Ethical decision making by Penelope Swenson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
After my last post, I've been contacted by individuals who share my concerns about decisions to non-reelect. I have heard numerous stories of abuse of the non-reelect provision and some where it was appropriately used. As one deeply interested in ethics, I began to ponder ethical decision making.
How do educational leaders make decisions? Educational administrators need clarity with their decision making process. And they need that clarity before they make their decisions. Of course, similar processes apply to all of us.
In reflecting on decision making, one of the first considerations that strikes me is to take one's ego and fold it small enough to fit in one's back pocket. Then the leader should take that folded ego, put it in that back pocket and sit down. Getting one's ego out of the way often is a great help in gaining clarity.
While a principal, I was the evaluator for a new, young, highly talented teacher. He was enthusiastic, innovative, and related well to students. BUT he seemed to always be pushing the envelope. He wanted more than his share of the budget. He railed at any oversight. He questioned, questioned, questioned. He was a pain for an administrator and he did not seem to like me. Did he deserve the position? As a probationary teacher, he could have been gone at the end of the first or second year. Ego in the back pocket, I saw a gifted individual who had a great future as a teacher.
As he learned how schools had to work, he would become less abrasive--or I hoped he would. With a focus on the positives and a bit of encouragement to become a team player, the observations and evaluations of this young teacher clearly indicated his value to the students and our school. Watching him teach, it seemed he was born to be a teacher. Seeing him move to permanent status from probationary teacher was about what was best for students and the school, not about egos.
The framework for making decisions written about by staff of Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University is worthy of consideration by every person who serves in leadership, whether as teacher, administrator, or other personnel. See this framework and other documents at: http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/
Other useful documents and books on ethics in educational administration decision making include:
Beck, L. G. & Murphy, J. (1993). Preparing ethical leaders: Overviewing current efforts and analyzing forces that have shaped them. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA), Houston, TX. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED364 936).
Begley, P. (Ed.). (1999). Values and educational leadership. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
Fulenwider, T. J. (2007). The application of ethical principals in decision making between beginning, intermediate, and journeyman educational administrators. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, the University of the Pacific, Stockton, California.
Johnson, C. (2005). Meeting the ethical challenges of leadership (2nd. Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Rebore, R. (2001). The ethics of educational leadership. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Sergiovanni, T. J. (1992). Moral leadership: Getting to the heart of school improvement. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Shapiro, J. & Gross S. (2008). Ethical educational leadership in turbulent times: (Re)solving moral dilemmas. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Starratt, R. J. (2004). Ethical leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Starratt, R. J. (1999). Moral dimensions in leadership. In Begley, P. & Leonard P. (Eds.), The values of educational administration (pp. 22-35). New York: Falmer/Garland.
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