Aaron works at a publishing company, where he was recently promoted from a coordinator to a client management role. As part of his promotion, he was tasked with training his replacement, a new hire named Rachel. While Aaron worked with Rachel and explained to her all of the office’s procedures and systems, Rachel found herself having difficulty, and she expressed to Aaron that the job was more complicated than he had explained. Rachel started going to others in the office for help rather than Aaron, but she continuously made mistakes. Aaron shared with his boss Yolanda that he had trained Rachel and showed her the records, prompting Yolanda to put Rachel on a performance improvement plan. Rachel then quit. When Rachel’s replacement Oliver was hired, Aaron was again supposed to train him and put together a binder of all the information about the job, certain that the binder would be better than how he had trained Rachel. However, Oliver has the same difficulties and ultimately becomes very behind on work, causing Yolanda to again ask Aaron how he had trained Oliver. Aaron feels defeated and wonders if the problem is his training style or if both Rachel and Oliver were just not able to do the job well.
Teacher Tradeoffs: Online Learning during the Pandemic
Majo is a teacher working with primary school students. She relies on her observations in the classroom environment and the personal connections she had formed with her students in order to know and feel she is doing her job well. During the pandemic, her classes abruptly shifted online, and she was no longer able to see students face-to-face. Due to distractions in their home environments, and the reduced attention span of sitting in front of a screen, Majo and her colleagues found that their students were struggling to remain engaged in online learning. The teaching team debated how to handle their new reality with online teaching. Ultimately, they decided to lessen the number of hours that students were spending in online classes with teachers and to provide more suggestions for at-home activities. However, Majo wondered whether her students were being served well by such a decision, or if they might be losing out on learning and community connections that she had worked hard to achieve during the months before the pandemic began.
A Teacher Accused
Majo is working as an instructor at a summer camp with young children. She knew she wanted to be an educator from a young age and is strongly guided by her Christian religious values in her daily practice as a teacher. During the first few weeks of the summer camp experience, she was particularly troubled by twin students who were emotionally upset and disruptive, but Majo tried her best to form a bond with them. One day, the twins’ mother came to the school and accused Majo of having physically harmed her children. Majo knew she was not responsible and would never commit such an act, which would be a violation of her personal values. She was protected by her boss and exonerated by footage recorded inside the classroom. However, she wondered after the fact if she should have stood up more strongly for herself, and it worried her to be so easily accused of something she did not do.
The Protest
Anna is a politically-active middle school teacher. She recently attended a rally in her city in support of progressive causes, including transgender rights. At the rally, a small group of counter-protesters had gathered in opposition, and people were chanting to express hate for the LGBT community. Anna was shocked to see that one of the counter-protesters was a fellow teacher from her school, Claire, who Anna didn’t know well but immediately recognized. Anna decided not to confront Claire but instead snapped a picture of the counter-protestors, including Claire, and posted her photo on social media so that it was visible to her family and friends, including some other teachers at the school. The next day, Anna felt uncomfortable. Several other teachers she was connected with on social media had commented on the photo: some were shocked Claire was in attendance, but others criticized Anna for posting the photo in the first place. Anna wondered whether sharing the photo was the right thing to do and feared that word would get back to Claire.
Discriminating Decisions
Renee is a 38-year-old American working towards a post-graduate degree abroad. Renee spent the past 12 years of her career working in international education. Before leaving her post to pursue her own education, Renee served as Director of Study Abroad at a mid-sized public research university in the US. Renee describes a time, early on her career, when she was instructed by her superior to block a student with disabilities from study abroad. At the time, Renee reached out to others, including the human resource department at her university, but was met with silence. Ultimately, the student did not go abroad. Renee was deeply troubled by the experience and has dedicated her energies to advocating for student rights ever since.
The Meaning of Grades
Stephen is a professor of engineering. He recognizes the importance of teaching in his work as a professor, and he tries to use techniques that require students to take chances and try new things that will help them to grow in both intellectual and personal ways. However, Stephen faces a major dilemma in his work with respect to grading. Like other professors at his college, Stephen has a strong commitment to the meaning of grades, and he refuses to inflate them. As a result, students from his department have traditionally had difficulty gaining acceptance into their desired post-graduate engineering programs: their grade-point averages are not as high as those of competing students from colleges where grade inflation is commonplace. Though Stephen recognizes that his students are at a distinct disadvantage as a result of his school’s relative lack of grade inflation, he wants to approach grading fairly.
Money Troubles
Felicia is the twenty-eight-year-old founder of a national nonprofit organization that works with schools, families, and volunteers to help create safe schools and communities. Some years ago, Felicia needed to raise money quickly. She talked with a potential funder about doing a challenge grant: if Felicia could raise $20,000 from other sources, this funder would give her an additional $20,000 Felicia and her coworkers at the nonprofit sent in a proposal, and then raised $20,000 from other sources under the premise of the challenge grant. Then the funder who had offered the challenge grant called to say that she had “changed her mind.” Felicia was faced with an ethical decision: should she tell the other funders the challenge grant had been reneged on, or should she keep quiet and keep the money?
Looking Good
Ray is a middle-aged history teacher at a new pilot school. Ray believes that kids need to enjoy themselves to learn. At the same time, he is a firm believer in holding students accountable: he expects them to be on time, to complete their work, and to not settle for a mediocre grade. As an individual teacher, holding students accountable is a real challenge. The school is a pilot school, and so it “might not be around in two or three years.” In order to help the school “succeed” and make it “look good,” many teachers at Ray’s school teach “down” to students and also inflate grades so that it appears that the students are thriving academically. Although Ray is part of a tight-knit community at the school, he often feels isolated when confronted with the issue of grading.
Excellence at Risk
Katie is a young woman who has been teaching ninth grade English at a large high school for the past six years. Katie goes out of her way to communicate with parents about students’ work in her classroom. Unfortunately, Katie’s interest in staying in contact with parents created a very difficult situation in her second year of teaching. She received two death threats in the mail and ultimately found out it was a student whose parents she had contacted because the student had been missing a great number of classes. As a result of Katie’s phone calls, the student’s parents took disciplinary action, and the student seemed to have responded by sending her teacher threatening messages. Although Katie did not feel a great deal of support from the school administration, she decided to press charges, because she thought that the student would be more likely to learn from the experience as a result.