Why is agency particularly important in teaching?
In Responsive coaching, Josh Goodrich (2024) points out that teachers are often alone (in the sense that they don’t usually work with another professional in the same room). Therefore, when faced with the innumerate decisions that teachers have to make on a daily basis, it would be impossible to function without exercising agency. It is not as if teachers could (even if we wanted them to) apply the instructions of a third party to every decision they have to make throughout the day.
So, agency clearly has a crucial role to play in the life and work of a teacher so it is important that we understand how we can use our coaching to facilitate it. There are many excellent examples of how to do this. Matt Stone has blogged excellently about. Josh Goodrich’s Responsive coaching is built around it and Tom Sherrington has blogged about the importance of co-constructing feedback, a crucial vehicle to achieving agency. Sam Gibbs and Dr. Haili Hughes have also spoken at length about agency at various conferences and have a book on effective mentoring coming out which will no doubt revisit the issue. Our perspective is one that is rooted in what we see day to day in the schools that we work in and the teachers we speak to through EduPulse. While those listed above are working constantly to encourage a culture within our profession that promotes thinking and the job satisfaction that comes with it, there are still many teachers, (and most likely leaders) who feel constrained by the seductive pull of conformity. The reason is that conformity looks like consistency but if they are related then conformity is, at best, an unsustainable version of consistency.
Let’s explore an example, or perhaps more accurately, a non-example.
Joyce is a Year 4 teacher who has been told that she should use cold calling because this is a whole school approach to questioning. She has been told that it is an excellent way of holding all pupils accountable for paying attention and will increase participation in thinking. She has planned a question for an upcoming observation in her writing lesson around the accurate use of subordinate clauses in a sentence. Joyce feels that this is a really important concept for the pupils to master before moving on. She puts an example on the board which uses a subordinate clause inaccurately and asks pupils to ‘explain the mistake I have made’. She gives them time to discuss in pairs and then chooses one pupil to feedback. The pupil gives an acceptable explanation and so Joyce, much to her observer’s delight, moves on. After the lesson, Joyce looks at the writing the pupils have produced and she is disappointed. Lots of them are still inaccurately using subordinate clauses.
In Joyce’s case, the most important thing is the purpose of what she is trying to achieve. The accurate use of subordinate clauses is something that she knows her class absolutely need to master in order to be ready to move on. Therefore, she needs to know what every pupil thinks, not just one (as is the case with her use of cold calling). A better strategy for this particular example would probably have been a multiple-choice question with one correct answer and three incorrect answers, each of which has been chosen because it exposes a particularly prominent misconception. Labelling the options A-D, Joyce would have been able to quickly scan the room and see who held which misconception. She could even have added in the requirement for pupils to give a confidence rating of 1-10 for their answer.
So, why didn’t Joyce do that? Why didn’t she match her strategy choice to the purpose of her action? The answer is because she had not been granted the agency to do so. The leadership of her school had mandated the use of cold calling for all questions and she had dutifully followed, crucially, sensing that something wasn’t quite right with this approach. And this is precisely why top down, prescribed, strategy only professional development is unsustainable. Joyce will keep following the instructions of her superiors, she will keep feeling disappointed at the outcomes in her lessons, she will work harder to try to shoehorn her contextual expertise of her class into the prescribed strategies of her leadership team, and she will eventually become burnt out from this endeavour.
How can coaching for agency help?
To be clear, we are not saying that coaching should not seek to develop the effective use of key strategies – it absolutely should. To argue otherwise would be like arguing that I should be let loose on attempting to cook a three-course meal without any support from an expert to present options to me around chopping, dicing and other culinary actions I currently read on a recipe card. But, if we want to improve teaching, we have to work towards improving thinking because, remember, teachers spend so much time alone so they need to be the ones doing the thinking and decision making.
Josh Goodrich has been mentioned earlier in this blog but deserves to be so again because of the way he has distilled a commitment to getting teacher thinking into a process that he calls ‘responsive coaching’. Jim Knight has also written with expertise about the idea of dialogic coaching which again, taps into the idea of teacher agency. Our thoughts here will not go any further than those already proposed by Josh, Jim or others but will be, at least another vote in favour of coaching approaches that facilitate agency.
Agency in teaching requires three key types of thinking:
Thinking about the learning process
Thinking about the teaching process
Thinking with tools (strategies) to change the teaching process
Teachers need to be supported to think about the learning process. This is where the importance of awareness cannot be underestimated. This is something that Shane Leaning has blogged about here and Matt Stone is regularly referencing. Within this, it is useful to think about two aspects of awareness in particular. Is the teacher unaware of what is going on in the room? For example, they think that all pupils are engaged in thoughtful debate during paired talk when really, they are not. Or, is the teacher aware of what is going on but is interpreting its efficacy incorrectly in the context of learning? For example, they know the pupils’ conversations are off task but they see that as a good thing because it is giving them a ‘brain break’? To develop agency, we need to make sure that teachers build an accurate awareness of what is going on in the classroom and its impact on learning. Developing this awareness is a process that can be supported by the coach through the use of evidence from an observed lesson as well as some evidence about how learning happens, in this case, the importance of ensuring partner talk facilitates purposeful discussion.
Next, teachers need to be supported to identify which part of the teaching process needs to be their focus in order to improve learning. What is most important here is that there is a shared understanding of the model that is being referred to. Here is one, heavily inspired by Josh Goodrich’s model in Responsive coaching.
Agency at this stage is important and the coach’s role should be to challenge the teacher to ensure that their interpretation is rooted in sound evidence and driven by the context of their class. This really is key. Evidence of how learning happens should underpin the selection of an area of focus but this work should then be driven by the context of the class. Coaches who are trying to develop agency will check in with teachers throughout this part of the conversation with questions like: ‘Does that seem like it fits with the context of what you see from your class on a regular basis?’ and ‘What makes you sure that this is right part of the process to be working on in relation to the issue we want to solve?’ Encouraging teachers to think through their decision thoroughly here really helps to develop their sense of themselves as decision maker and the importance of connecting the teaching process to the evidence they have about learning. This is what links bullet points 1 and 2 above.
When coaches and teachers get to the point where they are choosing a strategy to improve a particular part of the learning process, this is where the coach has the role of ensuring that the teacher has the required tools to think with in the moment. Starting this part of the conversation with: ‘Do you have any ideas of strategies we could try to improve that?’ or ‘How could we change the strategy you used to be more effective?’ is potentially useful. Ideally, coaches will also encourage teachers to think of the options they have. For example, ‘what else could you try?’ and then, ‘What makes you want to choose this strategy over that one?’ or ‘What is it about the purpose of what you are trying to achieve that makes you go for this strategy?’ or even, ‘when might the context demand a different strategy and what might this be?’ Of course, it is also the job of the coach to scaffold this thinking with examples but this really is where the agency can be most easily lost. If the coach is too effusive and eager to share a strategy, it can come across to the teacher that this is the right answer and that the coach will expect to see that strategy ‘evidenced’ when they next come in. If this is the case, we are back to compliance and will have undone our hard work in getting the teacher to think hard about teaching earlier in the conversation.
Indeed, even in cases whereby the coach has offered a strategy, they should still look to follow up with something like ‘Are there any contexts in which that wouldn’t work?’ or ‘Do you think there are any situations where that would be the wrong strategy?’.
Closing thoughts
Coaches need to find the sweet spot of supporting with ideas but also encouraging and scaffolding decision making and justification of their decision from the teacher. If we hope to ease our retention crisis, we need to focus on teacher job satisfaction and research has consistently shown that agency and autonomy are key drivers to the feelings of purpose and meaning that characterise satisfaction in vocational pursuits like teaching (Herzberg, 1984). Interestingly, engaging with purpose and meaning might also improve performance and not just job satisfaction. One study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that when engaged in an activity that requires more than rudimentary thinking, financial incentives actually reduced performance while engagement with the purpose of the task improved it.
One caveat to finish with. Teaching expertise is domain specific and it is important to be sensitive to the degree of expertise that a teacher holds. Coaches should be guided by the teacher’s expertise and should be prepared to be responsive to how the expertise shifts during different parts of coaching conversations and more generally, over time. Expertise will determine whether coaches take a directive or facilitative approach in any given moment. However, a teacher could require more direction at the point of developing awareness yet, more facilitation when it comes to strategy selection. Ultimately, coaches need to be highly attuned to the teacher’s expertise in order to make good decisions throughout coaching conversations.
There is so much more worth discussing around coaching with agency in mind. The role of modelling and rehearsal is one area that is certainly worthy of our time and consideration but hopefully, this piece will serve to be another voice in favour of constructing coaching models and practices that prioritise agency.
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