This study was both quantitative and qualitative, and it approached the topic of teacher ethics from the point of view of the students. The reason for this approach was that these results could help teachers reflect their own behavior in comparison with how students experience the reality in the classrooms, and thus gain important insights to support their professional development (see e.g. Soini et al. 2015, Seghedin 2014). The data was gathered through an online questionnaire (N=214), and most of it was analyzed statistically. The open-ended questions were analyzed with content analysis, where categories and subcategories of student descriptions of unethical and ethical teacher behavior were formed.
The research questions for which this study aimed at answering were the following:
RQ1: Which factors of English teacher ethics do the students consider the most and the least important?
RQ2: How ethical do students perceive the practices of their English teachers?
RQ2.1: How do student conceptions of important factors in teacher ethics compare to their evaluations of their experiences with English teachers?
RQ3: Which subject-specific ethical aspects of English teaching do the students consider the most important?
As for the first question, the answer is clear: students view most of the factors presented in this study as important in teachers’ ethicality. The most important factors included fair and consistent assessment, confidentiality, not accepting bullying, mastery of the teaching content and equal treatment of students regardless of the students’ background and personal aspects. The factors that students considered the least important were teachers’
boundaries in sharing personal issues with students and teachers’ inappropriate language use, e.g. swearing.
As for the second main research question, the analysis showed that upper secondary school students perceive their teachers as very ethical; all factors were rated clearly over “quite well”. This means that upper secondary school teachers seem to have high moral standards that are also transmitted to the students extremely well. According to the students, the teachers excelled in being truthful and not speaking ill of their colleagues. Also, respecting student privacy and having a professional relationship with students were positively experienced by students. The factors in which the students considered the teacher behavior as the least ethical included listening and trying to understand students, intervening with disruptive student behavior and caring about students and their wellbeing. However, the students still considered their teachers to perform quite well regarding these three factors, as the means indicate (see Table 6), so the results do not in any way mean that students regard teacher behavior in those factors as unethical.
Students were asked to give descriptions of any teachers throughout their studies to see which factors arise as the ones defining ethical and unethical behavior the most in the students’ opinion. Several factors emerged in the analysis, most of them manifesting the same aspects that appeared in the questionnaire. The student views of ethical teacher behavior were centered around teacher behavior, e.g. equal and otherwise positive treatment of students (encouraging, helping, listening etc.) and positive teacher characteristics (niceness, politeness, respect etc.). Teaching methods emerged as the second most important issue, in terms of diverse teaching materials, strategies, language use and cultural knowledge. Issues related to the classroom atmosphere arose as a view that was not very explicit in the questionnaire items, which signifies that the teachers’ actions in the classroom have a great impact on the overall classroom experience. Assessment emerged as the smallest category, but the category also overlapped with equal treatment of students.
The students had also experienced several unethical issues in English teaching, a bit under half of them relating also to teacher behavior: unequal and otherwise negative treatment of students (embarrassing, belittling, not being encouraging) and teacher’s negative characteristics (rudeness, being mean, indifference etc.). On a positive note, about one fourth of the students had not ever experienced unethical behavior from English teachers, which indicates that good ethicality could be the major tendency in primary and secondary education as well. However, the other aspects where unethical teacher behavior was recognized included assessment, teaching methods, teacher professionalism and the classroom atmosphere.
As for the comparison between what was considered important and what was experienced by students, two tendencies were found. First, students considered several factors as more important than how well their teachers enacted them. They included equal treatment, fairness and individual performance in assessment, care, listening, confidentiality, intolerance of bullying and encouraging students. Secondly, the experienced reality was better than the considered importance in several factors, including teachers’ personal issues,
appropriateness in teaching materials, teachers’ language use, level of friendliness in teacher-student relationships, honesty and not speaking ill of colleagues.
Finally, the third research question focused on the English subject, with an intention to see whether the most important factors in English teaching related to wider cultural issues or students’ personal objectives as language users. The statistical analysis showed that the teachers’ diverse mastery of the English language is the most important factor, which emerged on a general level as well (see Tables 3 and 14). The second most important factor was the teacher helping students develop themselves as language users. At the other end of the scale were teacher impartiality in covering e.g. political issues in English-speaking countries and treating ethics as a topic in English classes. These findings suggest that students consider more important the kind of English teaching that prepares them for being active users of the language and members of the English-speaking world, whereas an explicit focus on ethical issues and impartiality in covering political and cultural issues falls secondary to that objective.