Teachers' personal and professional boundaries

This short video clip raised so many issues for me and I confess to a tinge of envy that these young teachers had an opportunity, albeit a brief opportunity to talk about these issues. In my career as a teacher and RTLB (Resource Teacher of Learning and Behaviour) I have been confronted with almost every one of the ethical issues raised in the video and many other conflicting issues of mutual rights such as the right to a private life with the right of parents to teachers with the highest possible personal morals and integrity.

At times in our working life there are pressure points and any one who works in education will recognise the common ones of reports, transition, end of year class lists, school productions, parent interviews, changing classrooms, beginning a new class, student led conferences, appraisals, observations; some minor and some major. And then there are the personal tragedies and stressors that impact on our working lives. How do we manage these and maintain a professional standard of excellence in our day to day work? These can be as minor as the admittance of a grandchild in another country to hospital for a routine tonsillectomy or as major as the death of spouse. This reflection will raise more questions than answers and address issues that were never part of my teacher training.

What are the obligations and responsibilities of school management to support employees who are caring for terminally ill spouses? children? parents? The expectations for leave and procedures for time off are clear in collective agreements and contractual law. Less clear is the ongoing needs and supports for people who must continue to work to have an income while caring for a dying parent or child. I have worked through caring for a terminally ill husband and his death and been both supported and ignored in varying degrees by varying people. There is a fine line between too much of ones personal life intruding into professional world and not enough. There is a continuum of support that is intrusive to the isolation of being ignored.

As educators we are role models at all times and in all things. As educators we are also entitled to have privacy respected in our personal worlds. Who should know what is happening in our personal lives and how much should they know and when should they know? These are all profound and ethical questions that impact on us all as professionals working with young people. Honesty and integrity are essential when working with young people and it is fine to say to a class of 5 year olds that I will be away next week because I need to look after my sick mum. Do you ever say to a class that "I will be away next week to look after my terminally ill mother who has Alzheimers and needs someone with her 24 hours a day." As professional educators we have a duty of care to our students to be truthful - how truthful?


What is helpful for one person is intrusive for another, what is caring and kindly for one is overwhelmingly smothering for another. I have found that in the midst of overwhelming grief that work can be impossible and at other times essential as an anodyne from relentless grieving. Should we be attending work when we are likely to be performing at less than our best? How do we determine at what point we do or do not attend work due to ill health or emotional well being? We all know of teachers who front up to work when they should be at home taking care of themselves - and we know that rescheduling work matters can often create more more work than doing the work in the first instance.


Social media is another arena that is a minefield for teachers. I have known teachers posting material in breach of privacy through sheer ignorance of the technology and they have been very distressed by the experience. There are very few opportunities for professional development in a multitude of areas such as effective use of privacy settings, managing your digital footprint, managing storage on ipads, security of devices. As teachers we often turn to our children or our students or perhaps a sibling to demonstrate how to access different apps or music or utube accounts. The explosion of  apps such as instagram, utube  and twitter have changed forever notions of privacy and sharing. Using these apps appropriately and ethically is expected of us as teachers without training, without planning or guidelines. The NZ Teacher's Council currently has an excellent section on Social Media in response to the huge increase in issues surrounding teachers and technology. As a profession I believe we need to shift from being responsive to being proactive with our digital world. Schools are being confronted with text bullying and covert video of teachers used by students to damage the reputation of teachers. Our digital footprint grows exponentially every day sometimes with little awareness that such a footprint even exists.

We have an increasingly familiar issue where the students are more fluent and competent in the digital world than their teachers. Our children of today are digital natives and the teachers are digital immigrants. The immigrants are teaching the natives about their own world and the flipped roles are disconcerting for many teachers. I am mindful of the words of  mismatch is challenging for many teachers. Early in my career I took the words of Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400) to heart. In his description of the Clerk in the Prologue to Canterbury Tales he penned the words "And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche" (line 310). I hope to gladly teach and gladly learn in my vocation as a teacher. 

Reflecting on the Words of Judge Becroft: NZ Commissioner for Children

I first heard Judge Becroft speak at an RTLB conference many years ago. I was struck by how sensible he was and how clearly he understood and articulated the the issues and impact of poverty on the lives of our children. In my work and growing understanding of restorative practice in schools and in my role as a Resource Teacher of Learning and Behaviour, I also work with the marginalised and disenfranchised youth in our country. I have been fortunate in my work to be trained as an IYT facilitator and with the UBRS programme. Combined with my training in Restorative Practices these programmes have helped to form my growing sense that we have the knowledge to work better with our children. Judge Becroft believes that we also have the capacity to do so much better for the 95,000 New Zealand children living in poverty. As our Children's Commissioner with his office of 12 dedicated people he is the voice and advocate for the 1.12 million children (18yrs and under) who our future. These young people are largely voiceless and disenfranchised. There has been no budget increase for the Children's Commissioner Office in 7 years.

                                                              Photo: RNZ / Nicole Pryor                                     
We undervalue children in our country all the time.

In a recent article titled 'Why New Zealand is failing its kids' (May 2, 2017, www.newsroom.co.nz) written by National Affairs Editor Shane Cowlishaw, Judge Becroft stated that "I suspect history will judge us quite harshly. We judge those in the Victorian era of having a very crude approach to child welfare ... well I think a lot of what we're doing right now might be judged as almost, putting it crudely, sending a blind person to prison because they can't see". Every child who comes into a classroom must be taught by age the same curriculum and be judged to be at, below, above an artificially contrived standard. It is essentially an aspiration established by a political regime. A 7 year old child from a loving two parent family living in a warm, insulated house with ready access to medical care and quality nutrition, with a bedroom of toys and books, a personal ipad; is expected to have the same educational outcomes as a 7 year old who is cold, hungry and abused by bullying siblings fighting for space and limited resources such as a bed, a sandwich, a blanket and neglected by adults who may be psychological absent due to drugs or alcohol. This hungry child is treated the SAME as the other lovingly nurtured 7 year old child. Surely this is a barbarity we should be beyond?

The natural progression of treating both children the same, judging both children by the same measures is a progression separation of outcomes. A trajectory of success for one and failure for the others. Can we afford as a society to allow 10% of our youth to be born and grow into failure from the day of their birth? I am deeply saddened by the overwhelming sense of a society that is not outraged and actively working towards changing this system that is willing to allow a new born to fail before they even begin to live. It seems on a par with the atrocity of Generals in war accepting a reasonable loss of life to achieve military goals. As a teacher I cannot accept that there is an acceptable number of children doomed to be way below standard. As a teacher I have been complicit for most of my career being a tool of a school and "Schools grade, and, therefore, they degrade". Ivan Illich wrote these words in his 1971 book "Deschooling Society". That was nearly 50 years ago and we are still treating children with a barbaric grading system. I agree with Judge Becroft  that we need to listen to the voice of our children. Many schools are working to develop student agency and then our society and the political system in Aotearoa silences the young. I do not know of any school that has asked students what they think about being graded against National Standards. I use National Standards as just one example of educational barbarity.

Our school systems are riddled with 'fatted cows'. Ideas and systems that are so deeply entrenched in the notion of schools that they are reified. Not even open for discussion. The concept of compulsory schooling from 5 to 15 in New Zealand is rarely discussed. The sense of herding students into age group cohorts. The 9-3 pm time structure for school hours. The compulsory activities that students have to participate in even when it is painful or humiliating - we all know the obese child who comes last in the class race every - single - time. Children who are punished for being late to school, made to do PE, made to sit still in a classroom as a five year old, made to stay at school when it feels like a prison as a 14 year old. The arbitrary nature of many of our systems owe more to industrial British traditions that to humane responses to the needs of children.

Professor Johansson from Sweden who visited our country and (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_poverty_in _New_Zealand) spent some time working in New Zealand, said that New Zealand needed to address child poverty as not a political question, but an ethical question, a moral question.  I agree, I suspect that Judge Becroft would agree also. This reflection is my small candlelight of moral outrage.