Teacher Agency in Early Childhood Education: A Collaborative Self-Study Across Teacher Preparation Programs

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Leadership and Faculty Learning Communities (Table 13)

Abstract

Teacher agency, although not always well-defined or understood, is a valuable and critical component to effective teaching. It is especially important for preservice teachers to be explicitly introduced to teacher agency by college faculty. Early childhood education faculty developed a self-study community of practice to study teacher agency as a construct and examine how to support the development of teacher agency in preservice teachers. Faculty members met virtually and moved through a collaborative self-study process of understanding and defining the topic, learning about others and from others, and developing an action plan to examine teacher agency in early childhood teacher education. This paper presents results describing our self-study processes and the relationships between our self-study, teacher agency, and professional growth.

Authors

• Kaitlin Northey, University of Vermont

• Amy Wolfe, Ohio University - Chillicothe

• Karen M. La Paro, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Nora J. Krieger, Montclair State University