Professional ethics of upper secondary school teachers: the students’ perspective

Abstract

Our objective in this paper is to analyze some teachers’ unethical behaviors, based on the opinion of a group of students from upper secondary education. Our theoretical perspective is that of the professional teaching ethics; specifically, we distinguish between ethically questionable behaviors and ethically unacceptable ones. The research was of a qualitative type, and for our empirical work we used a focus group strategy in three schools of different educational modalities in Mexico City, one of them a general high school and the other two college-oriented high schools. 

Based on the information gathered through the focus groups, we identified five ethically questionable behaviors of teachers: the use of outdated teaching methods, poor dialogue skills, lack of interest in students’ learning, imposition of topics for written assignments, and disregard towards situations involving violence. As for the ethically unacceptable behavior, the students pointed to sexual harassment and discriminatory attitudes on the grounds of their economic status and/or physical appearance.