What does it really mean to be classroom-ready? Professional agency, autonomy and confidence in beginner teachers

RACHELE NEWMAN, PRINCIPAL TEACHING FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON, UK

The profession

There is no doubt that it is a tough time to be a teacher. It has been said that we are in the midst of a polycrisis (Mills, 2023), where seemingly unrelated crises in education – including challenging recruitment and retention, high workload, post-COVID recovery, socio-economic disadvantages and inequalities of outcomes, plus the degree of state-level intervention in initial teacher education (ITE) – are combining to create a perfect storm.

Despite this, we still welcome many keen, enthusiastic new entrants into the profession each year. If new teachers are to thrive and not just survive in the turbulent waters of our schools, then it is important for them to be classroom-ready when they complete their pre-service year.

Classroom readiness

So what does this look like? What do teachers really need to know (and be able to do) to be classroom-ready? A technicist model of ITE in England is currently baked in at policy level, positioning teacher knowledge and learning as ‘technical knowledge’ that can be developed through training (Brooks and Horndern, 2024). While debate around the professional knowledge and status of teachers is not new (Thorndike, 1910), a technical apprenticeship model of ITE was made concrete in education policy in 2010 by Michael Gove – then secretary of state for education – in a speech to the National College, when he declared that ‘teaching is a craft and it is best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or women’ (DfEDepartment for Education - a ministerial department responsible for children’s services and education in England, 2010). This ideology privileges the practical knowledge gained in classrooms and perpetuates ‘the popular myth that there is little to know about teaching and schools and what there is can be picked up on the job’ (Cochran-Smith, 2005, p. 302).

Thus, classroom readiness in this context implies technical, procedural or practical knowledge, underpinned by a training agenda with rich professional and disciplinary knowledge, reduced to a prescribed, authorised body of knowledge made statutory in the initial teacher trainingAbbreviated to ITT, the period of academic study and time in school leading to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) and early career frameworks (DfE 2019a; 2019b) and the National Professional Qualifications (NPQs).

This position trickles into schools and is reinforced by the schools’ inspectorate – in their 2021 report, for example, which emphasised the need to prioritise training in student behaviour management (OfstedThe Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills – a non-ministerial department responsible for inspecting and regulating services that care for children and young people, and services providing education and skills, 2021).

This narrow view of teacher classroom readiness as representative of professional knowledge discounts the importance of teachers as autonomous professionals who act with agency. Schools need critically engaged teachers who move beyond ‘uncritical implementation of other people’s policies’ (Priestly, 2015, p. 1). The significance of teacher autonomy and agency is highlighted in the recent working paper on teacher professionalism by Müller and Cook (2024) for the Chartered College of Teaching. This report challenges the idea of an established body of knowledge by instead positing the notion of richer ‘bodies’ of (contested) knowledge.

To further this position, I contend that we develop a broader understanding of classroom readiness for beginner teachers and beyond – one that is underpinned by notions of teacher professional knowledge, autonomy and identity. This would draw on the four inter-related domains of classroom readiness, as suggested by Brown (2015): teacher knowledge, professional experience, dispositions and school context. Additionally, Rushton et al.’s (2022) research suggests that teachers are autonomous professionals who work and learn in collaborative ways that are responsive to their context. This study identified many enhanced aspects of classroom readiness that were highly valued, such as adaptability, collaborative professionalism and more varied pedagogical exploration.

This study

In my work as a teacher educator on a secondary PGCE + QTS programme, I noticed that my student teachers were reporting a disconnect between expectations and assessment of their classroom readiness from school to school at the point of their transition between placement settings. Anecdotal comments were also received from school-based mentors, noting how their second-placement student teachers were so much less ready for the school environment in comparison to their first-placement student teachers. There is little written about how school-based mentors who support student teachers conceptualise classroom readiness. As such, this study set out to explore the perceptions of classroom readiness from the perspectives of the school-based mentors and the student teachers themselves.

This was a small-scale case study within a partnership in the south of England, with nine secondary student teachers and five school-based mentors. Appropriate ethical clearance was gained from the university. Qualitative data was collected between March and May 2023, through a survey tool and separate focus groups for student teachers and mentors.

Findings

The findings of the study show a notable difference in how beginner teachers and school-based mentors conceptualise classroom readiness. Table 1 provides a snapshot; note the difference in perceptions of classroom readiness here.

Table 1: Extract of summary of findings

For beginner teachers, their classroom readiness is categorised by feelings of agency, autonomy, confidence and a sense of professional identity of teachers who are adaptable and have conviction in their decisions. These perceptions align with Sachs’ (1999) work on professional identify, noting the notion of ‘democratic professionalism’ marked by agency, decision-making, ownership and judgement, as opposed to ‘managerial professionalism’, with its focus on accountability and effectiveness, reinforced by employing authorities.

In contrast, mentor perceptions of classroom readiness are marked by a greater focus on technical competence at a surface level. There is a focus on surface proficiency, managing the classroom, procedural competence and a systems-led approach to teaching. These views are, perhaps unsurprisingly, more aligned to the aforementioned technicist ideology that has been pushed so hard into our education system at policy level.

The perceived importance of technical proficiency is evident in the following comment made by a school-based mentor: ‘A teacher can be classroom-ready in one school and then not classroom-ready in another.’ (Focus group: mentors) This comment suggests that the perception of classroom readiness relates to a teacher’s ability to perform in a specific context and is dependent on a teacher knowing the nuance and subtleties of tacit, school-specific knowledge or explicit knowledge of whole-school systems such as data or behaviour management. This highlights the complexity of what it means to be classroom-ready and offers a possible explanation for why the school-based mentors perceived a lack of classroom readiness in the pre-service teachers, who had a limited exposure to varied classroom environments.

There are, of course, some overlapping perceptions, notably around strong subject knowledge for teaching. Additionally, both groups note the importance of confidence, although these views are espoused differently. For the beginner teacher, the sense of confidence is rooted in their professional identity. For the mentor, the confidence is projected outward through a display of classroom presence. It is possible that strong presence is an outward display of the confidence gained from secure professional identity. Equally, proficiency in managing a classroom is likely to enhance inner confidence, so it could be said that the surface-level proficiency feeds the deeper confidence, linked to pre-service teachers’ sense of classroom readiness.

What can we do to develop teacher autonomy and agency?

1. Encourage exploration and collaboration in the lesson-planning process and enhance pedagogic freedom

These critical aspects of a teacher’s job, which reflect professional knowledge and classroom readiness, have been arguably reduced in the English high-accountability education system in recent years. The reduction in agency, as described by Brown (2015) – caused by centralisation of systems, such as centralised schemes of work, and the resultant reduction of curricular and pedagogic autonomy – is a good example of this. 

Beginner teachers have a heightened experience of this accountability, as they have to navigate accountability systems of individual schools while performing within the competency framework for QTS. Therefore, they often experience extreme reduction in their individual agency at the lesson-preparation stage, with a resultant impact on their classroom readiness. 

While the use of centralised, pre-planned teaching materials has the potential to mitigate some issues around teacher workload, it further reduces the agency and autonomy of the beginner teacher over their pedagogical decision-making and erodes their burgeoning identity as a teacher. The complexity of having to make sense of a lesson plan devised by another, and then teaching it ‘correctly’, undermines the desired concept of ownership in Sachs’ (1999) notion of democratic professionalism.

2. Allow mistakes to build teacher confidence

High-accountability systems do not readily allow for mistakes to be made and there may be little room for innovation. Beginner teachers are acutely aware of the pressure that their host teachers are under to ensure the progress of their students in class. As such, mistakes are seen as costly, and fear of making them minimises the willingness for professional exploration, innovation and risk-taking. The result of this is likely to be a reduction in professional confidence, identity and capacity and an increased focus on the surface-level, technical proficiency outlined earlier. Teachers develop a disposition of professional judgement, which is honed when agency in decision-making is allowed. Increasing the trust given to teachers in the early stages of their professional career, and allowing them the full range of professional experience, is to be encouraged.

3. Develop professional judgement

Professional judgement is what teachers exercise when a situation doesn’t follow a familiar or replicable pattern. Classrooms are context-bound, uncertain, unpredictable and messy social environments, and the problems of real-world practice do not present themselves to practitioners as well-formed structures (Schon, 1987). As such, judgement is more important that routine (Hoyle and John, 1995).

To develop a beginner teacher’s professional judgement, then, we need to go beyond a focus on the surface-level, procedural elements of teaching and look at a deeper corpus of professional knowledge. Brooks (2021) describes this as a difference between focusing on a ‘repertoire of strategies, techniques and behaviours that enable them to operate effectively’ and a reservoir – a ‘pool of ideas and knowledge that helps them to understand what is going on in their practice’. This deep knowledge is what facilitates professional.

Conclusions

This study explores the development of our beginner teachers and how to enhance their classroom readiness in a way that fosters clear professional identity – an important factor in job satisfaction and retention (Müller and Cook, 2024). We must continue to encourage beginner teachers to develop confident professional judgement and knowledge that goes beyond a technicist model. I am encouraged by a renewed professional discourse around teacher professionalism and optimistic that beginner teachers can experience a broader classroom readiness, for a career that privileges professional knowledge, agency, autonomy and judgement.