Practical Application of the Ethical Decision-Making Manual for Essay

Practical Application of the Ethical Decision-Making Manual for Helping Professionals - Essay Example This model focuses on ethical strategies within an inter-professional context, so that it attempts to provide guidance for ethical dilemmas that may occur across the helping professions, such as education, nursing, social work, law and medicine (Steinman, Franks Richardson & McEnroe, 1998). This paper shall review the complexity of ethical decisions that are at times required by teachers within elementary, middle and high schools. Firstly, a brief outline of five ethical principles considered necessary for all ethical decision-making models shall be provided. Secondly, the model of Steinman, Franks Richardson and McEnroe shall be detailed. Next, applications of the proposed ethical decision-making model shall be presented, as relevant to ethical considerations within the school system. Finally, a conclusion shall synthesize the main points of the paper to highlight the importance of ethics to schools. School staffs continually experience situations that could be considered ethical dilemmas, in which they are required to apply confident and strong decision-making abilities (Strike, 1997). As such, for school staff to behave in a manner that is considered ethical, it is necessary that they also be responsible for their behavior, as the two are interdependent concepts (Strike, 1997). Essentially, school staffs are expected as educational leaders to continually develop the ability and capacity for reflection on their behaviors and choices to determine if they have acted ethically. Although many of the numerous decisions teachers and other schools staff make throughout a single day may not immediately appear to have ethical implications, contemporary Western societies are experiencing a rapid advancement in technologies, increases in litigations, and an increased emphasis on issues of social protection, all of which are relevant to the conduct of school staff. Additionally, at a local level, educational institutions are more and more are required to adopt standardized assessments of student achievement, and to be aware of issues of equal opportunity across genders, ethnicities and physical/cognitive abilities (Strike, 1997). Another ethical consideration relevant to the school includes the evaluation of teachers' performance (Messer, 2001).Ethical decision-making models tend to be based on five over-riding moral principles (Kitchener, 1984 as cited in Bradley and Hendricks, 2001). Kitchener (1984) determined that these five principles formed the basis of the concepts that comprise any ethical decision (as cited in Bradley & Hendricks, 2001). The five moral principles are: 1) Autonomy - each individual is acknowledged to have a freedom of choice. In regards to school staffs, they have the right to make their own decisions that align with theirpersonal philosophies, whilst also recognizing that they are responsible for theirdecisions, and that this responsibility requires assessment of the effects of one'sactions on others. The rights of autonomy extend to students, and school staffs are