Ethics of Communication as an Important Component of Teacher Self- Branding in the Settings of the Digital Environment

The purpose of the study was to identify how the Personal Branding Marathon with the involvement of the Ethics Supervisory Committee could influence the teacher self-branding in the settings of the digital environment if the ethics of communication is given paramount importance. The study used qualitative and quantitative methods such as a semi-structured indepth interview, a self-assessment checklist, and an expert assessment checklist. The Triangular Assessment Method was used to obtain participants’ judgments about the importance of every specified component of the self-branding viewed from their perspective in terms of implementation. The yielded data were processed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 25.0.0.1. Software. The novelty of the study lies in the way the teacher self-branding was organised and delivered. The Marathon created a community of individuals with similar needs and the environment facilitated and assisted by the experts to put the teachers in the ‘point of no return’ situation. The Marathon with the involvement of the Ethics Supervisory Committee was found to positively influence the teacher self-branding in the settings of the digital environment if the ethics of communication is given paramount importance. The intervention raised the teachers’ awareness of self-branding, enhanced/upgraded the tools and strategies of self-branding, and improved their communication and communication ethics, particularly. The teachers became more professionally advantaged, selfefficient, and confident as individuals. The intervention was found to help the teachers built-up a strong self-brand on the Internet and at the workplace. They also improved their communication skills in terms of ethics as the participants were assisted by the communication expert.


Introduction
Promoting expertise and building trust through a self-branding strategy is becoming an indispensable part of a teacher's job and the education institutions' policy. This trend is driven by the commercialisation of the instructional services provided by teachers privately and on behalf of the educational institutions (Collins, 2012;Khamis et al., 2017;Kolbuszewska, 2017). However, the teachers are still beyond this trend because they still do not accept the potential of this activity, and habitually, they see it as unimportant (Shulman, 2019). Additionally, they do not want to cause any negative impact of using self-branding to damage their career (Labreque et al., 2011;Ward & Yates, 2013;Wetsch, 2012). Recent digital advances make the process of self-branding less skill-capped and time-consuming as they provide the user with the ready-made tools and strategies to work for the individual (Khedher, 2015;Kleppinger & Cain, 2015). Communication ethics is interpreted differently in education and instruction. These interpretations rely on theories (communication theory, moral psychology, and philosophy) and ethical frameworks such as democratic, humanitarian, liberal, or authoritarian and on the context of communication such as digital, interpersonal, or institutional. These are The study used a quasi-experimental design of the one-group post-test only type. It employed the exploratory research strategy. The study relied on four consequent stages that included a baseline study, a design of a Personal Branding Marathon (PBM), and running a PBM with the involvement of the Ethics Supervisory Committee, and reflection (see Figure 1). The role of the Committee was to oversee and control whether the teachers comply with the Code of Professional Responsibility for Teachers (with the focus on communication ethics) in their activities and communication. In the reflection stage, nine teacher volunteers were supposed to express their judgements about the importance of every specified component of the self-branding viewed from their perspective in terms of implementation. They were asked to use the Triangular Assessment Method (TAM) (Pérez-Rodríguez & Rojo-Alboreca, 2017) to perform that. They used the 5-point scale from 1 -'very important and needs a lot of effort to implement', to 5 -'not important at all'.

Description of a Personal Branding Marathon
The Marathon lasted a year, from February 2019 to the end of February 2020. It started with a contest run amongst three groups of 24, 24, and 25 participants randomly formed from the sampled teachers to design the Code of Professional Responsibility for Teachers (with the focus on communication ethics) (see the consolidated version in Appendix A). The Marathon was proceeded by the experts' audit of each sampled teacher's brand, if there was any, on the Internet, and analysing the students' verbal unstructured testimonials about certain teachers.
The 'listen or watch-and-do' approach was the key one on the Marathon. Teachers listened to the experts' recommendations, which could be the pre-recorded 3-8 min. videos or webinars or Zoom sessions, and instantly implemented them into practical actions. Then the effectiveness of the steps (or events, video, or posts) was analysed and tracked using incorporated (in Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, BrandYourself) statistical tools. These were as follows: the engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and follower growth, the number shares of posts; click-through rate (CTR); open rate.
The teachers were assigned to do specific work on professional storytelling, reputation management (with an emphasis on communication ethics), and tracking their personal brand growth. They met once in two weeks at online 5-7-people conferences to present their work and provide their feedback to their peers' work. The communication inside the sampled group was facilitated by the research team members using the group chat in Telegram.

Sampling
The participants for the experiment were drawn from the target population of 1932 people who were the in-service teachers of government-owned schools in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, and Cherkasy in Ukraine. A random sampling method was used to select 187 teachers from those who desired to participate. That number of the short-listed teachers was further reduced to 73 persons due to the use of exclusion criteria such as a reference for the school headmaster and from the mythologists for the Local (District) Education Authority, teaching experience, and results of the unstructured survey that was autonomously administered amongst the students of the selected schools. The sample size of 73 teachers was decided to make certain that the data analysis was manageable. The demographic data of the sampled individuals are presented in Table 1.

Ethical considerations
The informed consent was obtained from the participants before the study to address the related ethical issues and their agreement to participate in the experiment voluntarily. The participants were supposed to allow processing and making public their personal data in the quantity needed for the experiment.

Instruments
The qualitative and quantitative data for the study were collected using three instruments such as a semi-structured interview questionnaire (see Appendix B), a self-assessment checklist (see Appendix C), and an expert assessment checklist (see Appendix D) and TAM. The yielded data were processed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 25.0.0.1. Software.

Description of a semi-structured interview questionnaire (see Appendix B)
The interview was administered in groups of four-five participants by the expert panel and took mostly 30 minutes. If additional explanation were needed, the respondents were asked several follow-up open-ended questions. A standard audio recorder was used to collect the interviewee's responses which then were made a verbatim transcript. The context of some responses was clarified through paraphrasing. The themes were extracted using the thematic analysis of the words and sentence structures. The codes were then assigned to every theme utilising the Raven's Eye software which can be retrieved from https://ravens-eye.net/. This tool was used for this purpose because it was found to have been applied in several studies and recommended as a qualitative instrument (Masliy et al., 2020;Trybulkevych et al., 2020;2SEO, 2019). The themes were as follows: 'the notion of a brand', 'components of self-branding', 'tools, strategies, and tactics of personal branding', 'communication ethics in the success of a brand', 'indicators of the success of a brand'. This software was also used to process the responses.

Description of a checklist for a teacher personal brand self-assessment
The key questions were as follows: how much attention and effort the teacher pays to self-branding; whether they are determined and committed in their efforts; whether they use communication strategy relevantly, with long-term benefits in mind. The checklist included 12 questions covering different components of branding. The respondents were supposed to give 'yes' or 'no' answers honestly. Having done that, they were supposed to total up the number of their "yes" answers to find out whether they needed experts' assistance and how much of it they needed.

Description of an expert assessment checklist
This checklist was utilised after the PBM was completed, as a reflection stage in the study. The checklist included 10 questions on understanding the basics of personal branding and using the tools to promote the brand (with an emphasis on ethics). The checklist used a 5-point Likert scale for performance with 1 meaning 'far below standards', 2 -'below standards', 3 -'meets standards', 4 -'above standards', 5 -'far above standards'. The experts were supposed to produce recommendations for the sampled teachers on how they could further strengthen their brand and increased its perceived value.

Data analysis
The data was yielded from the Personal Branding Marathon using qualitative and quantitative instruments and was analysed using scales and judgements. The semi-structured interview was used to identify whether the respondents were homogeneous in understanding the concept and importance of personal branding, developing and maintaining their personal brand, and being ethically-minded in communication and behaviour with their target audience. The selfassessment checklist was chosen because it was important to know whether there were loopholes in teacher selfbranding and related to their ethics of communication which can be closed through the Personal Branding Marathon. The purpose of the checklist for expert assessment was to assess the progress of the sampled teachers in building their self-brand, with a particular focus on the ethics of communication, to have occurred when they participated in the Personal Branding Marathon. The TAM was utilised to identify what components of self-branding were seen by the teacher as important and how these were prioritised by them.
The interview questionnaire and both checklists were drafted, pre-tested, revised, and edited. The validity and reliability content and the discourse of the questionnaire and checklists were analysed and approved by the expert panel. Concerning the checklists, the experts used a 4-point scale to rate the worthiness, clarity, and precision of each question. The experts' judgements distributed from 1 that meant 'not clear' or 'not precise' or 'not worthy' up to 4 that meant 'totally clear' or 'absolutely precise' or 'really worthy.' The average rating scores were used to calculate the scalelevel content validity index (S-CVI/Ave) of all questions (Rodrigues et al., 2017). The experts recorded the relevance rating score as 1 if the question was rated by as 3 or 4. If the relevance rating score was 1 or 2, the question was recorded 0. After the experts have rated the questions in the checklists, the mean relevance scores for a self-assessment checklist were 3.21 and for a checklist of expert assessment was 3.35. Those scores meant that both checklists were valid. The codes to questions were assigned by the research team members using the recommendation of Veal and Darcy (2017). The TAM was validated by Pérez-Rodríguez and Rojo-Alboreca (2017).
The common method bias that could occur as a result of the use of two or more scales together was addressed by the research team who intermixed the items of different constructs on the scales and limited the length of the scales to comply with recommendations of Podsakoff (2012).

Results
Overall, the study found that the Personal Branding Marathon could substantially contribute to the teacher selfbranding in the settings of the digital environment if the ethics of communication is given paramount importance. The baseline study showed that the teachers lacked awareness and experience in building, communicating, and maintaining their personal brands and the Personal Branding Marathon addressed those issues.
When conducting the expert panel interview with the sampled teachers, the experts reported that (Interview Question 1) 73% of teachers associate personal branding with their educational background and recognition of the colleagues. Seventeen percent of the respondents referred to a teacher brand as a way of sharing (selling) their teaching experience. Ten percent of the interviewed defined the teacher's personal brand as a way to represent the educational organisation. Only 7% of the sampled teachers could provide the example of a teacher brand that served as an example to them. The experts found those interpretations to be misleading and quite inaccurate.
When responding to Interview Question 2, the participants mentioned such components as professional expertise, effective networking skills, reputation, teaching experience, and effective (trust-building) communication. They stated that those components could be helpful for them in their career as they are the prerequisites to gain recognition among their colleagues.
Among the tools, strategies, and tactics the respondents use to create or develop their personal brand, the participants mentioned taking part in the teacher contests (e.g. "Best Teacher of the Year"), conferences, other public events as a way to present themselves. Running or facilitation of the training sessions for the colleagues was also mentioned. The teachers stated that they could use the same approach to maintain their brand. The experts found these quite a limited set to build a strong brand.
Interestingly that 63% of the respondents (Interview Question 4) were certain the communication ethics was the prerequisite of a successful teacher brand because any manifestation of aggression or arrogance or disrespect can cause damage to the teacher's reputation and image. Thirty-one percent of the sampled teachers stated that the ethics of communication is a component of a general professional competence of a teacher and helps create a comfortable learning atmosphere for the student in the class. Six percent of the teachers just tentatively agreed that ethics of communication was important claiming that some students like authoritative class management style and perform in studies better if they are forced. Besides, all the respondents confessed that they did not strictly follow or comply with any Code of Ethics or Professional Conduct.
Interview Question 5 appeared to be the most challenging to the teachers and the answers were quite dispersed. The results of the self-assessment of a teacher personal brand using the designed checklist showed that the majority of the sampled teachers (n=67) scored less than 5, while 4 teachers scored between 5-8, and just 2 teachers scored between 9 and 12 (see Figure 2).
The result was suggestive in terms of the necessity of some kind of training for the teachers that might forward them in the right direction. Therefore, the Personal Branding Marathon was a feasible solution. The underperformance of the teachers in self-branding was also proved by the experts' audit of the teachers' self-branding activity using the checklist in Appendix C. The experts also noted that 70 teachers cause a negative reaction to them by the way they communicate to their students and colleagues, especially when they give feedback to their colleagues' teaching work or their private life. Some teachers confessed that they were gossiping about their colleagues and were envious of their 'success'.

Figure 2. The results of the self-assessment of a teacher personal brand using the designed checklist
After the Personal Branding Marathon was completed, the results of the experts' assessment of teachers' knowledge and skills in self-branding were promising ( Figure 3). The histogram was used to show whether the data drawn from the experts' assessment of teachers' knowledge and skills in self-branding are srewed left (low performance) or right (high performance). Descriptive analysis was performed using Jamovi software (Jamovi Project, 2020) Score <5 92% Scores 5-8 5% Scores 9-12 3% Score <5 Scores 5-8 Scores 9-12 European Journal of Educational Research 647

Figure 3. Results drawn from the experts' assessment of teachers' knowledge and skills in self-branding
As can be seen in Figure 3, the experts' judgements concerning the teacher awareness of branding and Labelling Theory (Q1) and awareness of their weaknesses and strengths (Q2) were mostly srewed right meaning performance to be 'above standard' and 'far above standard' The experts' judgments can be interpreted that the teachers were good at the theory of self-branding, but still needed assistance or peer support in their brand development and maintenance. The teacher's story-telling and networking performance were judged by the experts to be far better than previously but still needed development which implied that the quality of communication and the ethics of communicating their brand needed more time to improve.
The results of the judgments of 9 teacher volunteers about the importance of such components of self-branding as effective (trust-building) communication, professional expertise, effective networking skills, reputation, teaching experience that are viewed from their perspective in terms of implementation using the Triangular Assessment Method (TAM) are presented in Figure 3. The results presented in Figure 3 suggest that participation of the teachers in the Personal Branding Marathon brought them to the conclusion that effective (ethical and trust-building) communication was the key component of the branddevelopment and maintenance. The professional expertise was rated by the teachers as the second most important component which was followed by reputation. Surprisingly, teaching experience was rated as the least important component of self-branding.
Overall, due to the Marathon, the teachers became more professionally advantaged, self-efficient, and confident as individuals. This suggested that the Personal Branding Marathon could help the teacher to build-up a strong self-brand on the Internet and at the workplace. They also could substantially improve their communication skills in terms of ethics as the Marathon is supposed to involve a communication expert in this project.

Discussion
The study attempted to identify how the Personal Branding Marathon with the involvement of the Ethics Supervisory Committee could influence the teacher self-branding in the settings of the digital environment if the ethics of communication is given paramount importance.
The study is relevant to the previous findings and important to society at large. The novelty of the study lies in the way the teacher self-branding was organised and delivered as the teachers are typically 'hard to budge' (García & Weiss, 2019) and humble in such things as self-branding. The teachers are also too sensitive to what they say about them which also serves as the psychological obstacle to them in creating their brands. The Marathon created a community of individuals with similar needs and the environment facilitated and assisted by the experts to put the teachers in the 'point of no return' situation.
In the baseline study stage, it was found that teachers' interpretations of a personal brand were quite inaccurate and misleading. The results obtained through the expert panel interview with the sampled teachers showed that 73% of teachers misinterpreted personal branding and associated it with their educational background and recognition of the colleagues, or a way of sharing (selling) their teaching experience, or a way to represent the educational organisation. It was found that only 7% of the sampled teachers could provide the example of a teacher brand that served as an example to them. These findings go in line with Kolbuszewska (2017) and Hopps (2020) who found that teachers still ignore their online self and consider branding a marketing hype that is not for them.
The Personal Branding Marathon helped the teachers raise their awareness of self-branding, enhance/upgrade the tools and strategies of self-branding, and improve their communication and communication ethics, particularly. It was proved that due to the Marathon, the teachers became more professionally advantaged, self-efficient, and confident as individuals. This suggested that the Personal Branding Marathon could help the teacher build-up a strong self-brand on the Internet and at the workplace. They also could substantially improve their communication skills in terms of ethics as the Marathon is supposed to involve a communication expert in this project. The results go in line with Still (2015) and Commaille (2018) who state that self-branding is about communicating your 'strengths and uniqueness to a target audience'. The findings of this study are consistent with Sedereviciute-Paciauskiene (2018) who sees the potential in using Facebook for the teachers to present themselves in the media. Furthermore, the study results agree with Sethy (2018) who proves the essential role of professional ethics in performing their responsibilities and institutional obligations that are closely related to self-branding.
The components of self-branding mentioned by the participants and approved by the experts were as follows: professional expertise, effective networking skills, reputation, teaching experience, and effective (trust-building) communication. It was also identified that the teachers used a limited set of tools, strategies, and tactics to build and Teaching experience promote their personal brand. They underestimated the importance of following or complying with the Code of Ethics though they understood that communication ethics is an important component of their professional competence. The results of a teachers' self-assessment of a teacher's brand using the checklist showed that the participants underperformed in their self-branding and needed support to update and upgrade their self-branding activity. The experts also discovered that there was an issue of ethics of communication which disrupted the sampled teachers' selfbranding.
The study added to the conclusions of Jones (2017) who stated that branding is not a purely commercial phenomenon, it also promotes the reputation of a person or organisation and its ethical purpose is in establishing a balance between the truth about a person or an organisation and the perception of them in the community. The implications drawn from the study are consistent with Schawbel (2010) and Noble et al. (2010) who suggest that a competitive environment requires a teacher to boost the size, activity rate, and reach of their network.

Conclusion
The study found that there were loopholes in teacher self-branding and related to their ethics of communication which can be closed through the Personal Branding Marathon. The results obtained through the expert panel interview with the sampled teachers showed that 73% of teachers misinterpreted personal branding and associated it with their educational background and recognition of the colleagues, or a way of sharing (selling) their teaching experience, or a way to represent the educational organisation. It was found that only 7% of the sampled teachers could provide the example of a teacher brand that served as an example to them.

Code of Professional Responsibility for Teachers (with the focus on communication ethics) Preamble
Consistent with the norms of morality and professional ethics, the Code of Professional Responsibility for Teachers shall serve as a basis for the ethical conduct of a teacher towards the student, the profession, and the community. The Code stipulates that the teacher acts in the best interests of a student who is the primary aim for the existence of the teaching profession. Thus, the teacher accepts that the physical, mental, and spiritual health of a student and their socialisation are of primary importance. Additionally, the teacher is committed to following the principles of respectbased communication to a student, responsibility to the community, and "primum non nocere" ["first, cause no harm"].

Ethical conduct of a teacher towards the student
The professional teacher shall: • Treat every student with respect to human dignity and avoiding any offensive or discriminatory formulations in the way they engage them in learning, interact, or communicate information.
• Maintain the confidentiality of all information they obtained about the student in the course of the educational process and out-of-class communication.
• Not interpret the student's opinions, judgements, or ideas in a humiliating way.
• Avoid moral, emotional, or verbal bullying in communication to establish dominance (leadership) in class.

Ethical conduct of a teacher towards the profession
The professional teacher: • Accepts responsibility for their continuous professional self-development.
• Strives for teaching effectiveness.
• Accepts professional criticism from their peers responding it respectfully.
• Does not accept any gift or favor that would cause misleading judgements, decisions, or actions.

Ethical conduct of a teacher towards the community
The professional teacher shall: • Be an example for the students.
• Communicate the community their teaching goals and expectations in a clear and non-intrusive manner.
• Strive to bring value to the community.
• Create a safe environment for every student.
• Create a democratic learning environment with equal opportunities for the students.
• Teach the students to be active citizens.
• Not be involved in gossiping, sharing false facts (claims), or gambling.
• Not pursue personal gains from their work in an educational institution.