Prioritizing Teacher Agency: A Tool for School Improvement

Preparing students for success is complex work. Fortunately, we have found that teachers are ready and willing to take on the challenge of meeting the needs of this complex work alongside administrators. In fact, that is why many teachers entered the profession and continue to pioneer new approaches to learning. Teachers lead classrooms every day and seek to continuously learn and grow in their profession. 

Even a decade ago, one in four teachers indicated interest in leading beyond their classroom (MetLife, 2013). Professional autonomy remains a consideration for retaining teachers; a recent survey found that teachers cited the ability to influence decision-making at a school level as one of their considerations for professional satisfaction and retention (SC TEACHER, 2023). By tapping into educators’ talent, school and district administrators can leverage teacher efficacy and agency to better prepare students to succeed in an increasingly dynamic world.

The Collective Leadership Approach 

These factors led the South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE) and Mira Education to create the Collective Leadership Initiative (CLI) that explicitly supports the development of agency and leadership across teams that include teachers, coaches, and principals. 

Collective leadership leverages the capacity of educators in many roles to accomplish complex leadership work, within and across schools. We know that collective leadership is moderately to strongly correlated to collective teacher efficacy and, thereby, student outcomes (Eckert, Morgan, and Daughtrey, 2023).

Through this effort, we have witnessed collective leadership positively impact student outcomes, teacher retention, and a number of other school factors. One CLI  school, Walker Gamble Elementary, has gone from being designated as an underperforming, to receiving statewide recognition as one of South Carolina’s Palmetto’s Finest, to becoming a National Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Distinguished School. Importantly, the school continues to be a Title I campus, has not added new positions or hours to the schedule, and has not radically restaffed. Instead, its CLI team found ways to better connect the resources they already had within their building to meet student needs.

Other schools that have integrated collective leadership into how they approach their work report increases in student academic growth, student leadership, teacher leadership, positive responses about school environment, and decreases in discipline. Many are considered destination schools; when vacancies open, high quality teachers apply because they want to be a part of those teams.

Not only does collective leadership move the needle on some of the biggest challenges in education, but it creates space for leadership opportunities where teachers can exercise agency. Moreover, it signals trust in teacher professionalism. As Amanda Williamson, teacher at Walker Gamble Elementary said, “When you allow me to exercise agency and do what’s right for my students…I truly feel like I’m looked at as a trusted professional.”

So, what are some of the keys to building teacher agency and collective leadership? We suggest you begin with priority setting.

Priorities

Effectiveness over efficiency

Let’s be honest: collaboration is less efficient than agency without parameters, but collaboration done intentionally has a compounding positive impact. The hope of collective leadership is that collaboration — even if it takes longer and involves understanding the perspectives and thoughts of people who think differently — multiplies the expertise of the group and makes both collective and individual actions even more effective. When school and district leaders help groups understand the strengths of individual team members, outline roles and responsibilities, and clearly describe which tasks are collaborative and which tasks are independent, teachers are enabled to use their talents freely. 

Through CLI, the SCDE has had to figure out the balance between what we insist upon – the requirements every school must meet – and what we assist with – the supports and experiences that are unique to schools. Where we’ve landed is that every school collects the same efficacy and conditions data, but individual schools can choose where to focus their improvement efforts and what additional data they will collect to show progress toward that goal. 

Personalized over programland

In addition to prioritizing effectiveness, we must also prioritize a personalized approach toward improvement rather than a cookie-cutter solution.  We share from experience that it’s easy as a systems leader to get stuck in “programland”. In programland, our theories of action sound like this: “If our organization invests in getting schools to implement the program with fidelity, then the strength of the program will help our schools improve.” Living in programland is easy and while many programs are evidence-based and effective, they can be costly. Furthermore, to be successful, programs often need both buy-in and consistency – a lofty goal in an already demanding profession. If we view teacher leadership and agency as a one-size fits all program, we run the risk of preparing teachers for leadership roles that may never materialize in their context.  

So, if we want teacher agency to be sustainable, we must exit programland and model collective leadership with the schools and districts we serve. When shifting to collective leadership, we can start by listening and asking the questions teachers are most apt to answer. 

• What specific needs is the school seeing? 
• What are the leadership strengths of the faculty? 
• What are the specific strengths and areas for growth in classroom instruction? 
• What support or professional development would help teachers and administrators grow in their ability to improve the school? 

We encourage districts and states to start small with a group of schools that are interested in growing the capacity of teachers. A book study on collective leadership or a commitment to collecting and sharing data around a problem of practice are great places to start. Our book, Small Shifts, Meaningful Improvement offers both case studies from CLI as well as tools for teams to pilot their own collective leadership approach.  

Cost-efficient and continuous over costly and complicated 

Collective leadership that integrates teacher agency is not costly or complicated. However, it can be difficult to implement because it takes time and focus. It takes time to craft the school calendar and schedule so that teachers and administrators have opportunities to collaborate. It takes discipline to focus resources and conversation on learning and teaching. It takes sustained effort to develop teachers’ leadership. It takes skill to build the trusting relationships between and among faculty, students, and families that enable growth. What South Carolina collective leadership schools are learning is that taking the time to create systems that grow teacher leadership is worth it.

What collective leadership does NOT take is adding another thing to educators’ already full plates. It requires rethinking how educators–together–approach the complex work of preparing students. Dr. Cassandra Bosier, Principal at a CLI participating school, puts it best: “The only thing I am adding is opportunity.”

When your priorities are effective, personalized, cost-efficient and continuous, you create space for collective leadership and teacher agency to thrive.

Ultimately, preparing students to succeed in our increasingly complex world is going to require that we leverage the expertise of all educators. Prioritizing efforts that build and leverage teacher efficacy that are effective, personalized, and cost efficient are key to ensuring the student outcomes that we need and support the teachers who do the hard work every day.

To learn more about CLI visit the SCDE website and for more collective tools and resources visit www.miraeducation.org/tools.

Bibliography

Jonathan Eckert, Grant Morgan & Alesha Daughtrey (2023): Collective School Leadership and Collective Teacher Efficacy through Turbulence, Leadership and Policy in Schools, DOI: 10.1080/15700763.2023.2239894 

MetLife. (2013). (rep.). The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Challenges for School Leadership. Retrieved November 27, 2023, from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED542202.pdf.

Starrett, A., Dmitrieva, S., Raygoza, A., Carti!, B., Gao, R., Ferguson, S., Quiroz, B., & Tran, H. (2023 November). 2023 Teacher Working Conditions in South Carolina Rural and Town Schools. SC TEACHER. https://sc-teacher.org/documents/twc-23-rural-and-town/