But what does that mean for me?

Harnessing professional identity in an effort to achieve agency.

Professional development and resonance

We have all been in professional development sessions that really resonate. We’ve also been in some that really don’t. Enormous strides have been made in recent years in our understanding of how people learn and therefore how professional development might be well designed to take utilise this knowledge. Sims, et al (2021) gave the sector fourteen mechanisms for effective professional development. The Education Endowment Foundation gave us the schools guide to Implementation (2018) and updated this in 2024. We have also seen a boom in the number of books on the market that do a great job at trying to unpack how we can design professional development that really helps teachers make sustainable change. Yet, it seems that while we have an ever-clearer path to well-designed professional development, the road to helping teachers connect with it is less well-trodden.

The Teacher Development Trust (TDT) published their report, ‘Teacher Development: the landscape in 2025’ earlier this year and it has a number of points that should be prompting us to reflect on where we have got to and where we want to go next with teacher development. Firstly, 39% of respondents reported that CPD has not helped them perform their job better (p. 9) with a number citing that CPD lacked relevance and follow up. Where there were positive responses to this, respondents said they felt that CPD had been ‘relevant, collaborative and reflective’ (p. 9). We have to be cautious about drawing sweeping conclusions from this kind of data. For a start, self-report is fraught with issues around reliability and validity. To conclude that we need to have a wholesale restart when it comes to our sector’s professional development work, on the strength of self-report surveys is probably irresponsible. However, the theme of resonance comes back time and again throughout the TDT report. As well as the comments about the lack of relevance, there is also the issue of wildly different perceptions between leaders and teachers. 33% of leaders felt that CPD met was well matched to staff needs while only 16% of teachers felt the same way. Does that mean that teachers or leaders are not very good at identifying their own or others’ CPD needs? Possibly… but it could be a lot of other things too. For example, 71% of teachers felt that CPD rationale was not communicated to them and 74% felt that it was not applicable to their role. 52% of respondents said that their individual CPD needs were identified, in part, due to the connection to whole school development priorities. What does all of this mean for CPD?

We clearly have issues with how the CPD teachers are receiving resonates with them. This lack of resonance appears to play out in the form of a perceived lack of relevance, a perceived lack of personalisation and a perceived lack of rationale. Perhaps most importantly, CPD support can play a role in influencing the decisions of teachers considering leaving the profession (p. 47). So, how do we maintain the great work that has been done across the sector to platform effective mechanisms of professional development that really help teachers improve their practice sustainably, while at the same time, creating a greater sense of resonance?

Let’s start with teacher agency

We are hearing a lot about teacher agency at the moment. At the recent Chartered College AGM, Professor Mark Priestley spoke about his ecological model of agency (2015). At a risk of summarising something deeply complex, his theory is that agency is a combination of two things. Firstly, knowing what to do and how to do it. This is something that as a sector, I think we have made enormous strides in. We owe this to the fantastic work going on in schools on a daily basis to focus on teacher actions, as the thing that has the biggest impact on student achievement. We also owe it to the way those of us in schools have interacted with educational organisations, publishers, edu-business and research organisations to keep dialogue open and responsive to the point where the messages from the thought space are making their way to the chalkface in a way that is fundamentally useful for teachers. Organisations like Steplab, Walkthurs, EBE and more have made a particularly significant contribution to my own thoughts around operationalising the best of what is out there in this regard.

The second aspect of Priestley, et al’s model of agency is the conditions that enable teachers to exercise judgement within an agreed framework. This is really key for a number of reasons. It isn’t a case of all teachers doing as they wish. There has to be an agreed understanding of how learning happens and therefore what great teaching includes to create a framework within which teachers can then make their own decisions. When there is an agreed framework, teachers can feel a greater sense of trust because they know their decisions are not going to be evaluated based on the likes or dislikes of a senior leader but instead, against that shared framework. In this way, the conditions for confident, trusted decision making are met and agency can be achieved. This is something that Priestley, et al are quite emphatic about.

‘Agency is not something that people have or possess … but instead as something that is achieved … an emergent phenomenon, something that happens through an always unique interplay of individual capacity and the social and material conditions by means of which people act.’ (p. 2).

Agency brings with it a sense of purpose and meaning. I know why I am doing the thing I am doing in this moment and how it serves the goal that I have in mind. I also know I’ll be trusted to make this decision because it fits within our agreed framework. It is liberating in a sense because when agency is achieved, there is a sense that there is a removal of doubt about how a teacher’s actions are going to be interpreted by others in terms of their effectiveness.

How can we take this further?

Even though this definition of agency takes us much further to understanding how we might create this resonance for teachers in the professional development we deliver, where this is done well, there can still be a sense that there is more work to be done to really help teachers feel that sense of relevance to them. Agency, in part, rests on this shared framework of understanding teaching. However, that framework still has to go through each person’s situational filter before it becomes lived out as a classroom action. Imagine we were to gather a group of ten teachers together who all believed that students paying attention to the teacher is fundamental to learning because without paying attention, they cannot think and without thinking, there cannot be processing and therefore learning. Now imagine we give the same scenario to all of them: You are teaching your class and you notice one child is looking out of the window while you are talking. How do you respond? 

I imagine that everyone in the group would come up with some variation of ‘it depends’ as their answer. This is despite them all having a shared framework of the learning process and what great teaching is. I think it is the filters that each teacher puts that information through that are the key to the decision they end up taking and I don’t think we do enough to give teachers the space and time to reflect and take control over these filters. I think there are two filters that are particularly important. Context and Professional identity.

Context

Almost every teacher will say that context is key but it’s how we interpret context that is interesting in the case of teacher agency. In the example above, there are lots of different contextual aspects that could be important or interesting to the teacher. What is the context of previous study? Of upcoming study? What is the context of that particular student, both holistically and academically? Both immediately and historically? What is the context of what is being taught and how it relates to what students already know or, what they think they know? To what they are interested in? We can’t take account of all of these contextual factors for every single student at any given time and so we filter out the ones that we deem to be less important and use what remains as a kind of ‘best fit’ contextual understanding to inform our decision. What is it that helps us conduct this filtering process? I think this is one of the functions of professional identity.

Teacher Professional Identity

Teacher Professional Identity is defined by Kelchtermans, (2009) as being comprised of five different elements:

1.      Self-image (What kind of teacher am I?)

2.      Self-esteem (How good am I at teaching this?)

3.      Task perception (What must I do to be a good teacher?)

4.      Job motivation (What are my values and how do they influence my work?)

5.      Future perspective (What do I want for my professional future)

All of these factors, some more than others, affect the contextual filtering process. For example, a teacher who sees themselves as nurturing and individual-centred may choose to ignore the student looking out the window because they might be more attuned to the potential of there being something on that student’s mind. A teacher who is driven by a sense of social justice and equity might see it as their duty to insist on that students’ attention. Of course, both teachers, most teachers in fact, are likely to say that to some extent they are driven by social justice and by a nurturing, individualised approach. To lead with one value set in a particular moment is not an outright rejection of the other. An aside to this blog is that I think we need to be mindful of the message we are sending to teachers across the sector that they need to choose sides and to be one thing all of the time. That being said, someone’s professional identity is going to have an influence over which contextual factors they see as important in a given situation and how they act on those foregrounded factors.

So, what does that have to do with professional development?

Let’s revisit my triangular model from earlier:

A lot of professional development focuses on decisions based around an agreed framework. We should keep doing this. It is probably out best bet for ensuring that students get an equitable deal regardless of classroom. We have made great strides in this area and we should protect that progress.

Some professional development, and an increasing amount, focuses on contextualisation. I hear more and more of schools who are doing professional development in teams, year groups and phases and who are allowing teachers the space to talk about how context influences their decision making. This work is really important because otherwise decision making remains tacit and it’s really hard to develop it if that’s the case.

Very little professional development seeks to help teachers engage with the question of ‘what does this mean for me’ By this, I don’t mean, ‘me’ the Year 5 teacher who has a tricky class or ‘me’ the ECT who has a formal observation with my Year 9s next week. I mean ‘me’ as in the professional, with a finely tuned skill set in some areas and focuses for development in others. ‘Me’ the professional who has a body of experiences, some triumphant and others traumatic. I think when teachers sit in professional development sessions and ask questions about implementation, we can assume that this is a case of the expectation not having been made clear. I think that often it is actually a case of teachers trying to work out what this means for ‘me’.

How can we cultivate professional identity?

As with so much in the professional world of a teacher, their professional identity is tacit. They don’t know why they do what they do and they are often not aware of having done it, especially if they are particularly expert. Fundamentally, we need to give teachers space to consider what they value and the experiences that they have had that have lead to those values. If they understand their own professional identity, I think it makes it easier for them to understand why they feel how they feel about new ideas an initiatives. Often, I’m told about, or I see, teachers who say something like ‘It just isn’t quite sitting right with me’ or ‘I get what you’re saying but I think we need to try it out first’. This isn’t just a case of highlighting the importance of rehearsal (although, wherever there is a chance to, I’ll always say… rehearse people!) I think it is also a case of teachers wanting the time and space to internalise what is being asked of them and this often means running what is being asked through the filter of their professional identity.

Over the last three months, I have been working with the brilliant Nadine Cotton and Flora Burt and a group of fifteen of the country’s most successful teachers from Chiltern Learning Trust to try to find out what it is they think and do and how they make decisions in their classrooms. On the launch day for this project, something that kept coming up was the importance of ‘knowing yourself’. Our very best teachers acknowledge that you need to have a grasp of who you are as a professional. In a second session, I shared a bit about my own professional story and how the three central tenets of my career, (vulnerability, evidence and developing others) were formed by key professional contours and how they have shaped me as a professional. We then invited the teachers in the group to do their own time maps, charting their own experiences and journeys to that point.

The power of this work for the individual, is, I think, in the fact it can be quite liberating. To understand who you are and how you became it can really help you to understand your instinctive responses to ideas and initiatives. There is also huge potential power in knowing others.

I think that if we gave an entire staff team the space to think about the formation of their professional identities and then we opened up a space where, safely, we could learn about each other’s journeys to that point, that would benefit professional development no end. The person delivering professional development would really know the people they were delivering to, they’d be able to understand why people interpret new ideas in different ways and find tension in different areas despite having that shared framework that is so important. This knowledge, if used intelligently, would enable those subtle individual adaptations and personalisation that we know we need in order to deliver the very best professional development.

Agency is absolutely key if we are going to cultivate a profession who are not only knowledgeable but also skilful and crucially, professionally invested. When teachers know themselves as professionals, and when they also know others, my sense is that belonging is also positively affected. My surer sense though is that peoples’ greater sense of who they are and what they have invested to become it creates a sense of investment that they truly value and are likely to want to continue to cultivate over time. Not only does this improve their ongoing sense of agency but it also makes it less likely that they’ll walk away. The phrase ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’ springs to mind here. If teachers don’t have the space to gain better understanding of who they are as professionals, they’ll never understand why they respond to professional development ideas in the way that they do. ‘You don’t know what you’ve got until you know who you are’ is perhaps a version of the saying that better fits the role of professional identity in teaching. We have come a long way in helping teachers understand what we mean in professional development. The next phase is understanding and then answering the question: What does that mean for me?

References:

Kelchtermans, G. (2009) ‘Who I am in how I teach is the message: Self-understanding, vulnerability and reflection’, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 15(2), pp. 257–272. doi: 10.1080/13540600902875332.

Priestley, M., Biesta, G. & Robinson, S. (2015) ‘Teacher agency: what is it and why does it matter?’, in R. Kneyber & J. Evers (eds.) Flip the System: Changing Education from the Bottom Up. London: Routledge, pp. 134–148.

Sharples, J., Eaton, J. & Boughelaf, J. (2024) A School’s Guide to Implementation. 3rd edn. London: Education Endowment Foundation.

Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Van Herwegen, J. & Anders, J. (2021) What are the characteristics of teacher professional development that increase pupil achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis. London: Education Endowment Foundation.

Teacher Development Trust (2025) Teacher Development: The CPD Landscape in 2025. London: Teacher Development Trust.