The nature and enactment of teacher leaders’ agency in lesson study facilitation

• In Event: Teachers as leaders and as learners

Proposal

Relevance
Teacher agency is a growing topic of interest among researchers around the world, particularly given a global standardization and accountability movement associated with limiting teachers’ flexibility to respond creatively to problems of practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2006; Hargreaves, 1994). Our own research suggests that teacher agency may be a key factor explaining the sustainability of both top-down and grass-roots initiatives, since teachers are the agents tasked with carrying out those initiatives in the venue that matters most: their classrooms (Authors, 2016).
Teacher agency is an especially fruitful area of research for international and comparative education because it directs attention to the many levels of contexts that shape—and are shaped by—teachers’ actions. However, most research on teacher agency to date has focused on teachers’ self-reported perceptions of their agency and has taken an uncritical approach to teacher agency, where more agency is assumed to lead to positive outcomes for teaching and learning. We suggest that to better understand how teachers engage in and respond to instructional improvement in a wide-range of contexts, we need more studies that critically investigate the nature and enactment of teacher agency, where analytic attention is given to how, why, and to what ends teachers exercise agency.
In this study, we explore the cases of two teacher leaders in the United States who have successfully implemented and sustained a Japanese-based lesson study practice to better understand the nature and enactment of teacher agency, addressing the following research questions:
1) What is the nature of teacher leaders’ agency as they facilitate lesson study?
2) How does teacher leaders’ agency influence their facilitation of lesson study and group learning processes?
Theoretical Framework
Our research questions are guided by sociocultural theories of agency (Vygotsky, 1981; Wertsch, Tulviste, & Hagstrom, 1993). In line with this approach, we define agency as the capacity to act with intention towards valued outcomes. According to sociocultural theory, agency will be mediated by tools (including language) whose meanings are socially, historically, and culturally shaped. This approach warrants an analysis of 1) the meaning-making processes that shape agency, which is what we mean by the nature of teacher agency and 2) ways that agency manifests in interactions with others within specific, socioculturally-shaped contexts, which is what we mean when we refer to the enactment of teacher agency.
Data Sources
We investigate the nature and enactment of teacher leaders’ agency by analyzing qualitative data collected over three years with two lesson study teams. These teams were selected due to their unique status of having sustained an independent practice of lesson study for over ten years. Data was collected at two schools in the same district in the state of Florida, United States.
Lesson study is a collaborative professional learning practice in which teachers, guided by a facilitator (usually also a teacher), research student learning and plan and teach a research lesson to investigate students’ understanding of a topic (Lewis & Hurd, 2011). We draw especially from five in-depth, semi-structured interviews with each of the two teacher leaders who facilitated the teams and transcriptions of over 80 hours of lesson study meetings. We also analyze documents related to lesson study practice, including lesson plans and research articles.
Data Analysis
To answer our research question about the nature of teacher leader’s agency, we first coded all interviews for meanings that teacher leaders make about their lesson study practice. After refining and aggregating emergent codes, we developed a coding system that we then applied to analysis of meeting transcripts and documents. Throughout the process, we relied on memo writing as an opportunity to reflect on our data and share findings with our research team. To increase validity, we actively sought out negative instances that might alter our findings and used follow-up interviews as opportunities to confirm interpretations.
Conclusions
We find that the nature of each teacher leader’s agency is characterized by shifts in the meanings they make about their role as teachers, leaders, and learners. As teacher leaders facilitate the learning of fellow teachers, they must simultaneously navigate changes in their approach to learning, leading, and teaching. Because these changes entail the construction of new meanings about each of these domains, this process is not strictly linear, but rather involves the continual negotiation of tensions in their views of these domains. Such negotiations occur in response to each teacher leaders’ individual growth processes, but also in relation to changes in the composition of their lesson study groups, where each teacher leader experiences a similar change from leading a veteran team of like-minded peers to leading teams of teachers new to the profession and lesson study.
Despite operating within very similar contexts, each teachers’ navigation of these changes looks quite different, reflecting both differences in their original views of teaching, leading, and learning and differences in the way their groups have evolved over time. The result is facilitation approaches that lead to very different group learning processes for two teams otherwise operating within almost identical contexts. While one team is guided by the facilitator to engage in in-depth exploration of content and student understanding, the other team—led by a “hands-off” approach to facilitation--seeks to share and identify promising strategies and tools for teaching. Elsewhere we have demonstrated how these distinct approaches ultimately lead to very different learning opportunities for students during the research lesson (Authors, 2017).
We interpret these findings to mean that teacher agency, especially the agency of teacher leaders, matters very much--not just for if/how an educational initiative is sustained, but how it is enacted. Each of these teacher leaders have managed the unlikely feat of sustaining a professional learning practice—without school, district, state, or national support—for over ten years. If we are merely interested in the amount of agency teachers have, this suggest that they have quite a bit. What we wish to emphasize is that the nature of that agency is 1) continuously changing with experience and changes in context and 2) related to different enactments of instructional improvement.
 

Authors

• Cassie Howard, Florida State University

• Motoko Akiba, Florida State University