How to Teach Code of Ethics
- 1). Spell out the basic tenets of your given code of ethics. Keep it simple and straightforward, but easy to understand. Each tenet should be a sentence or two, organized in a list.
- 2). Identify the core value that underlie your code of ethics. These often include such things as responsibility, self-sufficiency and serving the common good. Those values hold more importance that the specifics of simple rules.
- 3). Discuss the core values with your students and stress why they are important. Give them ample opportunity to question them, but be ready with counterarguments. A code of ethics can't be imparted by blindly insisting on following the rules. Instead, ethics are taught by helping others to understand the rationale behind those rules.
- 4). Teach the value of responsibility to your students. Ethical codes often fail because individuals assume that the rules don't apply to them or that they can break rules when they become inconvenient. Use examples that relate to your students' lives, such as cheating on a paper or taking money from another student's locker, to illustrate how the ethics code affects their lives directly.
- 5). Create responses to specific ethical situations that show ways to behave when a conflict arises. Ethics are easy to adhere to in the classroom, but in the real world--full of pressure and compromise--they become much tougher to respect. Working out practical solutions to hypothetical conflicts elevates the ethics code above the merely academic.
- 6). Talk about the notion of consequences and what happens when one fails to adhere to an ethical code. Don't use it as a bludgeon to scare your students; instead use it to illustrate the ramifications of every decision, and the fact that some consequences run deeper than just getting in trouble or losing money.
- 7). Emphasize that doing the right thing rarely means doing the easy thing. Principles only have value when it's inconvenient to adhere to them. Sticking with an ethics code often means giving up something else that a person may want. Stress the strength required to live by an ethics code--the way that it reflects well on the student--and emphasize such esoteric rewards as trustworthiness and reliability.
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