Reflections on the Chartered College of Teaching roundtable with the Teaching Commission
Changing the narrative…
Do we really understand the challenges that teachers face in being the best versions of themselves? Are we clear on what it is that enables teachers to have the greatest impact and what is currently preventing that from being realised? We all want to write a better next chapter in the history of education but do we understand the narrative to this point?
As part of the Chartered College’s series on recruitment and retention, a roundtable with Fellows and with colleagues from the Teaching Commission was held with the aim of understanding what teachers feel allows them to have the greatest impact in the classroom. This blog picks out the central ideas from the discussion and positions them in the wider context of national debate about how the education sector can better support teachers to have the impact in classrooms that will give them the meaning and purpose to remain in the job.
What do we think allows teachers to have the greatest classroom impact?
Centering debate around the role of a teacher should be a case of considering what has the greatest impact on pupils. On the one hand, we might consider the specific actions that teachers take. Checking for understanding so that they know whether to re-teach or move on is one such example. A focus on impactful actions is logical because they are the tangible aspects of teaching that we all see emerge from the complexity of what is going on in the heads of teachers and pupils. But this presents a problem. A single teaching action – checking for understanding using mini white boards, for example – is neither good or bad. It is the context of the situation that determines the effectiveness of the teaching action. What do we know about the context of teaching a class of pupils? It is highly unpredictable and frequently changeable. What this means is that the thing teachers do that enables them to have the greatest classroom impact is making good decisions, the kind of decisions that are responsive to what is happening with the learning of the pupils in front of them.
When we consider what allows teachers to have the greatest classroom impact, we need to consider two things.
- Firstly, whether or not school leaders create an environment that fosters teachers’ confidence to be decision makers.
- Secondly, whether or not school leaders equip teachers with the knowledge to make good decisions.
Let’s start with the first point about the environment leaders create. Roundtable participants consistently said that they had worked in schools where teachers are not seen as decision makers. Colleagues spoke about needing greater ‘scope and freedom to demonstrate skill in teaching’ and also about wanting greater ‘professional autonomy’ and wanting the focus to be on what is best for pupils rather than needing to follow hard and fast policy.
It seems that in many schools there is a culture of compliance in that teachers are expected to follow strict lesson routines that sometimes extend to classes in the same department and year group being at the same point of the lesson at any given moment. Clearly, scripting expectations of teaching to this extent is eroding the purpose and meaning that keeps teachers in the job and crucially, keeps them succeeding (Herzberg, 1987). Teaching happens in a highly complex environment, partly because the primary concern related to its inhabitants – the learning of pupils – is so unpredictable (Cilliers, 1998). This means that a lack of flexibility around how teachers respond to pupil learning or lack thereof, is not just bad news for the professional freedom of teachers, it is bad news for the learning of pupils with teachers not permitted to deviate from predetermined courses of actions.
Perhaps one reason for the lack of professional freedom allowed to teachers is a doubt over whether or not they will consistently make the best decisions for pupil learning. One roundtable participant said that ‘the quality of training for mentors is often questionable’. If we have doubts over the quality of training that mentors get then we must also have doubts about the quality of professional learning that teachers can do and therefore, the quality of their prospective decision making.
What gets in the way?
Why do we not have a system that allows teachers this professional freedom when so many people within that system believe it to be necessary for teachers to have the greatest impact? What is it that is getting in the way?
Cultivating the conditions for professional freedom
We need to be clear on what we think teachers really need in the best interest of pupils. Often, the terms autonomy and agency are used interchangeably. Indeed, during the roundtable, the predominant call was for autonomy. However, what was discussed was evidently closer to agency. Let’s be clear on the difference. Autonomy is the ‘freedom to organise one’s job’ (Evers et al., 2017, p. 806). In the context of teaching, this usually includes the methods by which the work is carried out (Hackman and Oldham, 1975). So, essentially, autonomy is the freedom to choose the methods by which you carry out your job, free from external involvement. As Professor Haili Hughes, Teaching Commissioner, points out, ‘In schools, we’ll never have freedom from external control – quite rightly as we are paid using public money (2025).’
Agency, on the other hand, is the ability to act and make choices. It requires two things:
- the knowledge of what to do
- the conditions or environment that allow the agentic individual to be a decision maker.
These two ingredients of agency are strikingly similar to the two things mentioned above that roundtable participants felt allowed teachers to have their greatest impact.
So, while we might think teachers need autonomy, firstly, it might be an aim that is out of reach due to the high-stakes nature of what teachers do. Secondly, and more importantly, if roundtable participants are representative of the profession more widely, it is in fact agency that teachers are seeking. This seems logical. Teachers want a framework of best practice principles to work within. To borrow a phrase from Professor Haili Hughes that I used myself in the roundtable discussion – we can’t have teachers choosing their own adventure and they probably don’t want to anyway. The profession’s appetite for better professional development tells us that teachers want to get consistently better.
So, armed with a clear understanding of agency, what is standing in the way of teachers achieving it? Often the answer is that schools themselves do not have the freedom to be able to give teachers agency. I’m not sure that’s true. I have personally worked with schools who take a project-based approach to their principles of high-quality teaching and learning and with other schools who take an approach far more aligned with direct instruction (Engelmann and Carnine, 2016). As a primary teacher, I am also reminded that the National Curriculum (2015) is 65 per cent non-statutory and 35 per cent of the statutory content is in English and Maths. The belief that schools as institutions are straight-jacketed around approaches to teaching and curriculum seems inaccurate. The question is why is the agency that schools have, not been filtered down to classroom teachers? A number of thoughts came up around this point in the roundtable and few were unsurprising.
External testing and the pressures that it places on schools to perform well is one such limitation. It leads schools to find a formula that works to get a good set of results which then feeds the temptation to ask all staff to teach to that formula. This is all well and good except that when we see ourselves as technocratic deliverers of a formula, it is unlikely that we will ever find the job satisfaction to keep us in the job. It is also unlikely that we will ever develop the sense of self-attribution and responsibility that is needed to develop expertise (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1980). Short term results, it seems, come at a cost of long-term sustainability. This will not be news to readers.
Another inhibitor of teacher agency seems to be our reluctance to engage with the art of subtraction (Johnson, 2024). We add more and more in the name of ‘what’s best for pupils’ but we seem to be ignoring the fact that what’s best for pupils is a responsive teacher and a teacher can’t be responsive to what is happening in front of them in the classroom if they have an ever-growing list of new things to be getting their heads around. According to roundtable colleagues, some of these things are administrative and this is something I have spoken at length about previously, both publicly and in my own SLT (Senior Leader Team) meetings. Teaching is hugely cognitively demanding. We need to strip back as much of the other stuff as we possibly can. Remove the sludge that stands between teachers and the thinking we want them to do – the thinking about teaching.
Developing teacher knowledge
The conditions to make decisions – the trust of leaders to do so – is only half of the agency equation. Teachers also need access to high-quality professional development and roundtable colleagues also felt that the quality of teacher training, for both new and experienced teachers, is often lacking. There have been significant gains in our sector’s understanding of how professional learning works. Many school leaders know that one hit wonder CPD (continuing professional development) to ‘light a fire’ is unlikely to make a tangible difference to teacher practice. We need coherent, well-designed professional development that has teacher decision making at its heart. We can’t stop at creating the environment for teachers to be decision makers. We also have to teach teachers how to make decisions, and often, this is about teaching them to understand the brilliant decisions they are already making. Decision making is tacit and so often, brilliant teachers are unaware of why they have done certain things. We need to get inside these experts’ heads and surface the mental models they are deploying (Cottinghatt et al., in press). This is something that we know there is an appetite for across the sector. A recent conversation with Sufian Sadiq, Co-President Elect of the Chartered College of Teaching and Director of Talent and Teaching school for Chiltern Learning Trust about this very thing is encouraging, showing that more school and trust leaders are turning to their most expert teachers as the source of the greatest improvements we can make as a sector.
If we can surface the mental models of great teaching as part of professional development, we might then be ready to face the other barriers to teacher professional learning. These barriers require a re-thinking of the purpose of professional development. Research is too often used to prove a point that every teacher must do things in precisely the same way and precisely at the same time. Research must inform professional judgement and not replace it (Lather, 2004). Roundtable participants also raised the point that teachers are rarely given the time to process new learning. Too often, professional development moves onto something entirely different and teachers are left with the residue of an idea, denied the time to let it properly grow. Teachers are often also missing the time to practise their craft. They are given the information, they know what to do, but are not given the time to engage with deliberate practice, (often called rehearsal) that helps to lay the ground for new habits. Perhaps most interestingly, colleagues felt that professional development often seeks to reduce the complexity of teaching in the name of wellbeing or staff workload. One colleague pointed out that being ‘cognitively tired is fine’. Teachers want to embrace the complexity of their job, they don’t want it reduced. They especially don’t want it used to the point where their role is not to engage with and respond to clues about pupil learning. So, what can we change and how can we do it?
What can we change?
Roundtable participants’ thoughts lead us to consider the following changes:
Agency for schools needs to lead to teacher agency: this doesn’t mean teachers do what they like. It means that leaders define the principles or the framework model of teaching and learning with teachers, and then teachers make decisions about how best to work within that in the best interest of pupil learning in any given situation. Proposing frameworks is beyond the scope of this blog but there are many great examples across the sector.
Teacher CPD needs to be patiently and skillfully designed: time needs to be built into professional development plans for teachers to process new ideas, to question them and to develop a sense of what they might look like and when. Teachers also need time to practise, to rehearse their craft, and this should be an integral part of professional development programmes. We wouldn’t expect a doctor to perform an operation having never rehearsed in a low-stakes training environment so why should we expect a teacher to do it? The threat of immediate death as a result of poor decision making is not present in teaching but the long-term impacts of cumulatively poor decision making on the lives of pupils is catastrophic.
Subtraction: leaders need to do everything they can to remove any tasks, and crucially – thinking – that detracts from teachers thinking about teaching. There is simply too much administrative sludge in a teacher’s job and if we want them to have the greatest impact they can have, we need to remove it from them.
Flipping scripts…
Roundtable colleagues talked about the need to flip the script. The challenge to help teachers have their greatest impact is that currently, the issues for teachers are not as well understood as they need to be. Before we can all move forward, we need to understand where we are willing to go.
Let’s flip the script that teachers want things to be easier. They don’t. They want professional trust. ‘Being cognitively tired is fine’.
Let’s flip the script that teachers don’t want to be accountable. They do. But they want to be collectively accountable to each other for their own part in a shared mission of better education for pupils, to the sector, not just to their line manager.
Let’s flip the script that teachers don’t want to learn. They do. They just want to be taught as well as they know how to teach. They want the space to process and to practise because without it, they can’t improve.
Let’s flip the script that teachers want to do what they want. They don’t. They want the agency to think for themselves and make decisions against a set of collective principles. We all want the joy of feeling part of something greater than ourselves. Shutting the door and doing what you like for the day is a novelty that rapidly wears off and teachers know this. They want to work together, under an agreed approach but with the freedom to apply that agreed approach in the right way and at the right time in the best interests of learning.
We can help teachers have the impact they want to have and have the skill to have but we need to keep talking about it because only by doing that can we hope to change the narrative. Before we can talk about it, we need to make sure that the script is correct.
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References
Cilliers P (1998) Complexity & Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. New York: Routledge.
Cottinghatt S, Hughes H and Kohlbeck A (in press) Coaching For Adaptive Expertise. London: Routledge.
Department for Education (2015) The National Curriculum in England: Key Stages 1 and 2 framework document. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/national-curriculum/key-stage-1-and-2 (Accessed: 29 June 2025).
Dreyfus S E and Dreyfus H L (1980) A five-stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition. California University Berkeley Operations Research Centre. ORC-80-2.
Engelmann S and Carnine D (2016) Theory of Instruction: Principles and Applications. NIFDI Press.
Evers A T, Verboon P and Klaeijsen A (2017) The development and validation of a scale measuring teacher autonomous behaviour. British Educational Research Journal. 43: 805-821. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3291
Hackman J R and Oldham G R (1975) Development of the job diagnostic survey. Journal of Applied Psychology. 60(2), 159–170. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076546
Herzberg F (1987) One more time: How do you motivate employees? Harvard Business Review. 65(5): 109–120.
Hughes, H. (2025) Agency vs autonomy. 22 June. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-haili-hughes-178479186_think-we-definitely-need-a-conversation-about-activity-7341853305792286720-Tedi?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABoZatUB_Y8D1hwrG-vFwDwtk22CexqFPso (Accessed: 29 June 2025).
Johnson, R. (2024) Serious about subtraction: The art of subtracting to add value. Available at: https://www.pixl.org.uk/blog/?pid=2&nid=2&storyid=17 (Accessed: 29 June 2025).
