In his book The Power of Habit, journalist Charles Duhigg explains that “giving employees a sense of agency—a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority—can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.”
No place is this truer than in schools. Research finds that teachers who feel like they have greater classroom autonomy report higher levels of job satisfaction. And in turn, the more satisfied teachers are with their jobs, the more likely they are to stay in them.
Yet numerous factors—from book bans to standardized testing to top-down compliance mandates—have an outsized influence on what happens within classroom walls. The subsequent “weakening of teacher agency,” says researcher and author Andrea Terrero Gabbadon, “has wide-ranging effects in education,” including high rates of turnover, particularly among teachers of color. “Many teachers attribute turnover to feeling burned out, unsupported, and disempowered as autonomous decision makers.”
This issue of EL aims to help schools put power back into teachers’ hands. The articles walk school and district leaders through ways to cultivate teacher agency—and guide teachers in how to exercise and strengthen their own agency, even (and especially) within restrictive settings.
People show up differently when they feel like they’re being heard.
As educator Kass Minor explains, “Teacher agency is fostered in spaces that position teachers as intellectual beings, change agents, and community leaders." To create such spaces, the authors in this issue suggest, leaders can do several things. For example, leaders can design professional learning that builds teachers’ capacity to exercise “principled resistance." They can give all teachers in a building, including paraprofessionals, the platform to share their expertise. And they can avoid micromanaging teachers by limiting compliance-related tasks that suck up teachers’ time and don’t contribute to their sense of professional empowerment.
By the same token, as several articles illustrate, it’s possible for teachers to preserve or “recapture” their own autonomy. When working within a required curriculum or prescriptive program, says education consultant and author Mike Anderson, teachers might not be able to change what they teach, but they can often change how they teach it.
“Sometimes it’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission,” writes Anderson, to make “some quiet changes for the benefit of your students without asking about it first.” For instance, teachers might make small adjustments like reordering lessons to improve cohesion, skipping repetitive lessons, and repeating lessons for students who need more time to grasp a concept.
Both the examples of autonomy-boosting companies Duhigg shares in The Power of Habit and the articles in this issue reinforce that people show up differently when they feel like they’re being heard. With teacher agency increasingly under attack or being neglected, we have reached a tipping point. It’s time for all of us to listen.
➛ How does your school
encourage teachers to be
activists for themselves or
their students?
➛ The authors provide a few
ways that leaders can set
the stage for empowering PD.
What is one other way you
can think of that leaders can
support teachers to become
smart activists?
➛ How would your teaching change
if it were “a new experiment each
and every day”?
➛ What elements of rough draft
teaching do you already practice?
What new element can you add?
➛ Does your classroom or school
offer judgment-free zones that
celebrate learning and growth?
End Notes
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1 Olsen, A., & Mason, E. (2023, March). Perceptions of autonomy: Differential job satisfaction for general and special educators using a nationally representative dataset. Teaching and Teacher Education, 123.
