The Importance of Confidentiality and Professionalism in and out of the Workplace

By Steve Vitto, MA, CCII, MAISD BTC

This article is not intended to be a review of the Family Educational Rights and

Privacy Act (FERPA), which clearly stipulates parameters around the sharing and

distribution of confidential student information. The purpose of this article is to review

best practice and professionalism related to the work we do with children and families.

For the past 34 years, I have worked in school and community settings and have heard

breaches of confidentiality and professionalism that appear to be harmless observation

or humor at first. For example, let’s start with the teacher’s break room—a place to relax,

vent frustration and laugh a little, and there is nothing wrong with this. We all need a

sense of humor to do the work we do. However, what I find sometimes as I wander into

those settings, is that the venting and laughter may negatively impact relationships with

our students and their families. This is never appropriate.

There is no question that we work with students and home-school partnerships that are

a source of frustration at times. Occasionally, we deal with families that may seem

unreasonable, unstable, in denial, or contentious. We may deal with families that we

feel are undermining our effectiveness and are the root cause of their child’s

problems. We may deal with families who argue with us and are disrespectful to us in the

presence of their child. And our frustration with these situations may result in an impulse

to use our experiences with families as a source of humor, not meant to harm or ridicule.

The problem with this is that it contributes to a culture where the importance of positive

professional home-school partnerships is devalued, and we fail to model the same level

of respect we want for ourselves.

We always need to ask ourselves how we would feel if we walked into a break room,

or a group of educators in a community setting and heard them talking in seemingly

negative terms about us or our child. I’m sure none of us would like this and that we

would be extremely wary about collaborating with those educators in the future, a

damaging blow to a home-school partnership.

One of the most important reasons to resist the temptation to gossip, or vent about our

challenging home-school partnerships is the very students we are trying to reach and

teach. For these children and all children, we need to be serving as the best model

possible for how adults successfully resolve conflicts and communicate with each other.

Lastly, before we pass judgment on any families’ parenting abilities, we need

to take a step back and ask ourselves a few important questions:

1) Have we ever walked in their shoes? 2) Do we have a true understanding of what type of parenting he or she experienced prior to becoming a parent?3) How much support have they had available to help them use effective parenting practices? 4) Is the information we are receiving about their parenting based on hearsay or is it factual? 5) And, are we imposing our own values and beliefs about how we feel they should raise their child?

When it is all said and done, our greatest gains with students will come when we have

made every attempt to model the same respect in interaction with families that we

would like to have returned to us.

For more information and additional insights on this and other topics related to

communication and collaboration, Steve Vitto will be presenting a one day in-service

entitled “Bringing Out the Best in Challenging Home School Partnerships” at the MAISD

in May, 2012. This presentation will focus on evidenced-based strategies for working

effectively with challenging home-school partnerships.