LOOKING THROUGH TEACHERS’ EYES – INVESTIGATING TEACHER AGENCY

ABSTRACT

Societal, structural, value-based or economic changes and changes related to technological developments necessitate a continuous development process in the field of education. In responding to the changes, teacher agency becomes a key factor. This study explores when the context of reform provides the basis for the growth of agency and when it disables the potential for teacher agency. The analysis is based on empirical data gathered as part of a large-scale mixed-methods study of the professionalism of Estonian teachers. This study identified the strong presence of professional knowledge and skills among teachers related mainly to classroom work and we argue that this is a result of focusing on short-term professional aims. But a prerequisite for the growth of teacher agency is support so that teachers can develop their professional vocabulary and theoretical knowledge base.

Keywords:

• neoliberal education reforms
• teacher agency
• life-history interviews

Introduction

Facing changes is an inevitable part of the work of a teacher. Therefore, the teacher must constantly adapt to changes or adapt them to suit her professional agenda. In regard to the latter, in terms of what reaction is possible, teacher agency becomes a decisive factor.

Teacher agency refers to the idea that a premise exists allowing teachers to act supported by the context in which they are consciously capable of affecting matters specifically related to their work – the decision-making process, active involvement in reform processes and constructing their professional identities (Lasky, 2005; Lipponen and Kumpulainen, 2011; Priestley et al., 2012).

This paper focuses on how teachers perceive changes in their work-life and how different periods of change enable or disable teacher agency. Estonia can be viewed as a case study where neoliberal educational policies were introduced and accepted at the regulatory level within a rather short period. The reforms implemented bore the same ideas and core values as elsewhere in the West, including standardisation, professional appraisals and changes aimed at increasing the efficiency of the teaching profession. And while Estonian education leads the world based on PISA results (OECD, 2018), insufficient young teachers entering the profession while older teachers continue to leave is a severe and growing problem that needs urgent attention and a solution that can guarantee occupational stability. In relation to the former, there are not enough young people interested in becoming teachers, and in relation to the latter, qualified teachers working in schools are unsure about their willingness to continue in the long term.

As a result of the analysis, the time under consideration here is divided into thematic periods that are contextually diverse. It must be stated that the influential effects are reciprocal – just as context affects agency, teacher agency affects the reform trajectories (Lasky, 2005; Priestley et al., 2015, p. 25; Vähäsantanen, 2015) and for that reason teachers may be referred to as agents of change (Fullan, 2006).

During World War II, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union and remained a part of the Soviet system until it regained independence in 1991. As common to the Soviet sphere, education was under centralised control (Cerych, 1999; Erss et al., 2014). The Soviet centralised education system ideologically reduced teachers to the executers of orders received in a top-down manner (Olek, 1998). As stated above, the aim of this study is to explore the characteristics of the reform context, which has the means to enable or disable teacher agency. Hence, this research was guided by the following questions: 1. What were the most fundamental changes in the eyes of teachers to have taken place during the past three decades? 2. In what ways have the neoliberal reforms implemented in Estonia affected teacher agency?

We attempt to closely follow the changes that occurred throughout the transition period to recent years, and in terms of the various layers of the reform, how teachers inevitably reacted to them and how these different reactions have respectively shaped teacher agency. Agency cannot occur in a vacuum – its potential is constructed by multiple variables, including professional milestones from the past, personal beliefs and understandings but also habitual patterns of action, and this helps us to understand how individuals are enabled and constrained by their social and material environments (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 23–24).

This study is akin of those designed to gather knowledge on how to support teacher agency in professional contexts (e.g., Erss, 2018; Moate and Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2014; Vähäsantanen, 2015). It is an empirical study that aims at giving voice to the teachers themselves and to understand the ways in which different conditional factors are related to enabling or disabling agency. We decided to use life-history interviews as a tool, as it supports reflecting upon work and purpose, and therefore allowed us to better perceive the whole picture of the working lives of teachers, which are bound up with personal and contextual factors (Goodson and Gill, 2011, Goodson, 2013).

Conceptual Frame: teacher Agency

Agency can be seen as part of teacher professionality, which develops over career stages (Ball and Goodson, 1985) and is shaped by the school, reforms, and political contexts (Sachs, 2001) – the latter, as it is shaped by systemic and regulatory contexts, is a crucial part of the potential for developing teacher agency. Teacher agency is also closely related to the concept of professional identity and a person’s professional identity and actions derived from this are inevitably conditioned by forces at the regulatory level (Bourdieu, 1984), while teachers’ actions are constrained by the fact that their choices are embedded in institutional forms and practices (Coldron and Smith, 1999). Giddens has stated that even though we are not entirely free to choose our own actions and our knowledge is inevitably limited, nonetheless we as a collective body are the agency which reproduces the social structure which in turn leads to social change (Giddens, 1986).

Priestley et al. (2015) emphasise the importance of context and that it should be taken more seriously by public policy makers. They assert the need to be aware that such contexts can easily disable individuals with otherwise high agentic capacity, and needless to say that the present context will impact future agency, just as the past context has shaped the present one (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 25).

There are at least two ways of viewing agency, including teacher agency – as a process, an ongoing internal conversation (Archer, 2000, 2003) or as something to achieve, a condition where the teacher has alternatives to consider and take action upon in light of her professional purposes (Biesta and Tedder, 2007; Priestley et al., 2015). There is a growing amount of literature about how agency occurs and how it is bound up with contextual factors (Archer, 2000; Priestley et al., 2015, 2012; Vähäsantanen, 2015). Some studies focus on specific factors in support of the emergence and growth of teacher agency, the role of community in teacher development (Moate and Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2014) or the importance of systematic reflection to support and sustain the formation of agency (Leijen et al., 2020). Archer, who does not focus exclusively on teachers, stresses the influential nature of reflectivity on agency, seeing it as a central factor between structure and agency, being a form of internal conversation (Archer, 2003, p. 15) or discussion inside a professional community; either way, reflectivity helps position the teacher in the given context and as a result becomes a key factor for the possible emergence of agency.

Methodological Design

We base our analysis on empirical data gathered as part of a large-scale mixed-methods study of the professionalism of Estonian teachers. The study consisted of four sequential stages: documentary analysis, survey study, narrative study and scenario building (see more about the study design in Niglas et al., 2018). In the current paper, the analysis of an open-ended question from the teacher survey has been combined with data from narrative interviews. By triangulating the data from the survey with those from the narrative interviews, we aimed to map the historical stages shaping the professional lives of teachers as perceived by the teachers themselves and obtain an in-depth understanding of how those periods have affected teacher agency.

The survey aimed to identify possible typologies of teachers by understanding their perceptions of professionalism and identifying factors they attributed to changes in professionalism. As part of the survey, teachers were also asked to name changes that they felt had most affected their work, and position these on a personal timeline (from when they started working till now). This gave us a chance to create a periodisation based on the most intrinsic changes perceived by Estonian teachers.

A total of 897 teachers from 44 different Estonian public schools answered the following open-ended survey question: ‘Looking back, what have been the most important events that have affected your work as a teacher during your working life?’ The inductive content analysis method (Schreier, 2012) was subsequently applied to analyse the data. The analysis started by creating the initial text-driven codes that were re-named and merged, if necessary, in the next stage of the analysis. The emerging thematic categories were connected to the timeline. As a result of the analysis, six periods emerged from the respondents’ answers characterised by different work-life events.

In order to grasp an in-depth understanding of how those periods have affected teacher agency and what personal meanings are attributed to the changes, 13 public school teachers were interviewed in the next phase of the study. The general procedure of purposeful sampling was followed (Goodson and Sikes, 2001), and social sciences teachers, as subjects under strong ideological pressure in a totalitarian society, were chosen as the respondents. The interviewees included 10 women and 3 men, with work experience ranging from seven to 47 years. As some teachers worked in several schools at the same time, seventeen schools are represented in the interviews and three of the schools were primarily Russian language schools.¹ Eight teachers out of the 13 agreed to take part in repeat interviews about 1–2 years later in order to understand the dynamics in the working lives of teachers.

Narrative life-history interviews (Goodson and Sikes, 2001) were conducted so the teachers could construct a work-life narrative, while allowing them to discuss any topics relevant for themselves. All interviews started with a generative question – ‘please tell me your story’ (Goodson and Sikes, 2001). The interviewer went along with the story given by the interviewee and asked additional specific questions limited to the themes or aspects raised by the interviewee. If necessary, some additional questions were asked about certain life periods that the interviewee had chronologically skipped. In the repeat interview some specifying questions were asked about the topics discussed in the previous interview.

The interviews had an average duration of 104 minutes per interview and were recorded and transcribed. The thematic analysis method (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was applied to analyse the interview data. The purpose of the analysis was to identify repetitive patterns and themes that formed the basis of the work-life narrative. All interviews were read at least twice without taking notes prior to the analysis process in order to gain a better overview of the data. The segments of the text referring to work-life were marked and initial text-driven codes were generated. Subsequently, the codes were graded into themes and sub-themes, which were examined in the next phase and named. The emerging themes were triangulated with the results of the analysis of the survey data and the periodisation emerging from that.

Periods of Change in Teachers’ Work-life Narratives

Six periods shaping teachers’ professional lives were identified based on the analysis of survey and interview data. Some of the teachers who were interviewed started their work already in the late sixties, but the majority in the 1980s or 1990s, and therefore experienced the period of rapid and sweeping changes that occurred during the transition from the Soviet state to the current democratic society, giving us valuable insights into how these changes have supported or constrained the growth of teacher agency. Since some changes took place more gradually than others, the start and end points of the periods presented below do not always indicate some specific event that took place to trigger the change but are more approximate borders of the timing of transitions.

1980–1987: the Final Days of the Soviet System

As in every totalitarian system, education is one of those areas where state control is overwhelmingly intense. There were periods during the Soviet occupation when this pressure was reduced and then once again increased – most notably it was loosened after the death of Stalin and enhanced once again in the late 1970s during the final years of the Brezhnev era. The campaign of russification hit schools hard in the late 70s and opposition to it among educational circles combined with the instability of the highest echelons of power (known as the gerontocracy) in the Soviet Union resulted in increasing control over the work of teachers. A key factor emphasised equally in the interviews and in the survey in regard to this period was how control was exerted over teachers work:

Every week I had to show my lesson plans to the school management to obtain approval to do these things that I had planned in the classroom with my students. Ruth

While the majority of the teachers found the state’s authoritarian guidelines unnecessarily restrictive, there were also teachers who considered the strict guidelines as making their lives easier. This is an example of how the desire to follow routinised paths was also present. A behaviour that indicates no desire for any discussion of alternatives is a clear indication of a lack of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 141).

Even though Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, and thereafter launched the reform policies known as perestroika, due to some time-lag in the reform process, the significant changes which had an impact on education were not felt for a couple of years. However, working under ideological control pushed the teachers to seek ways to beat or fool the system:

I was taught to pretend and lie and just say what was expected from me without actually meaning any of it. It was like this secret language you had to learn. And we all learnt it. Anne

Hence, a certain vocabulary became part of their professionality. This could also explain why there was so much mistrust and uncertainty in society after the end of the Soviet occupation.

Adopting this vocabulary and practice was required for the sake of effective classroom management, which also meant sparing your students from it as much as possible and finding ways around it:

I took my pupils journals and … wrote there what was expected./…/I knew if the inspectors came, they never talked with the children. I think this was done deliberately. Mary

The taught patterns and actions were motivated by short-term goals, as is also described by Priestley and Biesta (Priestley et al., 2015) focusing mainly on supporting student engagement in day-to-day learning. In contrast to all this, it is understandable how after the first cracks began to appear in the system, an avalanche of changes took place in a very short period, all of which had been boiling under the surface. Previously, the context had been disabling teachers but as soon as the window of opportunity presented itself these factors were abolished and the possibility to take action presented itself, and many dared to take the leap when presented with the opportunity to expand their agency.

1987–1995: the Golden Age of the Teaching Profession

In 1987, the Teachers Congress took place, where a radical decision was made to untie local education from direct Soviet power. This triggered rapid changes inside the profession and the professional freedom of teachers expanded – restrictive ideological guidelines for teachers work in the classrooms were eliminated. In the survey, the teachers remembered this event as the first time they could actually freely express their thoughts in public: It gave us a chance to find like-minded colleagues and start a dialogue of how to renew this stuffy profession.

A collegial and collaborative culture is one contextual feature on which the presence of teacher agency depends (Leijen et al., 2020; Moate and Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2014). The possibility for in-depth collegial dialogue is one specific way to foster reflective abilities – participating in a dialogue often requires active listening and the need to stand up for viewpoints and beliefs.

Due to the rapid changes, there were no suitable textbooks, and therefore it presented teachers with an opportunity to create materials and by doing this, rethink their professional purpose:

I started creating my own materials … and it suddenly became clear to me that by making these materials I will endorse some specific approaches and values … and I actually have to stop and think what kind of individuals I want to raise. Berta

This work-related necessity triggered something on a much greater scale – the need to consider one’s long-term purposes as a teacher. According to Priestley et al. (2015, p. 30), long-term aspirations are part of the projective dimension of their model of teacher agency, meaning that a teacher plans her actions in the present while considering and seeing them as a means of achieving long-term purposes.

Both young teachers, who were at the beginning of their careers during that time, and experienced teachers, who had worked for years or even decades under the Soviet system, had a great nostalgia regarding this period. But there were also some teachers who remembered the period as the most difficult in their careers – having to teach without proper guidelines and materials.

It was a horrible time for some teachers … having to decide on your own … but it wasn’t only a personality thing. It was a school culture thing as well, I substituted in a neighbouring school for a year and it was so different from my home school … the atmosphere, many of them were like frightened kittens in that school. Tina

This observation is in line with the findings of Priestley et al. (2015, p. 145), who argue that school structure can endorse or limit teacher agency. Unsurprisingly, there is a noticeable dichotomy during this era – most teachers considered that their autonomy and decision-making capability increased (including emphasising new alternatives), but there were also some who regarded this increased freedom as a burdening responsibility.

One of the key characteristics of this period was de-Sovietisation that was felt first by the teachers whose subjects were ideologically heavily loaded, like history teachers. For them the changes started earlier and preceded regaining independence in 1991, and they saw the period as an occupational renaissance, which was considered a learning period and a more important one than the primary teacher training they had received before.

As a part of this eagerness to study and grow as professionals, the first contacts with foreign partners were established and Estonian teachers happily took on the role of apprentices:

We went to Finland and Germany, and we took loads of textbooks back home with us and then other teachers borrowed these from us. We really worked for these connections, there was so much to learn … Ruth

There is reason to argue that the teacher autonomy that flourished in this period was more a collateral side effect rather than a planned change – the result of a policy of decentralisation and de-Sovietisation. Nevertheless, it was the most essential window of opportunity used by a great number of teachers.

1996–2001: getting Acquainted with New Borders and Guidelines

In 1996, the first national curriculum was adopted and then replaced in 2001 by the second. Based on the 1996 curriculum, schools had to develop their own school curriculum and for many teachers this task was overwhelming due to the fact that there was no previous experience or much-needed knowledge of educational discourse or vocabulary. Hence, the teachers were side-lined from creating the new national curriculum, which was done by educationalists and largely based on the Scottish curriculum emphasizing key competences. While the first curriculum was mentioned in the survey and also got some attention in the interviews, the second curriculum seems to have had a minor effect on the work of teachers and was rarely mentioned. The change that was meaningful for teachers, repeatedly mentioned in the survey and discussed in the interviews, was the introduction of the national examination system.

Although being part of the discourse surrounding standardisation, the national examination system had no real opposition from the teachers. It could be argued that the reason behind that was the fact that it was seen as a collaborative effort, a collegial learning opportunity when active or perhaps even agentic teachers had the opportunity to participate in creating these exams every year. It was a shared effort and so also acceptable for teachers who were not directly involved. The only negative side effect of the examination system was the public league tables of schools that were made based on the results of the student exams, giving tangible value to the teachers work:

Some things I had a hard time getting used to. Like school rankings/… /teacher’s role and effort is tremendous even then when some child gets a “3”(minimum positive grade)./…/In the first years of these rankings, some teachers were severely shaken by them, some of them cried, but it passed, later there wasn’t such tragic reactions. Anne

However, the league tables were well received by society and started to influence the field of education, creating public hierarchies between schools and hence introduced a performance and competition orientated culture in the field of education. The pressure to compete with each other quickly became the norm; pressure from society and school managements was acutely felt by the teachers as a result. Competition-based education works against teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015) and a performance orientated culture leads to fixed goals, enabling teachers to set their own goals, which is essential for agency formation. In this particular case we see how one educational initiative can work as an empowering factor and at the same time as a restricting factor in regard to enabling teacher agency.

2002–2007: the Adjustment Period – Going with the Flow

Distinctive features of this period included focusing on more external changes like the working environment but also the professional status of teachers. This period was seen by the teachers as one where things calmed down giving the much-needed time and space to settle into all the changes.

During this period teachers were eager to improve their own work-related prospects and many of them decided to convert the personal professional growth from the previous period into higher external professional status through the teacher attestation system, which gave the teachers who met the requirements not only greater professional status but growth in income. The professional status given by the system had to be renewed regularly and this motivated teachers to be professionally active in their professional communities, which as a result provided support for teacher development and the growth of agency (Moate and Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2014).

A noticeable shift also occurred in the willingness among teachers to be form tutors. In the survey, it was repeatedly mentioned that this specific part of the work, which previously had been an important part of a teacher’s self-actualisation, suddenly became undesirable:

Before, I wanted to be a form tutor because it gave me the possibility to step outside the boots of being this subject teacher and I could just be a guide for these kids … set long-term goals that weren’t just related to subject matter stuff, but rather … educating and guiding them to becoming individuals who care about other people and do good when they can. Eve

Hence, being a form tutor encouraged teachers to reflect on their personal long-term purpose, which shaped their actions in the present, compelled them to make conscious choices from among alternatives within the limits of cultural, structural and material conditions (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 30). When this particular part of the work of teachers became saturated with features that acted as constraints – bureaucratic responsibilities, accountability and prescribed means of effectiveness – then this part of the work became undesirable and in regard to professional development, teachers were deprived of substantial opportunities to raise their agency.

Another negative notion that became evident was that teachers were feeling disrespected by the media – teachers were often represented in an inferior manner and the idea of teachers as service providers to clients – the parents and students – was established. And there was also a touch of misogyny in this stereotype – a typical teacher was often seen as an elderly woman, representing the much-hated Soviet-style teacher, who is unintelligent and cruel:

One thing that has unfairly helped me in my career is that I do not meet this teacher stereotype created by the media and society. I am the opposite … being a man … and this is enough to be successful. Aron

According to the model by Priestley et al. (2015, p. 26), this can be seen as part of the practical-evaluative dimension, where there is initially the perception of a specific situation (in this case sensed disrespect from the media) followed by an interpretation (in this case knowing that my work isn’t valued) which clearly resonated in subsequent studies showing a decline in job satisfaction (Loogma et al., 2009).

2008–2012: carrying the Weight of an Efficiency-driven Education Policy

The defining notion in this period was the rapidly increased workload and the first contribution was an e-school environment that found its way to all Estonian schools. At first, teachers saw this as just a helpful digital tool, being an upgrade from the paper-based bureaucracy. Soon enough it became clear that the e-school environment carries in itself numerous bureaucratic responsibilities, which had not been there before. Teachers had to start explaining every step of their work – why some part of the subject matter is emphasised more than another, the grading principles etc. Therefore, frequent conflicts with the parents were an inevitable result as were increasing workloads due to expanded accountability.

This pressure from the parents … I really felt it coming in./…/I didn’t focus on the right things in my class, my grading system was wrong and I didn’t value their children enough. So now my attention to monitoring myself is really high. Mary

Here we see how this particular initiative acts as an accountability measure amplifying the teachers’ need to monitor themselves and restricting the growth of agency.

The economic crisis that started in 2008 and the austerity measures used by the government after that had a direct influence on education. The prevailing paradigm situated in the policy measures was efficiency. For teachers that meant a ‘general work time’ and school heads were given the right to decide over teachers’ workloads – 20 or up to 35 classes per week – plus all the other obligations (preparing classes, grading etc.) had to be completed within this general work time. The wage reductions often mentioned in the survey indicated that the teachers saw a mismatch between the work responsibilities and the remuneration. The rapidly increased workload becomes evident in a most straightforward way through the interviews where problems balancing work and family life were outlined:

Something that has become part of this job … is feeling guilty towards your family./…/My husband works abroad and every time he is at home there is quarrel about me working too much … but actually I try to hide it from him and do more while he’s away …/… /. I love my work … but I also understand that this situation now … this is not normal. Amanda

Out of the three separate national curricula adopted since regaining independence, the one that received the most attention was the current one adopted in 2011. There were numerous substantial differences and innovations in that curriculum that could have been emphasised by the teachers, but the pattern that stands out both in the survey and the interviews is that the teachers most noticed those changes that have a direct impact on their work, depriving them of the autonomy to set their own goals. The criticism from the teachers focused not so much on the ideas in the curriculum, many teachers saw a lot of potential value in them, but rather the fact that there was no actual plan for how to implement it all and where to find the resources. Ideas like formative assessment, supervising student research papers, the shift towards an integrated curriculum, among others. And in relation to the latter, the pressure of increasing cooperation with different parties, and using more project learning. Even if seen as necessary and substantive ideas, the problem raised by the teachers was that doing things in a superficial manner, due to the overwhelming workload, just increases the mentality of ‘ticking a box’:

Formative assessment … I did it for two months and then I was totally drained … some of my colleagues made this … bank of assessments and just started copy pasting it all/…/It’s the same with pressure to cooperate now. Yes, I will cooperate, but only when I have 15 classes per week./…/And the other thing is that this format of cooperation … I cooperate every week with my colleague … but this doesn’t count. We have to write things down in a memo. Then it counts … when you have a record of this cooperation. Mary

Another notion that finds its way into the schools during this period is the project-driven approach, meaning that schools are expected to participate in different projects with their students. This was part of the curriculum innovation, but the schools often saw it as competitive advantage over neighbouring schools, and therefore vitally important in the context of a declining population, a tendency that forced them to compete with each other for students. The majority of the work – applications, running the projects and writing the reports, were left to the teachers to manage.

Coordinating projects has given me the chance to guide my students along educational paths towards goals that are fundamentally important for me. I have conducted two projects connected with global education themes. And I have messed up some good relationships with my colleagues because of that – all I have is my work, I do it 24/7, I don’t have a family or other hobbies besides work (laughs) … and now my school board expects the same input from all the other teachers. Hannah

Leijen et al. (2020) argue how teachers with different backgrounds might perceive some contextual features differently – what is seen as an agency enabler for one can be seen as a constraint for someone else. This is also present in this case – while some of the teachers saw this project-driven approach as an opportunity for setting and moving towards professional goals, for others it was seen as a measure that was forced upon them which ultimately had a negative effect, interrupting collegial coherence, which is important for the growth of agency.

The declining prestige of the profession was felt more strongly due to different campaigns and initiatives based on the idea that everyone could be a teacher, making professional teacher training redundant or insignificant. Most notably, there was a severe dichotomy in regard to the Teach First type of initiative known as Youth to School² (YtS). The programme received a lot of attention in society and the media, teachers felt that YtS teachers were put in the spotlight and idealised as the saviours of Estonian education. Furthermore, a strict distinction that took shape quickly in the media was also noticed. Opening this ‘back door into the profession’ has clearly brought up tensions inside the profession:

This idea that you don’t need a proper education … in your chosen subject/… /Teaching is not a … bakery … that you can just learn through doing. There is something very wrong in this way of thinking. And it’s unfair for my older colleagues. They have dedicated their life to education. And no one cares what they have to say … the media asks YtS teachers to participate in talk shows and represent the body of teachers. You have been in school for 2 years and you represent the pillars that are actually holding this system together? Sam

This initiative was and is heavily supported at the political level. But it could be one more initiative that works against collegial cohesion and refracts the body of teachers (Tinn, 2020). As also established before, the role of the community in teacher development is one significant aspect that could be put to work to contribute to the growth of teacher agency (Moate and Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2014). In this case we see collegial fragmentation as a consequence that eventually becomes a restrictive phenomenon.

2013 – … : facing the Changing Inner Dynamics of the Profession

The elimination of elective exams and the teacher attestation system were the two key changes in this period. Previously, the examination system was built in such a way that students had to pass five exams at the end of high school. One exam was mandatory (Estonian language), all the other exams were elective exams, which at the same time could be used as admission exams for the universities. After 2013, elective exams were abolished and replaced by a mandatory maths exam. The Estonian language exam went through radical changes but remained mandatory. This was considered an ideological shift by the interviewees. One aspect which brought dissatisfaction was the fact that the national exams were one place where agentic and interested teachers could actually take part:

It was a tremendous learning experience, really thinking through your aims and goals./…/I evolved during that process and the effect of the exams were broader because it pressured teachers to think things through – what do we want to achieve really … like professionally and personally? Aron

Teachers were deprived of significant professional output, which provided the essence of their collegial culture and also supported systematic reflection. The new system created a hierarchy – now there were state exam teachers and subjects and non-state exam teachers and subjects, giving the former more leverage inside the schools and in the eyes of the public. In addition to the programmes that opened new paths into the profession, this is the second and somewhat deeper rift that contributed to the fragmentation of the professional body of teachers. It had a negative impact on professional engagement with each other, and therefore theoretically cut through some of the connections inside the collegial community that are necessary building blocks for agency.

Another aspect which influenced many teachers was the abolition of the attestation system that previously gave teachers a chance to apply for professional categories that gave them a framework within which to set aims and goals and strive towards professional development:

I had been investing in my career and my students for 30 years … setting goals and achieving them … and it was all taken away. Ruth

According to the teachers’ understanding, their career structure was wiped out and hardly any possibilities were left to enhance their status inside the profession. The options for increasing their income now stay the same throughout the career path, hence a novice teacher and an experienced teacher have relatively the same options at any given time. In a way, the attestation system worked as a framework for setting long-term professional goals and with its abolition teachers were deprived of one important support structure.

Conclusion

Reduced control in the final days of the Soviet system made room for collegial discussions to begin, which is an integral part of teacher agency (Moate and Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2014). Usually, it is acknowledged that the early years of a teacher’s career has the strongest influence on their professional development (Priestley et al., 2015; Ball, Goodson, 1985; Beijaard et al., 2004), but in this case it could be argued that the first three periods presented here were the most influential in the emergence of teacher agency and then also growth, regardless of their previous years of work experience. These periods were also those where neoliberal reforms had not really set in yet.

In the study conducted by Priestley et al. (2015), they identified a strong presence of efficiency in teachers while doing their classroom work. This is also evident in this study, where the teachers’ professional knowledge and skill base were on a strong footing even when they experienced severe and restrictive problems due to social, cultural or material constraints. We saw this regardless of the degree of freedom or the core essence of the incoming neoliberal initiative; this is well proven by the country’s top ranking in the PISA results (PISA, 2018). It could be argued that this resulted from focusing on short-term professional aims, which in turn can also be linked to low levels of job satisfaction (Loogma et al., 2009). That is something that occurs when deprived of the opportunity to lay down long-term professional aims while the latter is only possible when the teacher is not forced into a state where her main goal becomes getting by in the classroom, feeling powerless to change the contextual environment of education policy.

But at the same time, there is still strong evidence of agency being present in light of events where teachers gave an initiative a new meaningful purpose; for example, taking the incoming idea of standardisation and accountability and turning it around to work for them in the form of a national examination system. This was reshaped by the teachers as a tool for professional development, creating space for collegial dialogue and personal reflection to flourish – both key elements for agentic development (Archer, 2003, p. 15; Moate and Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2014; Leijen et al., 2020; Vähäsantanen, 2015) and as such, became a tool for setting long-term professional goals that are crucial for the growth of agency (Leijen et al., 2020; Priestley et al., 2015).

The last three periods outline the gradual growth in micromanaging, and by nature, micromanagement reduces the subject’s decision-making powers. Numerous aspects of the work of teachers were stretched during these periods and filled with duties loosely connected to the core of the work, and more characteristic of the work of bureaucrats, which does not presume but rather excludes agency.

In spite of objections from the teachers, the abolition of the attestation system flattened the career structure and the second example, changing the national examination system by abolishing elective exams, consequently and bluntly interrupted the collegial discussion and the grounds for professional development and agency building. This could prove to be the most severe loss that affects the viability of Estonian teacher professionalism, and hence the potential for the gradual development of teacher agency in years to come.

We propose that to halt this decline and to start supporting the growth of teacher agency, we need to recognise that teachers are missing access to professional discourses that could provide them with alternatives for growth and development. Clearly, teachers are great at orientating themselves within classroom practices, but what is needed now is support for developing their professional vocabulary and theoretical knowledge base so they can participate in the debates where the long-term national educational goals are set, so they can envision alternatives and drive discussions and ultimately also policy choices. From one perspective, the teachers’ own personal experiences also support this approach, but from the other perspective, we argue here that what is missing, and therefore is needed, is the informed support and development of these skills.

In this paper we have tried to outline the main policy trends that have occurred in different periods since the end of the Soviet Union and how these have affected Estonian teachers’ agency. We acknowledge that in addition to macro level changes, school culture can have a great influence on enabling or disabling teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015). The role of the school culture – especially that of Russian language schools, which have a somewhat different leadership style (hierarchical) – has not deserved in-depth discussion in this study due to the limitations related to the sample, and therefore needs further investigation in future studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Approximately 13% of schools in Estonia are Russian language or partly Russian language schools

² Candidates who apply for this programme aren’t expected to have an education in the subject field and are not allowed to have previous pedagogical training.