Paper abstract Teachers’ professional agency is central to their capacity to adapt to educational change, engage in continuous professional learning, and sustain their well-being in increasingly complex work environments. Professional agency comprises teachers’ motivation, beliefs, and strategies for learning at work. Although professional agency has been conceptualized as a relatively stable individual characteristic, growing evidence suggests that it is dynamically shaped by the social and organizational contexts in which teachers work. The aim of this study was to examine how teacher communities shape teachers’ experiences of professional agency over time. This longitudinal study examined how teachers’ experiences of their work community relate to the development of professional agency across a two-year period. The study focuses on four interrelated dimensions of teacher community: collaboration across professional boundaries, shared co-regulation strategies for managing workload, collective efficacy, and the emotional tone of the community as reflected in cynicism toward the teacher community. The three-wave survey data were collected in the context of Finland’s national curriculum reform between 2016 and 2018 and include responses from 1,543 teachers working in 75 comprehensive schools in Finland. The measures demonstrated good construct validity and longitudinal measurement invariance, which enabled robust comparisons across time points. The analytical approach was based on a random intercept cross-lagged panel model, allowing the separation of stable between-person differences from within-person changes over time. This approach provided insight into how fluctuations in teachers’ experiences of their work community are associated with changes in professional agency. The results indicate that shared practices and emotional states within teacher communities are strongly interconnected, yet their associations with professional agency are partly contradictory. Collective efforts to co-regulate workload were found to strengthen teachers’ professional agency over time. However, an increased emphasis on reflective practices appeared to weaken collective efficacy and intensify cynicism toward the community. Both collective efficacy and cynicism showed strong autoregressive effects, suggesting that deviations from individuals’ typical levels tend to persist over time. Importantly, a strong sense of collective efficacy emerged as a protective factor against cynicism and was further reinforced through active boundary-crossing and shared learning beyond the teacher community. The findings highlight the importance of balancing reflective practices with concrete, efficacy-building actions in professional learning and school development. They underscore the need for school leaders and policymakers to intentionally foster collective efficacy and supportive community practices in order to sustain teachers’ professional agency during periods of educational change.

Yli-Pietilä, R., Soini, T., Pietarinen, J., & Pyhältö, K. (2024). Profiles of teacher’s professional agency in the classroom across time. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research.