Q: “How can we create environments in school systems that allow for greater teacher agency?”
A: As a teacher, I often took matters into my own hands, embracing the motto “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.” When I knew which approaches would be best for students, it was difficult to advocate for them without data, so I’d quietly implement what I thought was best, tracking progress and collecting evidence. I could make a case for requesting time and funding once I knew what I was doing was working. If I didn’t have agency in my classroom, this could never have happened, and my work experience may never have gotten me to this place.
Something I understand about my personality, and maybe you know about yours, is that I don’t like being told what to do, especially if my expertise is being ignored and I’m expected to be a cog in a wheel. This kind of paradigm just doesn’t work for me. When teachers are given the freedom to make choices about what and how they teach, they can better address learners’ needs and feel supported and respected professionally. When teachers are micromanaged, it can feel as though we aren’t trusted, which can be very damaging to school culture.
Why Teacher Agency Matters
Recent research from the OECD TALIS 2024 study shows a clear link between teacher autonomy and professional effectiveness. Teachers who report greater instructional freedom and influence in school decision-making consistently demonstrate higher self-efficacy and job satisfaction; this was certainly my experience as well. More importantly, studies show that autonomy-supportive teaching environments significantly slow the typical decline in students’ intrinsic motivation during the secondary school years. Evidence indicates that empowering our educators yields better outcomes for both the professionals in our classrooms and the students they serve.
Defining Clear Decision-Making Parameters
Creating environments that foster teacher agency begins with establishing clear decision-making frameworks. Schools should develop comprehensive decision-rights matrices that explicitly outline which choices teachers can make independently, which require team collaboration and leadership input. This clarity should extend to curriculum adaptation, assessment design, grading practices, disciplinary approaches, scheduling flexibility, and budget allocation. By communicating non-negotiables upfront—such as legal requirements, safety protocols, and equity commitments — while clearly identifying where experimentation is encouraged — we create the psychological safety necessary for innovation to flourish.
Leadership should model vulnerability by sharing their own pilot attempts and learning experiences, establishing meeting norms that assume positive intent and encourage constructive critique of ideas rather than people. These opportunities to lead by example will have a much greater impact than a leader who claims to want these things and then behaves in a way that demonstrates the opposite. This mixed message is extremely damaging. There needs to be a mechanism in place that invites feedback to the leader to ensure that messaging and actions are aligned.
Redesigning Structural Supports
Meaningful teacher agency requires intentional structural redesign. Schools must guarantee at least 120 minutes of protected collaborative planning time per week for each teaching team, while reducing unnecessary meeting time to free up cognitive bandwidth for meaningful work. I can’t say this enough: We should never add more to the plates of educators without removing something else. When priorities shift, so too must obligations. You can conduct a time audit to assess how time is being spent and whether that time is appropriate for different tasks and initiatives.
Organizing teachers into stable, cross-disciplinary teams with clear charters and decision-making authority lays the foundation for collective efficacy. Providing resource autonomy through discretionary mini-budgets, streamlined purchasing processes, and limited schedule flexibility within established guardrails demonstrates trust in professional judgment. Establishing site-based leadership councils with elected teacher representatives ensures educators have an authentic voice in co-deciding school priorities and resource allocation. These opportunities also ensure that the decisions made will serve the whole community.
Shifting from Compliance to Trust-Based Systems
The transition toward greater teacher agency requires a fundamental shift from compliance-based to trust-based systems. Schools should adopt “default-allow” policies, under which, unless a proposed change conflicts with stated non-negotiables, the response should be “try it — measure it — share results.” Simple one-page proposal forms for classroom or team pilots with clear goals, timelines, and equity impact checks can streamline innovation while maintaining accountability.
Modernizing evaluation systems to allow teachers to co-author growth goals aligned with their professional interests, incorporating peer feedback and student voice surveys, and decoupling experimentation from punishment are essential steps. Approved pilots with negative results should inform collective learning rather than trigger individual sanctions. While I held my leadership position, it was important to me that teachers set their own goals. When teachers take ownership of their professional growth, they are personally invested in the work we need them to do, and we can support them more effectively.
Empowering Instructional Leadership
True instructional empowerment means providing teachers with meaningful curriculum leverage. Schools can offer a high-quality core curriculum with optional supplements that teachers can select based on students’ needs, while enabling teams to design common formative assessments and adjust pacing based on student evidence.
Within policy guidelines, allowing teams to choose grading practices that align with learning goals and equity principles demonstrates respect for professional judgment. Having this kind of freedom while I was in the school I was in longest is how I was able to innovate around my grading and assessment processes and my students flourished. We also can redesign professional learning to include choice-based PD catalogs with micro-credentials, workshops, and coaching cycles, while institutionalizing peer observation, instructional rounds, and lesson study with built-in coverage, creates continuous improvement cycles driven by educator expertise. When we create a culture of learning and insist on a learner-led paradigm, we need to mean that for adult learners too.
Balancing Autonomy with Equity
The pursuit of teacher agency must be balanced with an unwavering commitment to educational equity. Schools should require equity impact checks for all instructional pilots, asking critical questions about who benefits, who might be harmed, and ensuring access for multilingual learners and students with IEPs.
Defining school-wide common experience minimums while allowing local design flexibility ensures consistency where it matters most. Using brief, high-quality common assessments and student work protocols, rather than over-testing, maintains accountability without stifling innovation. Establishing comprehensive measurement systems that track teacher outcomes —such as retention rates, engagement survey scores, and PD participation — alongside student outcomes, including assessment growth, attendance, and behavior referrals, disaggregated by student group, ensures that increased autonomy serves all learners equitably. We always need to put the needs of students first when making important decisions about how and what to balance. Too much autonomy around policy will create a disjointed experience for our students.
Implementation Pathway
A thoughtful implementation approach begins with co-designing decision-rights matrices with teacher leaders, protecting planning time in master schedules, and significantly reducing the number of meetings. Launching teacher-led communities of practice and opening professional development menus creates immediate opportunities for agency. As momentum builds, schools can expand team authority over assessments and intervention blocks, implement peer observation cycles with coverage support, and shift evaluation toward goal-aligned evidence and student work artifacts. The goal is to establish site-based councils to co-decide future priorities and to publish annual learning reports that celebrate both successes and valuable lessons from instructional innovations.
The research is unequivocal: When we create environments that honor teacher expertise and professional judgment, we not only improve educator satisfaction and retention but also create richer learning experiences for students. The delicate balance lies in providing meaningful autonomy within necessary guardrails to ensure both excellence and equity for every learner in our care.
As an educator, what does teacher agency mean to you? What would it look like? Please share.
If you have an issue that you would like me to address, please email me at ssackstein@educatorsrising.org or complete this form. You will be kept anonymous.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Starr Sackstein
Starr Sackstein is the Massachusetts state coordinator for PDK’s Educators Rising program, COO of Mastery Portfolio, an education consultant, instructional coach, and author. She was a high school English and journalism teacher and school district curriculum leader. She is the author of more than 15 educational books, including Hacking Assessment (Times 10, 2015), Making an Impact Outside of the Classroom (Routledge, 2024), and Actionable Assessment (Routledge, 2026).
Visit their website at: https://www.mssackstein.com/
