Exploring Beginning Teachers’ Professional Agency In The Context Of A Teacher Traineeship

Author(s):

Jacobiene Meirink(presenting / submitting)Anna van der Want

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 01 A, Teacher Leadership as Professional Agency

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-22

13:15-14:45

Room:

K3.17

Chair:

Maria Assunção Flores

Contribution

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that the role of the teacher is of great influence when it comes to the quality of student learning (Priestley, Biesta, Phillippou & Robinson, 2015). Consequently, teacher agency gainedincreased interest among policy makers, educational organizations and researchers (Hökkä & Etelapelto, 2014; Vähäsantanen, 2015). In European countries, like the Netherlands, teachers in schools are expected to become teacher leaders and use their agency for professional development and school development. Hence, several initiatives (for example, Professional Learning Communities, scholarships for teachers to do research, etc.) are being deployed to emphasize the need to improve the quality of teachers to help them to become teachers with agentic capacity who can take leadership roles. Another example of such an initiative is a teacher traineeship. Similar to programs like Teach First and Teach for America, in the Netherlands, traineeships are established to motivate young excellent academics to work in education rather than an employment in the business world. In a two-year program the trainees work two or three days per week as teacher in a school for secondary education. The other days they follow a regular university teacher-training program and master classes specifically aimed at teacher leadership skills. The goal of the traineeship is to educate young professionals who can both direct their own professional development as well as contribute to school development. In other words, trainees are expected to become agentic teachers.

Nevertheless, empirical evidence is lacking on how agency is established in teacher trainees’ working environment.

In research on teacher agency, differences can be found in how agency is described or defined. In this study we assume that agency can be characterized with a dynamic and interactive perspective. Teacher agency can change over time (Priestley, et al, 2015) and develops in a continuous interaction (Kessels, 2012). De Rue & Ashford (2010) refer to this interaction process by arguing that agency includes a view on the teaching profession in which teachers take responsibility for the quality of their teaching while claiming and granting their leadership and ownership accordingly.

In a context of a teacher traineeship it is interesting to explore how beginning teachers perceive their agency and how they enact one the goals of the traineeship: to contribute to school development. Although these beginning teachers work in schools for secondary education, they are still in training and need to develop their knowledge, skills and identity. At the same time they are expected to be agentic teachers who take responsibility for their own professional development and to contribute to the quality of education in their schools.

In this paper we therefore address the following research questions:

- How do beginning teachers experience professional agency to contribute to school development in the context of a traineeship?

- How do school leader perceive professional agency of beginning teachers to contribute to school development in the context of a traineeship?

Method

This research can be characterized as a descriptive, exploratory study. Eighteen trainees from three different teacher education institutes agreed to participate in this interview study. We opted for an instrumental collective case study design (Stake, 1995). Therefore, the focus was not on the individual respondents (trainees and school leaders) but their ‘stories’ were used to inform us on how teacher professional agency unfolds in the context of a traineeship. Built on our hypotheses that the perception of teacher agency can change over time we interviewed them after their first and second year of teaching. In the interviews the teachers were asked to describe experiences at school (cf. key experiences in a story line method (Meijer, de Graaf & Meirink, 2011)) in which they felt agency for their own professional development as for school development. In the second interview we focused on the development of teachers with respect to perceived professional agency. For this purpose, a summary of their responses in the first interview was constructed. These summaries were presented to the teachers accompanied with the question if any changes in their experienced agency had occurred and if so, how these changes could be characterized. After the first interview we asked the participating teachers who we could contact in their school to study the school leaders perspective on teacher professional agency. Based on these contacts 13 school leaders were interviewed. The school leaders were asked how they perceived teachers’ professional agency in general at their school and more specifically the agency of the trainee that was also participated in this study. Furthermore, they were asked to report on how they thought beginning teachers contributed to school development in the context of a traineeship. The analysis of the interviews consisted of several steps. Based on a thorough read of the interviews with the teachers after year one, a coding scheme was developed which was discussed with experts in this domain. The interviews with the trainees after the second year and the interviews with the school leaders were coded with the same coding scheme and also focused on possible changes in perceived agency. To analyze similarities and differences between trainees and between school leaders and trainees all codes were summarized in matrices. To ensure the quality of the analysis all steps were conducted by two researches that continuously discussed the applied codes until agreement was reached.

Expected Outcomes

Beginning teachers differed in how they perceived their professional agency. Their experiences could be characterized on two types or dimensions of agency: 1) receiving agency and 2) creating agency. With respect to receiving agency, a few teachers reported that they experienced possibilities to contribute to school development, and more specifically to the development of new lesson materials within their own subject matter department. In general, the teachers differed in the extent to which they made use of the possibilities they received. Regarding creating agency, the trainees varied in the degree to which their efforts to contribute to school development were considered effective. Most of the trainees reported that they experienced difficulties in claiming or creating their professional agency with respect to team or school development. Often they explained that their ideas for experimenting with new materials or suggestions for implementing new methods were not agreed upon by their more experienced colleagues. This finding seems to be in line with previous research in which argued that teachers who take leadership roles and aim for innovation are often accompanied by conflicting situations with colleagues (Wilson, 1993). According to the school leaders the teachers trainees did not take the existing beliefs of their colleagues into account and they needed to learn how to do that more in the future in order to show more effective agentic behavior. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that beginning teachers in the context of a traineeship experience professional agency to contribute to school development. However, they need to develop knowledge and skills for this purpose. To optimize these competencies, teacher education programs could consider including this more explicitly in their curriculum. And finally, school leaders should address issue this in an ongoing dialogue with their trainee teachers.

References

DeRue, D.S. & Ashford, S.J. (2010). Who will lead and who will follow? A social process of leadership identity construction in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 35, 627-647. Hökkä, P., & Eteläpelto, A. (2014). Seeking New Perspectives on the Development of Teacher Education A Study of the Finnish Context. Journal of Teacher Education, 65(1), 39-52. Kessels, J. W. M. (2012). Leiderschapspraktijken in een professionele ruimte [Leadership practices in a professional space]. Inaugurele Rede. Open Universiteit, Heerlen. Meijer, P.C., de Graaf, B., & Meirink, J.A. (2011). Key experiences in student teachers’ development. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 17, 115-129. Priestley, M., Biesta, G.J.J., Philippou, S. & Robinson, S. (2015). The teacher and the curriculum: exploring teacher agency. In D. Wyse, L. Hayward & J. Pandya (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Stake, R. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Vähäsantanen, K. (2015). Professional agency in the stream of change: Understanding educational change and teachers' professional identities. Teaching and Teacher Education, 47, 1-12. Wilson, M. (1993). The search for teacher leaders. Educational Leadership, 50(6), 24–27.

Author Information

Jacobiene Meirink (presenting / submitting)

Leiden University, Netherlands, The

Anna van der Want