What contributes to first-year student teachers’ sense of professional agency in the classroom?

Abstract

This study explores Finnish first-year primary teacher students' (N = 244) sense of professional agency in the classroom. In addition, the interrelation between student teachers' sense of professional agency and the perceptions of teacher education as a learning environment is explored. The sense of professional agency in the classroom simultaneously requires the motivation to learn, efficacy beliefs about learning and intentional acts for facilitating and managing new learning in the classroom. The results showed that these basic elements are embedded in the contextualised components of student teachers' professional agency, entailing judgements of one's competence in teaching, transformative and collaborative practice, reflection in the classroom and modelling as a learning orientation. The results further suggested that teacher education provided an encouraging learning environment for student teachers. However, only peer relations in the learning environment were positively related to perceived professional agency.

Secondary student teachers' personal values and perceptions of Teaching as Inquiry

“…Matt spoke informally with available teachers in his school department and staffroom, and Henry had a group of four fellow student teachers with whom he met regularly. Soini, Pietarinen, Toom, & Pyhältö, (2015) had a similar finding in their study about student teachers' learning. To what extent were student teachers' self-organised, informal communities of dialogue an adequate substitution for participating in formal communities of practice focused on spirals of inquiry about better learning outcomes?…”

Teachers’ agency: Do their values make a difference?

“…At this point, we still did not know how these values and agentic capacities related to functioning. Many researchers say agentic capacity leads to agentic behaviours (Etel€ apelto et al, 2015;Soini et al, 2015). A specific behaviour is chosen from amongst a number of possibilities, and agents act on their beliefs and values within particular contexts (Biesta & Tedder, 2007;Panti c, 2017).…”

“…Helping behaviour (Van Dyne & LePine, 1998;Neubert et al, 2008) features an orientation whereby individuals collaborate with and help others in their working group for the benefit of the group. Collaboration with colleagues and helping behaviours are key characteristics of agentic teachers (Spitzmuller & Van Dyne, 2013;Soini et al, 2015;Van der Heijden et al, 2015), especially helping behaviour that goes beyond minimum role expectations (Neubert et al, 2008).…”

Teacher agency and professional learning communities; what can Learning Rounds in Scotland teach us?

“…Similarly, Soini et al (2015) find that peer support is important affordance in developing agency among student teachers.…”