Analysis of professional teaching ethics among prospective teachers enrolled in undergraduate education degree programs

Professional teaching ethics is an important dimension of initial teacher education, particularly for fostering social responsibility, democratic coexistence, and educational commitment. This study examines how ethical-professional values, dispositions, attitudes, and commitments are reflected in the self-reported responses of 1117 prospective teachers enrolled in undergraduate education degree programs, using a descriptive, cross-sectional, and ex post facto design. The Questionnaire for the Assessment of Professional Teaching Ethics was administered, and two complementary person-centered approaches—K-Means and Gaussian mixture modeling (GMM)—were used to identify patterns in participants' ethical-professional orientations. The analyses supported three focal descriptive response profiles characterized by higher, moderate, and lower endorsement of ethical-professional dispositions, although profile prevalence and individual assignments differed across clustering approaches. Profile membership was significantly associated with gender, Indigenous-group membership, degree program, institution, and country in both K-Means and GMM analyses, whereas some associations were method-specific. These findings should be interpreted cautiously given the exploratory, cross-sectional, and self-report nature of the study. The results indicate heterogeneous patterns of ethical-professional orientations among prospective teachers and support a context-sensitive understanding of professional teaching ethics in initial teacher education. Overall, the study highlights the relevance of addressing professional teaching ethics explicitly in teacher education while recognizing variation in students' ethical-professional orientations and educational contexts.