Teachers’ Agency in Shaping the Educational Success of Schoolchildren: Roles and Beliefs

Abstract

All over the world, educational and, particularly, curriculum reforms face different issues, including communication with teachers. To implement reforms successfully, politicians should consider the teacher agency since teachers deliver all the innovations to schools. Agency is an autonomous activity to change routine practices. The high level of agency is related to teacher’s belief in the possibility to influence the results of the work. This study focuses on the teachers’ perceptions about the role of school, family and students themselves in academic success. A mixed methods strategy was used to analyze the results of a Russian national survey of over 4,000 teachers and 12 focus groups. Results showed that over half of teachers believed that their work and other school factors do not affect the students’ academic success. The most crucial factors of success, according to teachers, were students’ diligence and motivation, as well as family contribution. Many teachers believed that the academic success factors are beyond their control, the school is just an instrument to unleash the students’ potential. Thus, many teachers had attitudes that do not encourage a high level of agency that define teacher practices transformation during curriculum reforms implementation.