Edclicking Keyword Cloud
By Dr. Harry Tennant
Wednesday, December 14, 2011 Should Professional Educators Be Trusted To Be Professional... Or Must We Protect Young People From Them? There is a widespread traditional practice in education of wiping the slate clean each school year in regard to student discipline. Both the premise and the reasoning are questionable in my mind. While I'm not advocating holding a student responsible for mistakes made the prior year or earlier, I am suggesting that there is value in developing a more complete picture of our students over time. This came up the other day when I was at a top-notch high school in the DFW area meeting with their three assistant principals. We were discussing how valuable it is (dare I say imperative) to have a database that provides a complete, concise discipline history for each student. We all agreed. When I showed them an example of one from Discipline Manager, they loved it and were excited to have this new tool. The rub came, as it often does, when I introduced the "archived" discipline history. At the end of each year discipline records in Discipline Manager are archived and a link to this archive is provided on each student's discipline history page. That way, if a professional with a 'need to know' wanted more context and perspective on a student who is in trouble or struggling in whatever way, they would be able to access the archive to develop a more complete picture. This initiated a discussion of the wisdom of allowing any professional in the school building to see discipline history from the prior year...after all, we hope young people grow over the summer and common wisdom is that they deserve a fresh start each year. We wouldn't want adults in the building to develop negative perceptions of a child based upon behavior predating the current year...the argument is made. In fact, there is often a debate in such discussions whether or not that child's teachers should even be allowed to look at any discipline history on a student...including discipline records from the current year. The fear is that if these professional educators have access to this information they will then develop negative impressions of the child and treat him/her differently as a result. This gets to what I believe is the false premise of this practice of hiding valuable information about a child's development. The false premise is---and if it is not false, it is disturbing---that professional educators who have devoted much of their life to the profession of bettering young people are not professional enough to look at such data without it biasing their image of that developing human being to such a degree that they would treat the young person worse for having been privy to this data. Sadly, it is a widespread conception among educators that some of their colleagues can't be trusted with such insight. For many, the fear of prejudicial thinking outweighs the benefit of the more complete picture one can develop from studying the young person over time. I disagree. A professional educator who cannot look at such data objectively and with an idea to utilize that information solely for the betterment of the child is not very professional at all. This person likely engages in numerous behaviors that harm children. In such a person, their own subjectivity trumps their professional responsibility to remain objective and foster the growth of each child by every means at their disposal. This type of educator has no business working with developing minds and characters. The reasoning for providing a clean slate is also flawed, in my opinion. Professional educators must be professional enough to trust with all data points and other context that help us make the best decisions impacting the young people we are charged with bettering. Otherwise, we cannot do our job (for most of us, our passion) as effectively as we could otherwise. In effect, we are wasting the benefit of seeing patterns and gathering context that can better inform our efforts to better the child. We fear our colleague in the next classroom...and once in a while an educator is even candid enough to admit that they themselves can't be trusted. In other words, they fear their ability to put the best interest of the child ahead of their own biases and preconceptions. I personally have faith in the vast majority of my professional colleagues. I believe that they are better than this less than professional behavior. If not, as principal, I would have kept student "cumulative folders" more securely locked up. After all, these are folders kept in front office file cabinets that contain most of a student's academic, personal, and other information. Teachers access these all the time in most schools. It is encouraged. If I felt teachers on our staff were so unprofessional as to treat a student more poorly as a result of looking at their sensitive information, no teacher would have viewed one of these folders without going through a vetting process appropriate for the untrustworthy and unprofessional. On balance, the value we get from developing a more complete picture of each individual student---including what their discipline history is---MUST outweigh the negative ramifications of the tiny minority that can't escape their biases and prejudices enough to make professional decisions in the best interests of each and every young person in the school. Do you trust the educators you work with or deal with? Do you trust yourself? Shouldn't educators strive to understand the whole child, not merely the child in a sliver of time? Are educators professional enough to deserve the title of professional educator? I want to trust so. Posted at 11:05 PM Keywords: EdClick , Discipline , Discipline Histories , Teacher Professionalism 0 Comments |