Ross and favorite guest Dave Weller talk about ethics in English education. What problems are caused by charging for teaching? What are the ethics of observing teachers? Is it fair to expect teachers to prepare for classes in their own time?
Ethics in English Education (With Dave Weller) - Transcript
Ross Thorburn: [laughs] Hurrah. Welcome to Dave Weller.
Dave Weller: You just stole my thunder.
Ross: [laughs] I know. What can I say? Regular listeners will understand the joke.
Dave: Hello everybody.
Ross: Welcome back, Dave.
Dave: Thank you.
Ross: Today, I thought we could talk about something that is much needed and often much lacking, which is ethics in English education.
[laughter]
Dave: A deep topic.
Ross: Isn't it? I don't know about you, but I've definitely found that most of the schools that I've worked in, not always, but in some ways, been ethically lacking.
It's something that we don't often talk about, maybe. Certainly, we've not talked about in this podcast before. It's something that teachers often talk about in teachers' rooms, right? With problems about the ethics of schools. I thought it would be interesting of us to debate here.
Dave: Absolutely. People listening, it depends which context you're teaching in, but every teacher I've ever spoken to has a story or several stories to tell about unfairness, discrimination, prejudice. Definitely, there's issues in the industry with ethical behavior.
Ross: Maybe, it's more important in teaching, for a lot of teachers that get into teaching, because it should be a net-positive profession. It might be different to some other higher-paying jobs that are more financially motivated, whereas teaching, very few people will get into it to make money, right?
Dave: Oh, def.
[laughter]
Ross: Too late now.
Dave: You can't.
[laughter]
Dave: Is it too late to change my...
Ross: I think it is at this point, Dave. We want to play a little quote from David Brooks -- who's got a great book on this topic -- talking to Sam Harris.
Sam Harris: What are the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues?
David Brooks: The eulogy virtues and the resume virtues are things I, more or less, took from a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi in the mid-20th century. He said we have two sides of our nature.
One side, which is about conquering the world and being majestic in it. Those are the resume virtues, the things that make us good at our job. Then the eulogy virtues are the internal side of ourselves, the things they say about us after we're dead, whether it's being courageous or honest, or capable of great love.
We live in a culture that knows the eulogy virtues are more important. We all would rather be remembered for our character traits rather than our career, but we live in a culture that emphasizes the career parts. We're a lot more articulate about how to build a good career than how to build a good person.
Our universities, in particular, are much more confident in talking about professional rise than a moral or spiritual rise.
Ross: I would say that's probably also true in our industry, at least, in all the training courses I've worked on. I don't ever remember ethics or the ethics of education ever coming up on them. Obviously, we spend a lot of time talking about how to become a better teacher, but not better in terms of character, better in terms of ethics teacher.
Dave: I would agree. It's interesting. I remember the old Greeks used to do several subjects like the triumvirate of rhetoric, logic, and ethics, because they saw it as inseparable from being able to lead a good life.
Actually teaching ethics to the young citizens of the time was imperative. They would have thought it very strange not to do so. Yet, it's something missing. Well, I never got taught ethics. Probably why I am why I am now.
[laughter]
Ross: I thought we could start off with what are the ethics of charging people for education. Obviously, both you and I, pretty much our entire careers, we've worked a little bit in government schools at some point, but mainly it's been paying customers.
What would you think are some of the ethical issues or problems there?
Dave: Any ethical question, you have to look at all the variables behind it. You have to look at people's income, their wealth, what they are currently studying, government schools, their need, the company that's providing the education, its standards for their own teachers.
I think that the context is inseparable. To say in general terms, it's quite tough.
Ross: At least, I can see there being some advantages of having education in the private sphere rather than the public sphere. In theory at least, there should be more...In general, there should be more pressure on providers to deliver a better service, because you're getting all this pressure from your competitors.
Dave: If government schools and services were perfect, there wouldn't be any need to have private education in the first place.
Ross: I can see, maybe, the difficulty there. It's like who do you decide to sell to, or when do you decide not to sell things to people?
I've had friends and colleagues who've worked especially with adults. People who they know can't afford an English course, or maybe they're working in a job where English is not going to benefit them very much, or they know that this person doesn't have the study skills. Most people are, maybe, encouraged to take out a large bank loan to pay for something.
Dave: Even if the school or institution that's selling the courses, it depends if they do so ethically. If they have a different payment plan so you can pay monthly rather than in a yearly lump sum, which makes it more affordable. If they are offering to people who they think won't be able to complete it in time, or they have other pressures.
Even how good their teaching is, which methodology do they follow? Is it up-to-date and evidence-based? If they follow an outdated system because it's easy to market, they'll definitely get more sales.
Also, you need to look at the school's retention. What are their results? Can they show that they've helped learners to learn?
Ross: You touched on something there, this idea of rewarding teachers for, for example, students signing on, re-signing contracts in private language schools, or demo conversions. Students come to a trial class and they've paid, or they've not paid.
That, I think, is an interesting ethical question, of whether that is something that should be rewarded, obviously something that should be punished. Is that a good way of judging people?
There is one side of that in that if your students have signed a year contract and they've stayed with you for a year, and they want to re-sign again. That probably does, in aggregate with a lot of people, say some positive things about you. Maybe, if they don't, it says some negative things about you.
There's obviously another side to that as well. You're starting to judge teachers by how much money they're generating rather than how much learning they're generating.
Dave: Precisely, because learning is such a long process. If a teacher is purely entertaining, they're going to get a very high re-sign rate. That doesn't mean learning happened.
Learning is hard. You have to really think. You're perhaps frowning as you grasp a new concept. That is leading to a teacher not getting as high re-sign rate because the students don't want to think in class.
The teacher could be technically brilliant and really adept at helping the students to learn. If that teacher is disincentivized from that behavior and think, "Well, actually I earn a decent salary. I enjoy where I'm living, and I want to stay." They could well change their behavior to increase whatever rate they might be being judged on, especially if it's a financial one.
Ross: Then you can imagine that being a vicious circle as well, where you would promote the people that get those metrics rather than the metrics of learning, which are harder to measure. That reinforces that whole paradigm, doesn't it? That what we want is re-signs and money rather than learning.
Dave: Precisely. This is a problem that I had years ago when I first became a DoS. Before all the technology that we're talking about, I was struggling with the idea of how to measure academic quality. It's really hard to do, because the only way you can do it, as far as I can see, is to directly observe it.
We don't have any standard algorithm of what makes good teaching or what makes good learning, because it varies so much depending on the variables of the teacher and the students involved, that is only by direct observation you can see.
It affects so many other business metrics within a school. It can affect sales. If you're doing class, you get referrals. It can affect your retention, your service department. You can measure it through the effect it has on other things, but that is a very tricky process and needs a lot of data.
If you have a manager that's very business-focused, and you're an academic head, then trying to prove that becomes a real battle. I see that getting worse if the right things aren't measured. With online, with all the extra data coming in, people could well take the easy solution and make those simple correlations.
Ross: It's like the old management saying, "What gets measured gets managed." It's a lot easier to measure re-signs or conversions than to measure learning, which is still a bit of an abstract idea and very, very difficult to actually assess.
Dave: That's actually a Peter Drucker quote, and he has an extension to it which most people don't say, which is, "...but make sure you measure the right things."
Ross: Ah.
[laughter]
Ross: Oh wow, there we go. Moving on, let's talk a bit about teachers. I know this is something that you wanted to talk about. Schools in general often ask teachers to do a lot of work, and preparation, and marking classes in their own time, right?
Dave: If a school is upfront with how they pitch the job to teachers, then I think it's fine. I think a lot of schools don't mention what their expectations are of work upfront.
They might say, "The job is this many hours per week for this salary." Then when the teacher starts work, they find out, "Oh, there are also office hours you have to attend. There are extracurricular activities you also have to be present for. There are team building activities which are compulsory." The list goes on. I'm sure [chuckles] our listeners can add a lot more to that.
Suddenly, what was thought to be a 40-hour a week job turns into 60 or 70, when, as you say, you add in preparation, marking, and even the horrible situation where teachers are buying supplies from their own pocket as well.
Ross: It's almost like schools are taking advantage of the good nature of teachers, of wanting to do good things for their students.
I remember my dad, growing up, in my childhood, I remember him. So often the living room floor would be strewn with these cut-out bits of old exam papers which he was copying and pasting to turn into new tests for students that they hadn't had before.
Maybe, teaching is different from other professions. Whereas if you're in sales or something and you're putting in many extra hours, you're probably doing that, partially at least, in the expectation that you're going to get more money. Whereas teaching doesn't have that.
It's almost that the more you care about the students, the more time you're putting in, but you're not necessarily going to get any financial reward for that.
Dave: There's a saying in England, in the NHS, they say it runs on goodwill. They do take advantage of the empathy that staff have. I do think that is very similar in the teaching profession as well.
Ross: I also wanted to ask you about the idea of more and more surveillance in classrooms. When both you and I started teaching, there was very little oversight. Maybe, your DoS would come in and observe you. I don't know, for me once a year if I was lucky. Maybe, it could last.
[laughter]
Dave: That explains a lot, Ross.
Ross: It does, doesn't it? Now in offline teaching you often have cameras in classrooms. Even more interestingly, in online teaching, you have not just cameras -- because obviously everything is on camera.
Everything that you do in every single class can be watched back both by parents and the people measuring the quality of classes, and more and more companies investing in AI to monitor teacher behavior.
Generally in public life, at least, people have a real aversion to facial recognition, whatever authority's using technology to track their behavior, their movements, and everything. I've not really heard anyone talking about this with teaching.
I'm not sure if I was a teacher now, full-time, especially an online teacher, and I knew that everything I said was being recorded and monitored with AI. I'm not sure how comfortable I would be with that.
Dave: First of all, the first thing that popped into my head there is the idea of privacy and intention. Privacy concerns from the students, and I'm assuming they would all sign waivers so that their recordings could be used and reused for training purposes, and shown to other people. That's where the intention comes in.
If all this data is used with ethically-sound principles in mind, I can't see too much of an issue with it. If you're using it to improve their learning, to personalize resources, materials, and lessons, so they're better able to learn, then that is the positive side.
Ross: It'll be interesting to see how that changes as the technology moves on and we get to a point when technology knows every single word you've said in every single class to every single student. There's a record of that. There's even a record of every single facial expression that you might have made in every single class. I think all that's coming.
Dave: The immediate problem with that, though, is assuming good intentions. You could still run into pitfalls.
If you have, say, the ability for AI to recognize engagement through facial expression --Will it be leaning forward in the chair, smiling, eye contact with the camera, however you judge those metrics? That's equated with a good class because they're engaged and more likely to re-sign. That's a business metric rather than a learning metric.
A teacher's rewarded for that, then you could go back to the idea of edutainment. The teacher is encouraged to be entertaining rather than help the student to learn. Interestingly, that data could also be used in aggregate to see what really works and what really doesn't in teaching.
That is very exciting, but it has this dark side which I think we need to be very careful of. I've not really heard any discussions or anywhere else about the potential pitfalls of this. It's really nice that you're raising people's awareness now.
Ross: You heard it here first, folks. [laughs]
Ross: Thanks for coming on again, Dave. Do you want to give the blog a quick plug?
Dave: Sure. If you want to read more about these topics, then please visit www.barefootteflteacher.com.
Ross: Great. Dave, thanks again for coming on.
Dave: You're very welcome.