A duty to educate

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En provenance du cours de Commonwealth Education Trust

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Being a Professional

71 notes

Commonwealth Education Trust

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Being a Professional

71 notes

The Foundations of Teaching for Learning programme is for anyone who is teaching, or who would like to teach, in any subject and any context - be it at school, at home or in the workplace. With dynamic lessons taught by established and respected professionals from across the Commonwealth, this eight course programme will see you develop and strengthen your skills in teaching, professionalism, assessment, and more. As you carry on through the programme, you will find yourself strengthening not only your skills, but your connection with colleagues across the globe. A professional development opportunity not to be missed. This course will emphasise what you can do to act professionally. This includes developing your own philosophy of teaching and making sure that you continue to improve your knowledge and skills. It also considers what it means to be part of a community of professionals, working with others to improve what happens in your school, community and profession. Enhance your course by joining the Commonwealth teaching community on our website, Facebook and Twitter.

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Legal and administrative responsibilities of a teacher

This week we will consider the roles that statute law, judge-made law and case law play in teaching and schooling. We will examine the concept of duty of care, the care that is owed to students by their teachers and school, and its implications for your professional practice. We will also consider the rights and responsibilities of students, parents, caregivers, and teachers. What is and is not reasonable for parents and students to ask for in relation to schooling? You will be encouraged to reflect upon your professional behaviour as a teacher and to consider how these issues might impact upon current practices in your classroom and in your school. You will also be encouraged to discuss these issues with your principal, colleagues, and other course participants.

The duty of Care11:37

Negligence (Part 1)14:32

Negligence (Part 2)8:44

A duty to educate7:45

The rights and responsibilities of students, parents and teachers11:06

Rencontrer les enseignants

Professor Stephen Dinham
Chair of Teacher Education and Director of Learning and Teaching
University of Melbourne, Australia
Professor John MacBeath
Professor Emeritus
University of Cambridge, UK

[MUSIC]

Welcome back to Course 7, Being a Professional.

We're in week three,

Legal and Administrative Responsibilities of a Teacher.

And we're going to look at a very interesting area today, a coming area,

called a duty to educate.

I have a number of hypothetical situations for you, and I'd like

you to read through these carefully, and note down any areas of concern.

Ask yourself these questions.

Is there a duty of care?

Is there a breach of the duty of care?

And does injury or damage result?

Now, in the case of these hypotheticals, the injury or

damage seems to be the fact that students learning has been affected.

[MUSIC]

The concept of a breach of the duty of care resulting in a failure to learn is

a concept called educational malpractice, or educational negligence.

It's a new area, although it's been talked about for some time.

There are concerns about the concept of educational negligence or

malpractice, as we'll see.

Educational malpractice or negligence, occurs where a student

incurs some fort of intellectual harm as a result of incompetent or

negligent teaching and through failure to do things such as the following:

adequately teach aspects of the curriculum.

So, for example, students sit an examination,

and the teacher concerned has not taught certain parts of the curriculum,

therefore the students are disadvantaged when they do that examination.

Evaluate and place students incorrectly.

For example, categorising a student as a slow learner, or

of low ability, when in actual fact that may well have a hearing problem,

incorrectly diagnosing learning difficulties in various ways.

Teachers who are not counselors or

psychologists should be very, very careful about making judgments about whether

a student has a particular syndrome, for example.

Not providing appropriate and adequate remedial learning programs,

where the teacher knows that the student has a learning difficulty.

And in the case of this one, where a teacher doesn't feel they have the

equipment or the knowledge or the skills to remediate the student,

they have a duty to refer them to an appropriate professional

who may well be able to help them.

Educational malpractice or negligence is an American concept, and as we've noted,

it's concerned with the failure of students to learn, or for

their learning to be compromised in some way.

Lawsuits in the USA for educational malpractice, or

negligence, fall into two main classes.

The first is where the student is able-bodied and able-minded, and

is not taught certain skills and knowledge.

The second is where there is some form of intellectual or physical disability

and the student's needs have not been met through the school or the teacher.

Even in the US, where there have been many cases in civil courts,

around the concept of educational malpractice,

the courts have largely refused to accept such claims.

There are some obvious reasons for this.

The first is that if one case was successful it

would act as a powerful precedent for other cases.

And it's very, very difficult to ascertain, in many cases,

why a student fails to learn.

Questions that we need to ask are, what responsibility does the parent or

parents have in ensuring students do the work that's required of them for example.

What about the student's own responsiblity to learn?

No doubt there are cases where teachers actions or

inactions can result in students not receiving adequate education, but

it's difficult to ascertain whose responsibility this is.

The fear is that once we have some successful cases,

many, many other cases both legitimate and otherwise, will occur and

it's possible that the whole issue becomes unworkable.

I've given you one example of a case in the USA

concerning educational malpractice.

Read this particular article, and

see what the issues were and what the court decided.

Just because there had been no successful cases to date, or

very few succesful cases for educational malpractice or negligence,

doesn't mean we can be complacent.

We need to know,

for example, that we have addressed all the areas of the prescribed curriculum.

We need to make sure that all our students' learning needs are accessed adequately.

We need to ensure, for

example, that if a student has a learning disability or a physical disability, and

we can't accommodate them, we need to take the correct steps to alert our principal,

and other authorities, so that the needs of these students can be met.

There have been successful civil cases for example, where students have not been

able to access all areas of the school, because they're in a wheelchair and

schools had been forced under law, statute law and civil law,

to remedy the situation by putting in, elevators and ramps and so forth.

It's a growing area of concern, and

we need to take our responsibility to educate very seriously,

despite the fact that there have been relatively few successful cases.

There is also a clear case of vicarious liability in this particular case.

If you remember, vicarious liability is where the buck stops and

in most schools responsibility stops with the principal.

A principal who knows that they have an incompetent teacher or

a teacher who is not following the curriculum or a teacher who is not

teaching effectively or assessing students, has a duty of care and

has a responsibility to act in that particular case.

In our next lecture we're going to examine the rights and

responsibilities of students, parents and teachers.

[MUSIC]

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