Empowering Teachers: Autonomy, Agency, and Accountability in the Teaching Profession

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TEACHERS AS
PROFESSIONALS:
AUTONOMY, AGENCY
&
 ACCOUNTABILITY
 
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Yusuf Sayed
 
 
OUTLINE
 
2
 
“The quality of an education system cannot
exceed the quality of its teachers”
 (
Barber and
Mourshed, 2007:19)
  
useful but only partly true
Teachers account for about 75% of
education budgets
“…a number of studies have found that
teacher effectiveness is one of the most
important school-based predictors of student
learning after home background. In the
classrooms of the most effective teachers,
students from disadvantaged backgrounds
learn at the same rate as those from
advantaged backgrounds” (Hamre & Pianta,
2005)
Teachers tend to be held in high esteem at
socio-cultural level by the local communities.
 
3
 
TEACHERS AT THE CORE
OF GLOBAL AGENDA
 
 
“2030, substantially increase the supply
of qualified teachers, including through
international cooperation for teacher
training in developing countries,
especially least developed countries and
small island developing States” (Target
4.c, United Nations, 
2016
).
 
“Revitalize the teaching profession to
ensure quality and relevance at all levels”
(African Union Continental Education
Strategy, the 2063 Framework)
 
4
 
INCHEON DECLARATION
(2015)
 
We will ensure that teachers and educators are
empowered, adequately recruited, well-trained,
professionally qualified, motivated and
supported within well-resourced, efficient and
effectively governed systems
”.
 
5
undefined
 
UNPACKING AUTONOMY,
AGENCY, AND ACCOUNTABILITY
 
 
6
 
 
C
ontestation about what it means to be a
teacher and to be part of the teaching profession
D
octors
 lawyers
Workers
Nurse ,
And/or ….
 
7
 
8
 
 
9
 
THE IDEA OF
AGENCY
 
 
 
 
Agency, in other words, is not something that people can have; it is
something that people do or, more precisely, something they
achieve (Biesta & Tedder, 2006). It denotes a ‘quality’ of the
engagement of actors with temporal-relational contexts-for-action,
not a quality of the actors themselves. Viewing agency in such
terms helps us to understand how humans are able to be reflexive
and creative, acting counter to societal constraints, but also how
individuals are enabled and constrained by their social and material
environments.
 
 
Priestley et al 2015
 
10
 
 
teacher agency  is , conditioned in differentiated ways by the
context teachers  find themselves in. There are 3 interrelated
ways in which this is
I.
experiential determination. Social class and wealth
determines much of the lived realities s such as where
individuals live, where they go to school, and who
their friends are. This segregated experiential
determination using the fault line of social class is
overlaid with issues of race, gender, ethnicity and
geographical history.  Teacher agency is thus to a large
extent shaped by the social class determined basis of
the everyday lived experience.
 
11
 
ii.
Agency is determined within
institutions teachers work. What it
means to be a teacher continues to be
shaped by contours of colonial and
apartheid institutional configurations
that are overlaid by new forms of
inequities.
 
12
 
iii.
Agency is determined by the
professional support that
teachers receives (and the
quality thereof). ITE, NQT, and
CPD curricula shapes the ways
in which agency is activated,
realised, and manifest in school
and classroom contexts
 
13
 
 
Context thus punctuate forms
of agency facilitating and
inhibiting it in contingent and
unequal measures. These
determinations suggest the
agency of teachers then is
enacted in spaces that are
segmented and separated, with
tools that are shaped by
experience and institution, and
in ways that are productive in
as much as they are barren.
 
14
 
ACCOUNTABILITY: WHO, WHAT FOR WHAT
PURPOSE , WHAT MEASURES & HOW
 
ii.
For what
Learning outcomes –
narrow to broad
Safe and inclusive
learning spaces
Societal benefits??
 
15
 
iii.
What Purpose
iv.
External – Compliance,
parliament - spending to
regulations
v.
Internal: leaner achievement
and life chance progression,
quality of teaching
 
 
iv.
What measures
Learner assessment scores
Peer/external  rating
according to teacher/teaching
standards
Parental/learner satisfaction
rating
Self measures
 
16
 
DIVERSE ACCOUNTABILITY FORMS
 
 
Bureaucratic and
managerialist
accountability
 
vs.
 
Democratic and
professional forms
of accountability
 
17
undefined
 
AUTONOMY, AGENCY AND
THE KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS
 
 
18
 
IS THERE A
PROFESSIONAL
KNOWLEDGE
BASE
UNDERLYING
TEACHERS’
WORK?
 
 
No general agreement on whether or not there is a professional knowledge
base:
GEP frameworks have led to recruitment of para teachers – with some
skills training
GEP frameworks have also promulgated ideas about “good teacher”
National policies have suggested university/school based TE
 
 
Multiple, competing, inconsistent, shifting and evolving ideas of knowledge
base for teachers
 
 
However, each of these views is based on a frameworks of assumptions
about teacher knowledge – even if knowledge is equated with minimum
skills or outcomes
 
 
Core to the knowledge claim is that teachers make a difference to what
leaners’ learn in the classroom pedagogy – the unknown – which we need to
know more about
 
19
undefined
 
20
 
A HEURISTIC FRAMEWORK FOR F TEACHERS' AGENCY
 
21
undefined
 
CONCEPTIONS OF TEACHERS
AND AUTONOMY AND AGENCY
 
 
22
 
SHIFT IN
GLOBAL
GOVERNANCE
OF TEACHERS
 
 
Mechanisms of global governance of teachers are being
transformed:
 
From education as (national) development and standard
setting to learning as (individual) development and
competitive comparison.
 
Orchestrated by key global agencies
 
Based on the argument – there is a crisis in the teaching
profession
 
The crises could be solved by the global actors through
teacher governance
 
23
 
 
CHANGING IDEAS OF A GOOD  TEACHER
 
24
 
CONCEPTIONS OF ‘GOOD’ TEACHER AND ‘GOOD’ TEACHING
(CETE, 2021)
 
 
25
 
 
The neo-liberal shift in education has increasingly subjected teachers
to managerialist forms of regulation and accountability. Payment by
results, performance related pay, increased auditing of teacher work,
insecure and temporary work contracts and recruitment of para
teachers frame teachers as the problems requiring surveillance.
Professional autonomy and self-regulation is supplanted by externally
driven forms of regulation with mechanisms and tools that narrowly
measure teacher efficacy by learner assessment results.
 
Sifts the locus of blame onto individual teachers. In individualising
education failure as the failure of teachers and teaching, and in
ignoring  the socio-political and cultural context in which teachers
work, the state removes itself from the sphere of public critique; state
failure and the increasing commodification of education in a neo-
liberal capitalist order are removed as objects of critical engagement.
 
26
 
 
 
Discourses of derision balanced by discourses of salvation and hope.
In the former, policy and media portray teacher behaviour, teacher
knowledge, teacher skills and teacher attitudes and values negatively
to suggest that they do not work for the good of society or for their
learners or communities. In the latter discourse, national and policy
media reach out to teachers to valorise their labour and invoke a
historical moment of teacher status in the past. Policy attention
pertains to teacher professional development to address both the
‘policy problem’ of teacher knowledge, skills and dispositions and, at
the same, to empower teachers to be part of the ‘policy solution’.
 
27
 
TEACHER – BEYOND WESTERN CENTRIC
NOTIONS
 
 
Decolonial meanings – e.g 
guru/ustaad/Griot 
 as referring to
influential and popular experts is widespread in living traditions of
South Asia/Africa, secular and religious, indicative of the existence of
formally recognised role of pedagogues and educational systems in
pre and post-colonial times. It involves the transmission of a range of
knowledge forms in maily oral forms  – religious; spiritual;
metaphysical; epistemological and rhetorical; state-craft and law;
sciences such as medicine, architecture and astrology; grammar and
linguistics; as well as performance (music, dance and drama) and
visual arts and crafts.
 
These epistemic structures are often gendered, caste-based, ethnic-
based and religiously circumscribed, with injunctions and proscriptions
on who is worthy of receiving particular knowledge, which in turn
maps onto the social stratifications and hierarchies
 
28
undefined
 
AUTONOMY, AGENCY AND
TEACHER STANDARDS
 
 
29
 
 
EI/UNESCO Global  Framework of 
Professional Teaching
Standards
 (2019)
 
30
 
REGULATION
AND
SURVEILLANCE
 
Robinson (2012) discuses the generation of standards
as  of wider set of neo-liberal reforms which seek to
regulate and surveil teachers
 
Raewyn Connell speak about an audit culture –
breaking the idea of teachers as reflexive
professional, transformative intellectuals
 
Teacher need to engage with external, public facing
accountability – is this a move to or away from public
accountability
 
The paradox: regulate teacher but standards cannot
be negotiated without teachers – a mixture of
ownership by associations/unions and control
 
31
 
STANDARDS
AND
LICENSING
 
32
undefined
 
MOVING FORWARD
 
 
33
 
BALANCING
AUTONOMY AND
AGENCY WITH
PROFESSIONAL
AND
DEMOCRATIC
ACCOUNTABILITY
 
A new vision needed
Moving beyond an idealised, romanticised
account of the past and the contemporary
neo-liberal thrust of surveillance accompanied
by a narrow instrumentalist view of teachers
and their work,, requires that a critical
humanist agenda be adopted towards
teachers, their work and their professional
development. A critical humanist agenda
understands the practices of teaching and
teacher education as a relational activity
involving teachers in multiple relations taking
a normative stance in favour of social justice
and equity in and through education
 
34
 
35
 
36
 
 
Comments and questions
 
37
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Why quality?

Why teachers?

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The significance of teachers in education is highlighted, emphasizing autonomy, agency, and accountability. The role of teachers in student learning outcomes and the global agenda for teacher empowerment and quality education is discussed.


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  1. TEACHERS AS PROFESSIONALS: AUTONOMY, AGENCY & ACCOUNTABILITY SACE INAUGURAL NATIONAL TEACHERS CONFERENCE 2023 The teaching profession in our hands, our voices and plight matter 20 and 21 April 2023 Yusuf Sayed

  2. Importance of teachers and teaching Unpacking autonomy, agency & accountability Autonomy, agency and knowledge claims OUTLINE Autonomy, agency and teacher/teaching standards Moving Forward 2

  3. The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers (Barber and Mourshed, 2007:19) useful but only partly true Teachers account for about 75% of education budgets a number of studies have found that teacher effectiveness is one of the most important school-based predictors of student learning after home background. In the classrooms of the most effective teachers, students from disadvantaged backgrounds learn at the same rate as those from advantaged backgrounds (Hamre & Pianta, 2005) Teachers tend to be held in high esteem at socio-cultural level by the local communities. 3

  4. TEACHERS AT THE CORE OF GLOBAL AGENDA 2030, substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, including through international cooperation for teacher training in developing countries, especially least developed countries and small island developing States (Target 4.c, United Nations, 2016). Revitalize the teaching profession to ensure quality and relevance at all levels (African Union Continental Education Strategy, the 2063 Framework) 4

  5. INCHEON DECLARATION (2015) We will ensure that teachers and educators are empowered, adequately recruited, well-trained, professionally qualified, motivated and supported within well-resourced, efficient and effectively governed systems . 5

  6. UNPACKING AUTONOMY, AGENCY, AND ACCOUNTABILITY

  7. Contestation about what it means to be a teacher and to be part of the teaching profession Doctors lawyers Workers Nurse , And/or . 7

  8. What a teacher is is based on several claims Knowledge claim Autonomy claim Agency claim Service orientation claim Belonging claim Within context 8

  9. A defined body of knowledge Service motive Restricted entry Profession a focus on the core Code of conduct/ethics Professional association Involvement and determinati on in key policy maters - social dialogue 9

  10. Agency, in other words, is not something that people can have; it is something that people do or, more precisely, something they achieve (Biesta & Tedder, 2006). It denotes a quality of the engagement of actors with temporal-relational contexts-for-action, not a quality of the actors themselves. Viewing agency in such terms helps us to understand how humans are able to be reflexive and creative, acting counter to societal constraints, but also how individuals are enabled and constrained by their social and material environments. THE IDEA OF AGENCY Priestley et al 2015 10

  11. teacher agency is , conditioned in differentiated ways by the context teachers find themselves in. There are 3 interrelated ways in which this is I. experiential determination. Social class and wealth determines much of the lived realities s such as where individuals live, where they go to school, and who their friends are. This segregated experiential determination using the fault line of social class is overlaid with issues of race, gender, ethnicity and geographical history. Teacher agency is thus to a large extent shaped by the social class determined basis of the everyday lived experience. 11

  12. ii. Agency is determined within institutions teachers work. What it means to be a teacher continues to be shaped by contours of colonial and apartheid institutional configurations that are overlaid by new forms of inequities. 12

  13. iii.Agency is determined by the professional support that teachers receives (and the quality thereof). ITE, NQT, and CPD curricula shapes the ways in which agency is activated, realised, and manifest in school and classroom contexts 13

  14. Context thus punctuate forms of agency facilitating and inhibiting it in contingent and unequal measures. These determinations suggest the agency of teachers then is enacted in spaces that are segmented and separated, with tools that are shaped by experience and institution, and in ways that are productive in as much as they are barren. 14

  15. ACCOUNTABILITY: WHO, WHAT FOR WHAT PURPOSE , WHAT MEASURES & HOW ii. For what To Who: Learners? Parents? Community? State? Learning outcomes narrow to broad Safe and inclusive learning spaces Societal benefits?? 15

  16. iii. What Purpose iv. What measures Learner assessment scores iv. External Compliance, parliament - spending to regulations Peer/external rating according to teacher/teaching standards v. Internal: leaner achievement and life chance progression, quality of teaching Parental/learner satisfaction rating Self measures 16

  17. Self regulation Bureaucratic and managerialist accountability vs. Democratic and professional forms of accountability School/Community regulation State regulation Professional Body regulation 17 DIVERSE ACCOUNTABILITY FORMS

  18. AUTONOMY, AGENCY AND THE KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS

  19. No general agreement on whether or not there is a professional knowledge base: GEP frameworks have led to recruitment of para teachers with some skills training GEP frameworks have also promulgated ideas about good teacher National policies have suggested university/school based TE IS THERE A PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE Multiple, competing, inconsistent, shifting and evolving ideas of knowledge base for teachers BASE UNDERLYING TEACHERS WORK? However, each of these views is based on a frameworks of assumptions about teacher knowledge even if knowledge is equated with minimum skills or outcomes Core to the knowledge claim is that teachers make a difference to what leaners learn in the classroom pedagogy the unknown which we need to know more about 19

  20. Knowledges about learners and context Courses about Theory, foundations of education Knowledges about the affective Course that support the development of diversity and values - includes courses such as inclusive education, social justice, social cohesion Knowledge about areas/phase Clear aims and goals for the programme aligned to national curricula Teaching practicum (supporting professiaonlly teacher practice in the form of clinical practice is core to an ITE programme design) Knowledges about teaching as a profession Courses that enhance understading of teacher status, roles, codes of conduct, laws - courses that support that development of teaching as a profession Knowledges about teaching courses that support the acquisition of content and pedagogic content knowledge of teachers (CK, PCK) Knowledges about general pedagogy Course about general pedagogy such as classroom management (eg. Professional didactics module) 20

  21. A HEURISTIC FRAMEWORK FOR F TEACHERS' AGENCY Individual - knowledge, competence, beliefs and values Teacher Agency and leadership for effective teaching Context/structural - nature of community, policy, system governance Relational - peers, school leaders, Representational - involvement in policy making/determinat ion, say over working conditions 21

  22. CONCEPTIONS OF TEACHERS AND AUTONOMY AND AGENCY

  23. Mechanisms of global governance of teachers are being transformed: From education as (national) development and standard setting to learning as (individual) development and competitive comparison. SHIFT IN GLOBAL Orchestrated by key global agencies GOVERNANCE OF TEACHERS Based on the argument there is a crisis in the teaching profession The crises could be solved by the global actors through teacher governance 23

  24. CHANGING IDEAS OF A GOOD TEACHER Competent Teacher Model (2000s) Reflective Practitioner Model (1970s) Scholar- Teacher Model (1960s) 24

  25. CONCEPTIONS OF GOOD TEACHER AND GOOD TEACHING (CETE, 2021) Malaysia Hong Kong Who sets the standards Ministry of Education Committee on Professional Development of Teachers and Principals (COTAP); Council on Professional Conduct in Education (CPC) & Education Bureau (EDB) Nature of the organisation Central Government Non-statutory, advisory role Required to update their students with current developments in technology, current affairs of the world and develop their entrepreneurial skills so they can compete with the changing world. Expected knowledge and skills for practice Thorough subject-content knowledge, knowledge of using ICT for teaching, design and implement teaching methodologies that are rooted in research Belief in God, display patriotism, patience, fairness, competitiveness, being active and healthy, interpersonal and intrapersonal skills Beliefs and values required of teachers Not specified No licensing/registration. Public school teachers need to undergo a 3 three year probation as education officers and are given permanent appointments based on performance As per the Education Ordinance, which empowers EDB for teacher registration and de-registration based on meeting the standards Regulations 25

  26. The neo-liberal shift in education has increasingly subjected teachers to managerialist forms of regulation and accountability. Payment by results, performance related pay, increased auditing of teacher work, insecure and temporary work contracts and recruitment of para teachers frame teachers as the problems requiring surveillance. Professional autonomy and self-regulation is supplanted by externally driven forms of regulation with mechanisms and tools that narrowly measure teacher efficacy by learner assessment results. Sifts the locus of blame onto individual teachers. In individualising education failure as the failure of teachers and teaching, and in ignoring the socio-political and cultural context in which teachers work, the state removes itself from the sphere of public critique; state failure and the increasing commodification of education in a neo- liberal capitalist order are removed as objects of critical engagement. 26

  27. Discourses of derision balanced by discourses of salvation and hope. In the former, policy and media portray teacher behaviour, teacher knowledge, teacher skills and teacher attitudes and values negatively to suggest that they do not work for the good of society or for their learners or communities. In the latter discourse, national and policy media reach out to teachers to valorise their labour and invoke a historical moment of teacher status in the past. Policy attention pertains to teacher professional development to address both the policy problem of teacher knowledge, skills and dispositions and, at the same, to empower teachers to be part of the policy solution . 27

  28. TEACHER BEYOND WESTERN CENTRIC NOTIONS Decolonial meanings e.g guru/ustaad/Griot as referring to influential and popular experts is widespread in living traditions of South Asia/Africa, secular and religious, indicative of the existence of formally recognised role of pedagogues and educational systems in pre and post-colonial times. It involves the transmission of a range of knowledge forms in maily oral forms religious; spiritual; metaphysical; epistemological and rhetorical; state-craft and law; sciences such as medicine, architecture and astrology; grammar and linguistics; as well as performance (music, dance and drama) and visual arts and crafts. These epistemic structures are often gendered, caste-based, ethnic- based and religiously circumscribed, with injunctions and proscriptions on who is worthy of receiving particular knowledge, which in turn maps onto the social stratifications and hierarchies 28

  29. AUTONOMY, AGENCY AND TEACHER STANDARDS

  30. EI/UNESCO Global Framework of Professional Teaching Standards (2019) 30

  31. Robinson (2012) discuses the generation of standards as of wider set of neo-liberal reforms which seek to regulate and surveil teachers Raewyn Connell speak about an audit culture breaking the idea of teachers as reflexive professional, transformative intellectuals REGULATION AND SURVEILLANCE Teacher need to engage with external, public facing accountability is this a move to or away from public accountability The paradox: regulate teacher but standards cannot be negotiated without teachers a mixture of ownership by associations/unions and control 31

  32. The act of teacher accreditation licensing Should standards be linked to licensing? STANDARDS AND LICENSING Should professional development be linked to licensing Should standards be linked to professional development? 32

  33. MOVING FORWARD

  34. A new vision needed Moving beyond an idealised, romanticised account of the past and the contemporary neo-liberal thrust of surveillance accompanied by a narrow instrumentalist view of teachers and their work,, requires that a critical humanist agenda be adopted towards teachers, their work and their professional development. A critical humanist agenda understands the practices of teaching and teacher education as a relational activity involving teachers in multiple relations taking a normative stance in favour of social justice and equity in and through education BALANCING AUTONOMY AND AGENCY WITH PROFESSIONAL AND DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY 34

  35. Agency of teachers requires involving teachers in Agency of teachers requires education systems that: Policy determination Identifying what they need professionally, but also what is appropriate to their own learning Functioning and effective Are supportive of the work of teachers in their diverse school and classroom context Transparent, fair and equitable in decision making Provide teachers with regular, and sustainable professional development including encouraging teachers to with their peers and in communities of practice 35

  36. Agency of teachers requires teachers to render themselves as accountable professionals to Learners for their teaching To parents and the state to account for their professional work [balancing intrinsic and extrinsic forms of accountability] Agency of teachers requires teacher autonomy and choice in Mediating the curriculum in their classroom Pedagogic enactment 36

  37. Comments and questions 37

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