What would you do when you have ethical dilemmas as an instructor ....or you have none?

Of course I am writing these blogs as my homework assignments for my PIDP diploma (3260) but they are true reflection of my personality, as a person who I am and how I like to work in my real life. Once my employer asked me, what are the three top priorities for you as a professional? Without even thinking for a second I said, "never compromising my work ethics is my top priority and then comes going above and beyond to help my clients/students and thirdly, never losing my human touch while serving my clients/students - Humanity First!"

I was given this scenario as an ethical dilemma (one of the 7 scenarios I chose this one) and I wish to share with you how I considered to resolve this dilemma.

Scenario 5 (PIDP 3260)

Your heart sinks as you calculate Tyler’s final exam grade. He bombed it, leaving him just one point short of passing your second-semester Pharmacology class in the Practical Nursing program.

Tyler struggled through his first semester, and ended up failing two classes, resulting in his being placed on academic probation. This semester, he took a reduced course load, and has been visiting the learning Centre to get extra help with math. You’ve met with Tyler during office hours throughout the semester and you’ve gotten to know him a bit better than most of your students. College life has been a big adjustment for him after the small- town high school he attended. He’s the first person in his family to attend college, and he has shared his anxiety over the student loan debt he’s already accumulated. You’ve seen first-hand how much he wants to succeed, and how many hours of extra work he is putting in trying to bring up his grades. Up until today, you have felt he has been improving.

However, you’ve also seen how flustered he gets in stressful situations like exams. On this final exam, he has made errors in drug calculations due to very basic math mistakes. If he can’t handle an exam, how can he handle the hectic environment of a real hospital? You are worried about patient safety if he were to get a job as a nurse. If he fails your class, he will be required to withdraw from the program. Should you find an extra point somewhere, and allow him to pass your class?

1.      Narrative: tell the story of the situation and give the context of the dilemma (who, what, where, when, why).

Hi, my name is Kusum and I am a past instructor from a Medical School in India where I taught Human Physiology and Pharmacology to first year medical students, dental students and nursing students. I can better correlate with the Scenario 5 as given in the assignment section of PIDP 3260 Course Moodle because I came across quite a few such students like Tyler in my 15 + years of teaching experience. So, I will keep this virtual name as Tyler in my story while sharing my narrative. Tyler made a special place in my heart when, on the very first day of the class, he shared during introductions that he’s the first person in his family to attend college! 

Further, many times when he visited my office for extra help and expressed his seriousness to pass the pharmacology exam with his added anxiety over the student loan debt he’s already accumulated and his academic probation due to failing two exams in the first semester. Tyler also shared that coming from a small town to the big city and a big Medical School have been quite a cultural challenge for him and then adjusting in the dorms, away from home among the other students of urban background turned him into an introvert. While living with his own fears of being judged as “less smart” and he took long time to adjust in the social culture of the college which affected his studies a lot. Few visits to my office for seeking extra help time to time, Tyler felt comfortable sharing with me about his challenges regarding his struggles in studies and he built a rapport with me because I always listened to him patiently. One day, he shared about his challenges especially pharmacology which involved some drug calculations, which he always found complex from the very beginning, (though he found physiology very interesting), but his love to become a Practical Nurse and helping the patients brought him to choose this profession.  

I could sense very clearly that Tyler was basically a very hard working, committed and self-motivated student who always maintained his interest to keep going and keep working hard in order to pass this course besides all the challenges he was facing. One thing which I strongly admired in Tyler was “not giving up” which motivated me to keep helping him even in the after- class office visits and I always took time out of my busy schedules.

2.      Dilemma: describe why this situation was a dilemma. What values were in conflict?

This situation was a dilemma because Tyler needed only one point to pass the exam and eventually that will move him forward in the program but I was feeling stuck how to give him one extra mark staying ethically right in my professional boundary. Yes, I was heart-broken when I finished my marking for the second semester pharmacology test papers. It was challenging to give one extra mark to Tyler so that he is declared “Pass” in the exam. On the other hand, looking at an overall situation of Tyler’s hard work and how much he had tried to put efforts this time to pass the exam, going to the learning Centre and coming to my office for extra help and not giving up in his motivation, I strongly feel that Tyler really deserves to pass this exam. And he was failing only by one point so he was almost there to pass the exam. I am in great ethical dilemma how to give one extra point to Tyler and I decided to call my instructor friend Ms. Lucy (arbitrary name given for this assignment) to discuss the situation, how can I make fair and ethical decision that Tylor doesn’t have to lose his professional goal and I am not guilty for what I am doing. Lucy is an instructor in the School of Arts at University of the Fraser Valley and we worked together for a short period of time last year.

3.      Framework: what decision-making framework have you used to help you think through the dilemma.

I discussed the whole situation with Lucy in depth. Actually, I had sent the scenario and Kidder’s Principles and paradigms in advance last night so that Lucy have some time to think about the solution. I told Lucy, “I didn’t want to rush to my conclusion in hurry” and immediately she said, “so you are using ‘care-based thinking’ of Kidder?” and I replied, “maybe both care-based and end-based”. I am a humanistic instructor, of course care-based is my intrinsic nature and I am always student-centric. Passing this exam will be good for Tyler’s mental health and it will make him very happy and successful, obviously. When I look at his overall life and how passionate he is to serve as LPN; and he is the first member of his family to come and study in any college, how much his family will be proud of him and benefit from his passing this exam so that he doesn’t have to give up his professional goal and he doesn’t have to deal with all the financial and emotional consequences. I was also thinking about his self-esteem, confidence and motivation in life. Lucy and I discussed as many possibilities as we could to resolve this dilemma in a positive way. I am very thoughtful how Tayler’s future life will reflect based on my decision of ‘Pass’ or ‘Fail’ when my pen has to write only four letters in any case? 

4.      Alternatives: describe several possible ways the dilemma could have been solved. What values and principles informed each alternative?

Lucy asked me the very first question: “what does your gut feeling says, Kusum?”. I told her my gut feeling is already mentioned in the opening sentence of the scenario, “Your heart sinks as you calculate Tyler’s final exam grade”. I am not at peace if Tyler fails, I sincerely want to see him completing the program with great success! I want to help Tyler, indeed!

In that response (of my gut feeling), Lucy suggested few options to consider:

A.      Review my own markings and in the short answer questions if I can consider giving ½ mark extra somewhere or maybe in few questions if I can consider giving partial marks for the steps which are genuinely right and where exactly I see Tyler got distracted in the end in calculating the final results where mathematical calculations were involved which could be a typo mistake or simply a manual miscalculation. Lucy’s recommendation emphasized that if a student understands the process of the calculation and demonstrates positive results in his critical thinking, then he deserves some marks better than zero.

B.      Considering the possibility of peer review for his answer sheet as I discussed in my last week’s reflection – team teaching. Getting his performance evaluated by three of my colleagues with a special request made to them, in order to get a holistic response for his performance and then taking the average / or taking the highest-grade point average as final result.

C.      Reviewing my evaluation sheet/ question paper with my team members and getting their feedback. If they feel, I have asked some really tough questions in this semester which are beyond the scope of intellectual capacity of average students and they are beyond the learning outcomes of the program, then I may consider giving 1 or 2 bonus points to the whole class as a correction quotient so that the average grade-point of the whole class will increase and eventually Tayler and few other students on the margin will also pass the exam.

5.      Resolution: what course of action did you choose to address the dilemma? Why?

I chose all three suggestions (A, B and C) as mentioned above as my course of action. First, I checked my own marking if I could consider giving some marks for the partial right steps (1/2 or ¾ depending on the degree of rightness in the steps) in some questions.

Next, I also considered to do peer review for Tyler’s answer sheet and my question paper. In the end, by giving bonus points to the whole class if my question paper was really a tough one, I will learn for future how to make a suitable question paper keeping in consideration the intellectual capacity of our students and guidelines of the program’s learning objectives; and moreover, I will resolve this dilemma ethically and fairly by giving  1 or 2 bonus points to the whole class. 

6.      Refection: what have you learned as a result of thinking through this dilemma? Did your initial reaction to the case change as a result of your discussions with your partner? If the dilemma was a real one from your experience, would you have done anything differently.

I have learnt a lot doing this exercise and by reading all the scenarios in the assignment. All of them have tough situations / dilemmas for instructors who are student-centric and who care for their students like their own family members. Here I reflect the summary of my learning in the following steps:

1.       There is always a way out to help our students do better in their performance if the instructor has a right attitude to help the student to do better. In a bigger picture, our role as an instructor is to motivate, encourage and provide with as many resources as a student needs within the time frame of his learning process and it is okay to go above and beyond some time to give an extra support to some students who  are at the margin of pass-fail fulcrum. By doing so, we are contributing to build a healthy and professionally successful society, rather than creating more failures in our society (End-based thinking).

2.       Team-teaching is very helpful. Whenever we feel any challenges to resolve the issues alone and stuck in a dilemma, discussion with a fellow team member(s) and taking help often brings positive results in our students’ lives. In the current situation, discussion with Lucy and taking further help from my team members for peer review of Tyler’s answer sheets prompted an opportunity for him to pass the exam and move to the next semester rather than being expelled from the program which is a life-changing event for Tayler.

3.       The whole exercise of reviewing my evaluation instrument (question paper) along with checking the program learning goals as well as understanding an average intellectual capacity of the students was helpful. It helped me to validate how much our students must know and how much it is good to know for them. I remember one of my training sessions as an instructor when we were getting training on Problem- Based Learning, and the trainer mentioned about three levels of learning for students and accordingly we should give them the problems in order to evaluate them:

4.       1) Must know    2) Good to know               3) May/ May not Know or Okay to know

If we set our evaluations mostly from good to know and may/may not know areas and ask tough and tricky questions for proving to our students how much we know the subject, then students will not benefit from that type of evaluation.

I learned from my peers that my evaluation instrument must be simple and cater to the learning objectives of the program. After I re-evaluated my evaluation instrument, I did have 2 questions which were tough for the average students and I gave 2 bonus marks to the whole class.

My reflection on doing this whole exercise is that staying grounded while teaching a program and not flaunting my ego how much I know and how much power I have in my hand as an instructor doesn’t bring satisfying results in terms of student learning. But, instead, utilizing that power in terms of “power to change” doing a paradigm shift and demonstrating how much I care for my students brought better results in the class. At the end of the day, as I said in my last blog, my authenticity as an instructor and winning my students’ heart by building a rapport with them as caring instructor is my top priority and then comes the credibility of my knowledge. I, kind of agree with this quote, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” Theodore Roosevelt

References:

Kidder, R. M. (1995). How good people make tough choices. New York: Morrow.

Soni, K. (2020): My journey from understanding students’ resistance to learning to resolve their confrontations by compassionately responding (not reacting). http://kusumsoni2014.blogspot.com/

Thanks You for your patience to read this long blog. I invite you to please leave your comments how did you like my approach of resolving the dilemma. Thank you