Exploring school leaders’ dilemmas in response to tensions related to teacher professional agency

This study explores a school leaders’ perspective on teacher professional agency. Tensions may arise when teachers feel hindered in their professional agency and try to negotiate their ‘space’ with other stakeholders (colleagues, students, management). School leaders are expected to empower and support teachers, but how do they perceive teachers’ agency tensions? What leadership instruments do they select for these situations? School leaders’ sense-making and framing of situations can influence the way teachers subsequently interpret and act upon situations. Regular research methods (interviews/surveys) are not sufficient to study school leaders’ framing of agency tensions. Therefore, we used a qualitative vignette questionnaire to study the dilemmas, responsible actors and leadership instruments of 50 school leaders from Dutch secondary schools in response to teachers’ agency tensions. The results show that school leaders perceived dilemmas at both the organisation and teacher levels. Five different leadership instruments showed a variety of possible roles for school leaders (e.g. communicating vision, exchanging expectations, diagnosing problems). This paper discusses the ways in which school leaders attribute an important role to themselves in resolving tensions related to teacher professional agency and the consequences school leaders’ roles and practices might have for how they lead professional learning.