Ideology and teacher agency.

Co-opting teacher agency for control.

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered I’ve seen lots of funny men; some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen - Woody Guthrie

Photo by Adhitya Sibikumar on Unsplash

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Can policy mandates enable teacher agency?

I saw some commentary recently suggesting that the Victorian government’s move to mandate specific pedagogical approaches for teachers might actually enhance teacher agency.

The relationship between mandated approaches to teaching and teacher agency is important to consider and - as with most things - there is some truth to the claim.

But to explore the question of whether policy mandates enable teacher agency, we need to first define what we mean by the term.

Defining teacher agency.

In an educational climate where we are often unclear about what we mean by certain terms and phrases (take for example the variations of the phrase “explicit instruction”), it is important that we try to reflect upon and communicate as best as possible our understanding of the terms and phrases we use.

So, I will do my best to make myself clear here.

At this point in time, my definition of teacher agency is influenced by the work of Priestly and Biesta (2016)¹. In my terms, I define teacher agency as a teacher’s achievement of intentionality in their work (whether in the practice of pedagogy, assessment, etc.), given the structural and ideological constraints of their environments. This involves the development of ownership and responsibility upon one’s work as a teacher.

Let me explain what I don’t mean.

In advocating for teacher agency, I don’t mean that:

• Teachers are free to do whatever they want.

• There should be no teacher accountability.

Note that I am not against educational policy and accountability per se. It is the form of such policies and accountabilities that either fosters or limits teacher agency, rather than the thing itself.

Ideologically speaking, I hold the perspective that teachers ought to be given agency to reflect upon various forms of evidence in order to make the best decisions to support their students. In a similar vein to Glenn Savage’s call to “think like a gardener”, a teacher’s deep knowledge of their students and contexts (including who they are and what they value in education) should be seen as powerful evidence driving educational decision making.

If we are serious about teacher agency, at times, this means allowing for teacher judgment and action to diverge from whatever ideologically driven “best practice” is dominant at the time.

This is because “best practice”, although implying some “scientific” universal quality, is ultimately based upon temporal, ideologically driven, narrow ideas of evidence and education (see Biesta, 2010 and Brecht, 2024).

In short, “best practice” is a myth.

Educational insurance.

Sadly, we find ourselves in an educational climate where fear has become a core driver of educational policy and practice. As a result, educational policy in Australia is becoming increasingly influenced by ideologies of control that actively discourage teacher judgment and decision-making.

The bet we seemed to have placed upon education to solve society’s failings thus has made it too risky to allow teachers the agency to make decisions, believing (and assuming) that this is a suitable price to pay to ensure the outputs of our education system are the same for everyone.

Many seem convinced that the “science is settled” and that the “experts” have found the secret sauce.

Mandated policy in education then becomes a kind of insurance policy against public outcry over government decision making and societal responsibility. As a result, governmental and societal responsibility becomes diverted to teachers, who become repeatedly framed in media and educational discourse as the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems².

Teacher agency and control.

Mandates to teaching practice are a strange means of diverting responsibility though.

At the same time as diverting responsibility from governments and society to teachers, imposing “best practice” convinces teachers to relinquish control and ownership of their practice, whilst still being held accountable for it.

More on this in a minute.

Mandated approaches towards teaching implicitly send the message that teachers cannot be trusted to do what is best for their students. They are anchored in specific and dominant educational ideologies that control the kinds of decisions and approaches that a teacher may be able to take for their students.

This does not mean that teacher agency cannot be achieved in these environments but that it is simply not designed to allow for it.

But do systems ideologically driven to mandate pedagogy and curriculum enable it?

Maybe, in some cases.

Agency in the grip of control.

It has been suggested that recent mandates in teacher practice have helped teachers feel more confident in their practice, more supported and have agency in deciding which of the programs they choose to use for this mandated practice.

Teachers may very well feel a sense of agency as a result of mandated practice, as they take ownership to ensure they’re implementing “best practice” as faithfully as possible.

However, in these cases I wonder whether we might be confusing agency with security. That is, the comfort that comes from knowing that you’re doing the “right thing” within a clear boundary of options provided to you by “experts”.

Responsibility and ownership of practice therefore becomes transferred from the teacher to those who have made the pedagogical decisions for them. Their agency becomes less defined by their ability to take responsibility for their practice, but rather in relation to their decisions to intentionally comply with the “orders” of mandates and the “evidence”.

In these cases then, mandates fundamentally cannot enable teacher agency as they literally remove the teacher’s responsibility to engage in “best practice” for their specific contexts.

So, although it may seem that teacher agency might be achieved by mandating “evidence-based” approaches, the teacher’s ability to truly take responsibility for their practice is largely removed and placed upon the “experts” who have made their decisions (including lesson plans) for them.

It seems more likely to me that teacher agency is being co-opted for the use of ideological control of our education system than enabling it.

Failed control.

In a bid to control and secure educational outcomes for students after the release of the first version of the Australian Curriculum, the Queensland (QLD) department of education launched the mandated Curriculum to Classrooms (C2C) initiative in 2012. The C2C was as a “one size fits all” set of scripted, direct instruction materials provided to QLD schools support their enactment of the Australian curriculum at the time for English, Mathematics, Science and History (Barton et al., 2014).

How did the experimental move to mandated, blanket explicit instruction teaching practice pan out for QLD?

As far as I can see, you’d be pretty hard pressed to find evidence of an educational revolution in QLD³ (do some hunting and see for yourself).

C2C has since been rebranded “as a starting point for school curriculum planning and can be adapted to meet individual student learning needs and to suit local school contexts”.

In the Northern Territory from 2014 to 2019, $30 million of taxpayer money was invested in scripted, direct instruction (DI) programs in a bid to improve literacy outcomes of First Nations children. In analysing NAPLAN data of schools participating in the initiative, researchers suggest that not only did this not work to improve the literacy of First Nations young people, but attendance for schools with DI programs declined faster than schools not using the DI approach.

If we really believe that NAPLAN is useful for strong policy decisions (such as the newly appoint CEO of the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, Stephen Gniel), we need to take this evidence very seriously.

These two examples show how reducing teacher agency in favour of mandated, blanket approaches to teaching practice has the potential to not only be harmful for our teachers, but also for their students.

Do we really have evidence to suggest otherwise?

One last point.

Mandates ultimately limit teacher and school agency to determine and refine “what works” in their contexts for themselves.

For some, “what works” for their communities may look very similar to what has been mandated. In fact, for many schools it will not change what they’re doing at all (which in relation to the phonics mandate, will be the case for the majority of primary schools in Victoria⁴).

Good for them.

However, as Thomas Newkirk states in his thoughtful critique of the “Sold a Story” podcast:

Teaching is situational and unpredictable; the approach that works with one child fails with another, and no program, research-based or not, can anticipate and eliminate these failures. (Newkirk, 2023, p. 27)

We have evidence to suggest that the promises of the current “evidence-based” practice imposed upon teachers will leave us disappointed.

Sadly, as teachers are removed of their agency but still seen as the cause of and solution to all educational problems, they will continue to be blamed rather than the policies that have left us in the mess we find ourselves in.

Creating passive teachers through mandated instructional practice keeps teachers as an easy target to blame and keeps us spinning around the same circle over and over again.

Yet teacher agency, as ownership and responsibility of one’s practice, creates true accountability, as teachers become accountable to the needs and desires of their specific communities and students, rather than those imposing mandated policy.

This is the kind of teacher agency we should be supporting.

Till next time,

References

Barton, G. M., Garvis, S., & Ryan, M. E. (2014). Curriculum to the classroom : investigating the spatial practices of curriculum implementation in Queensland schools and its implications for teacher education. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 39(3), 166–177. https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2014v39n3.9

Biesta, G. (2010). Why ‘What Works’ Still Won’t Work: From Evidence-Based Education to Value-Based Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education. 29. pp. 491–503.

Brecht, A. (2024). Four ways of seeing education, and why “best practice” is a myth. Wonder in Mathematics. Retrieved from https://amiealbrecht.com/2024/12/11/four-ways-of-seeing-education-and-why-best-practice-is-a-myth/.

Newkirk, T. (2023). The Broken Logic of "Sold a Story": A Personal Response to "The Science of Reading". Retrieved from https://literacyresearchcommons.org/resources.

1. This is a must-read for anyone interested in teacher agency.

2. Got carried away a bit here…

3. Happy to be proven wrong.

4. This was calculated using the Victorian Department of Education’s estimate of 700 government primary schools already using this approach out of a total of 1,219 government schools in the state.