blind to
any indications that moral upbringing and the development of individual moral char-
acter have some role to play in moral and political action. The best way to sum it up
is perhaps by pointing out one word that is completely missing from the author’s
vocabulary: phronesis.

Kristján Kristjánsson, School of Education, University of Iceland, Stakkahlíð,

IS-105 Reykjavík, Iceland. Email: kk9@hi.is

© 2010, Kristján Kristjánsson

DOI: 10.1080/03057241003755077

Ethical dilemmas in education: standing up for honesty and integrity

Beverley H. Johns, Mary Z. McGrath and Sarup R. Mathur, 2008
Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield
$29.95 (pbk), 210 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-157-88-6783-7

Ethical educational leadership in turbulent times: (re)solving moral

dilemmas
Joan Poliner Shapiro and Steven Jay Gross, 2008
New York, NY, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
$37.76 (pbk), 224 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-080-58-5600-2
$70.00 (cloth), 224 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57886-782-0

Ethics in the classroom: bridging the gap between theory and practice
Dan Mahoney, 2008
Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield
$27.95 (pbk), 168 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-157-88-6768-4
$70.00 (cloth), 224 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57886-767-7

Three recently published books address the ethical demands and decisions faced by
adults in schools and offer guidance on how to make better ethical decisions. The
books are designed for use in courses on ethics in professional development
244 Book reviews

programs. They are all committed to the core ethical principle of helping children
without doing harm and each provides case studies from a wide range of school
experiences. But their analyses of the sources of ethical and moral ambiguity differ
markedly and therefore the guidance they believe educators require to navigate such
dilemmas differs as well.

Ethical dilemmas in education. ‘Every day the authors are surprised at the violations
of ethics that are seen in the educational world—conflicts of interest, engaging in
inappropriate behaviour to get ahead, using school equipment inappropriately.’ So
Johns, McGrath and Mathur describe their view of the sorry state of ethical decision-
making by educators and they draw their case studies from just such ethical
violations. They begin Ethical dilemmas in education: standing up for honesty and
integrity with an example of blatant sexual harassment of a veteran teacher by her new
principal. The authors suggest that ‘we know the difference between right and wrong’
and that educators need only remember those differences, seek information and
choose to act in order to overcome the moral malaise that allows these violations to
go unchallenged. The authors seek to help educators by providing support for our
moral instincts in the form of this book.
Johns et al. first identify the factors that make it difficult for educators to maintain
the socially benevolent motives that brought them into schools. They argue that
teachers’ violations of good conduct result from a progressive moral failure that
causes them to become insensitive to or tolerant of low-level ethical violations. They
begin to feel they are doing what everyone else is doing, blaming others for their own
transgressions and fearing retaliation for confronting moral failure. The authors
provide a range of examples in which someone witnesses the violation of a school
norm, code or professional expectation by a colleague and they offer advice on why
and how to address such failings.
In these stories it is not difficult to discern what the right thing to do is—rather,
the challenge, they tell us, is in mobilising the courage and the will to confront
wrong-doers in the face of pressure to remain silent or even to collude. The authors’
moral stance is summarised in their succinct statement of how to create a better
ethical climate in our schools: ‘Rules without enforcement allow the ethical culture
to begin its slippage…’ (p. 9). Over and over the authors plead with educators to
monitor themselves in order to avoid the lapses of moral conduct that narrow self-
interest invites. However, the most interesting case examples are drawn from the
authors’ experiences in special education and in these cases the problems that
emerge are not simply a matter of poor judgement or the blatant ethical violations of
others. Instead, they are difficult to resolve because of circumstances beyond the
control of the participants—such as limited resources, conflicting needs and interests
and lack of adequate knowledge—circumstances that form the context of most
educational decisions.
After providing instruction on how to respond to the foibles of others, the authors
conclude with a list of questions for monitoring one’s own behaviour when faced
 Book reviews 245

with an ethical dilemma: ‘Can I look the parents of my students in the eye and say
this? Would this stand up in a court of law? Do my words describe my family and
co-workers with dignity? Do I have ways to address my anger and stress so I do not
harm my students, family and co-worker with my behaviour? Does this fit with
district policy? Would I want my own children to experience this lesson or have this
service? Is this really true? Do I conduct myself with the same integrity in all profes-
sional and personal arenas of my life? Do my values elevate and give dignity to
others?’ Interestingly, such questioning, rather than leading to the rule-conformity
that the authors advocate, can actually help educators appreciate the sometimes
hidden ethical dimensions of everyday decisions and actions.

Ethical educational leadership. Shapiro and Gross, unlike Johns et al., believe that
educators have difficulty making ethical decisions not because of a failure of courage
or will, but because value conflicts are an inevitable aspect of the complex communi-
ties we call schools. In Ethical educational leadership in turbulent times: (re)solving moral
dilemmas, they use case studies to describe these conflicts and to promote learning
and thinking about complex decision-making for school leaders.
The authors provide a theoretical introduction to the case studies, based on ideas
more fully developed in their earlier work on Multiple Ethical Paradigms (Shapiro &
Stetkovich, 2005) and Turbulence Theory (Gross, 2004). In proposing four distinct
ethical perspectives (justice, care, critique and professional ethics) the authors inevi-
tably simplify and draw contrasts that tend to obscure the overlapping concerns of
the theorists whose perspectives they describe. For example, they cite Kohlberg’s
statement that an orientation to justice relies on principles, not rules, to resolve
competing claims and interests; yet they go on to write that the justice perspective
primarily concerns rules and preserving authority (‘rights and laws’). Perhaps they
have found in their own teaching that such simplifications make it clearer to their
graduate students that different perspectives bring out different questions and issues
when we are making difficult ethical decisions. Nevertheless, their analysis presents
an erroneous picture of Kohlberg’s psychology and educational initiatives. (There are
also errors of biographical fact.) Kohlberg, like the authors, was committed to bring-
ing multiple, competing perspectives into moral decision-making as a stimulus to the
moral development of students and teachers and to improve the moral climate of the
school as a community. In fact, the essence of shared governance in Kohlberg’s just
community approach to schooling was to provide students and teachers alike with the
opportunity to voice their concerns, to express their interests and to balance their
perhaps competing perspectives and claims within explicit ethical decision-making
discourse. Presenting a ‘justice perspective’ as the perspective of laws and rights
diminishes rather than enhances the moral dimension. Furthermore, because the
‘critical perspective’ is, as the authors write, frequently rooted in a commitment to
social justice and to giving voice to the silenced, it thus overlaps with the ‘justice
perspective’. So the distinctions among ethical perspectives that they attempt to draw
are sometimes obscured by their similarities.
246 Book reviews

The authors then provide an introduction to Turbulence Theory, an approach

designed to describe the dynamic, cascading forces of emotional reactions and social
contexts that might support or resist efforts to reform or improve educational
practice. The authors view Turbulence Theory, and its metaphors, as providing the
‘emotional’ counterpoint to a ‘rational’ approach to ethical leadership as embodied
in their multiple ethical paradigms. The authors describe levels of turbulence in a
community as a whole, as well as the different ways that members of that community
might experience critical events.
The case studies that form the greater part of the book were written by graduate
students in ethics classes and are interesting, duly complex and richly detailed.
Several questions follow each vignette, providing a first step for exploring some of the
issues embedded in the dilemmas: what is the level of turbulence in the situation, how
might one respond to ambiguous situations or acknowledge competing claims
(individual student, school as a community, prevailing norms and expectations, etc)?
However, the questions are fairly predictable and it might have been more effective
to sequence and develop them so that the reader gained insight into just how the
authors would use multiple perspectives to enhance understanding of the subtle ethi-
cal dimensions of these dilemmas, especially the circumstances leading to them. As
it is, their questions leave the reader with the impression that ethics are simply relative
to the perspective adopted, and therefore in some sense arbitrary, and that managing
‘turbulence’ is the primary indicator of success in ethical decision-making.
The authors conclude by advocating a movement, New DEEL (Democratic
Ethical Educational Leadership), to encourage educators to focus on the ideals that
brought them into education in the first place. They argue that too often educational
leaders are encouraged to exercise control rather than to support democratic engage-
ment in the messy process of community building in their schools. Bringing these
tensions between control and democracy into their dilemmas would have been more
useful to the reader.
In Ethics in the classroom: bridging the gap between theory and practice, Dan Mahoney
writes that too little time is spent helping educators prepare for the troubling situa-
tions in which the greater good sought is difficult to define and conflicts of interest in
daily commitments to educating children well and equitably inevitably will arise. He
believes that learning to think about these troubling situations from a variety of
ethical perspectives can provide teachers with a new platform for discussing conflict
and for examining their own actions, both of which will lead to ‘enhanced ethical
decision making’.
Mahoney begins by providing synopses of seven approaches to ethical decision-
making in order to highlight the variability in thinking about what constitutes the good
and the right, the just and the benevolent, among other ideas that guide our thinking
and feeling about interpersonal dilemmas. ‘The purpose of this text on ethical deci-
sion-making is not to illustrate the difference between right and wrong, but to show
how teachers might choose among ethical approaches to decision making as they face
difficult choices they must make every day’ (p. 1). However, a breezy five-page
summation of the complex assumptions and arguments of the philosophers Mahoney
 Book reviews 247

enlists (Plato, Hume, Kant, Mill, Ayn Rand, Gandhi and Downie and Telfer) inevi-
tably fails to satisfy the reader who shares the author’s view that there will be no easy
answers to difficult problems. While Mahoney’s goal is to help the reader understand
that it is possible to take different perspectives on the dilemmas we face in schools,
and that doing so will help us draw out the complex ethical dimensions of such dilem-
mas, his summaries, particularly the sections on the philosophers’ imagined responses
to the case studies, are marred by over-simplifications and imagined admonitions.
After presenting the philosophical approaches, Mahoney provides a synopsis of
Bowen’s Family Systems Theory approach to understanding emotional arousal and
entanglement as a basis for analysing decision making under duress. The most
successful parts of Mahoney’s book are the stories between Chapter 10 and 25. Using
the philosophical perspectives and classroom observations of the earlier chapters, he
presents believable, complex and deep dilemmas, each centring on a professional
fulfilling a role in school. The core of each story is in his or her reactions: like the
other authors, Mahoney acknowledges the emotional responses we are likely to have
when facing difficult and confusing situations, but he does not stop there. Instead he
goes on to more rational responses and, finally, even an action plan. Each one of these
steps makes excellent use of the details presented earlier, reinforcing the idea that
none of this work is simple, but that, slowly and carefully, it can be done.
Mahoney provides guiding questions that open up the dilemmas he describes. In
this way the competing perspectives of the parties involved and of various concep-
tions of fairness and welfare are made accessible to the reader. He also examines the
ethical contexts of the dilemmas; very often the most difficult situations faced by
educators require a new analysis of the circumstances giving rise to the problems with
students or colleagues, as well as developing a solution that will be acceptable within
given constraints.
Mahoney concludes with his own distillation of the moral imperatives for class-
room teaching: follow the silver rule (first do no harm), keep your promises, be fair,
know yourself. His final question to the reader is: ‘Are there issues at school I avoid
taking on because I don’t want to make waves?’ In other words, just how wide might
one’s moral sphere be, if one only looked?

Conclusion. The authors of these three books recognise that teaching ethical reason-
ing is a crucial responsibility of programs in professional development for educators
and that such teaching is best done using authentic dilemmas or case studies. Shapiro
and Gross, as well as Mahoney, couple their case studies with questions designed to
draw attention to the complex ethical dimensions of the problems described;
Mahoney’s use of case studies and questions is the more successful and engaging. In
any case, these books are apt to be most effective in group learning experiences,
where students can benefit from hearing the disparate and sometimes surprising reac-
tions of their colleagues to the dilemmas presented. Those of us who teach future
educators know that our best work is done when we draw out the ethical dilemmas
of our students’ own experiences and ponder them together. We would do well to
248 Book reviews

consider how to weave the complex perspectives described in these books into our
classroom teaching and not leave ethical decision-making to courses on professional
ethics. Instead we should keep it at the heart of everything we do.

References
Gross, S. J. (2004) Promises kept: sustaining innovative curriculum leadership (Alexandria, VA,
Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development).
Shapiro, J. P. & Stetkovich, J. A. (2005) Ethical leadership and decision making in education:
applying theoretical perspectives to complex dilemmas (2nd edn) (Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence
Erlbaum).

Laura Rogers, 309 Paige Hall, Department of Education, Tufts University,

Medford, MA 02155. Email: Laura.Rogers@tufts.edu

Nancy Faust Sizer, formerly Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge,

MA, USA. Email: faustie@aol.com

© 2010, Laura Rogers and Nancy Faust Sizer

DOI: 10.1080/03057241003755093

Professional care and vocation: cultivating ethical sensibilities in teaching

T. W. Wineberg, 2008
Rotterdam and Taipei, Sense Publishers
€29.99 (pbk), 164 pp.
ISBN 978-90-8790-298-8
€145.69 (hbk), 164 pp.
ISBN 978-90-8790-299-5

This book points to some new ways of moral thinking and moral development within
the teaching context with the aim of improving teacher’s ethical sensibilities—as the
title indicates. Wineberg criticises current versions of professional ethics for not being
morally formative, because they only focus on standards of conduct or on ethical
dilemmas and therefore cannot help in changing our schools for the better. Thus
Wineberg wants teachers to bear the ethical dimension in mind, because this aspect
often seems to be neglected within daily teaching practice, which is described as
‘increasingly programmatic, technique-oriented, and career-driven’ (p. 1). He calls
upon teachers to perceive their work as a vocation as well as a ‘profession’ in the orig-
inal sense of the word—namely a strong devotion to serving the public good with a
deep appreciation for the moral dimensions accompanying pedagogical work in
general. This seems crucial, because developing perceptual sensibilities enables
professionals to interpret practical situations better and thus react more adequately.