Teacher agency in professional learning communities

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how teachers’ professional agency afforded and constrained their decisions to participate in or withdraw from professional learning communities (PLCs). While PLCs are often thought to position teachers as agents, explicit links between teacher agency and key features of PLCs have not been explored. Data from interviews with teachers and principals are examined in relation to five key features of professional learning communities: focus, long-term inquiry, collaboration, leadership support and trust. Three forms of teacher agency emerged in relation to these features and contextual conditions: engaging with communities, abstaining from communities and rejecting communities. Each form of agency has different consequences for sustaining professional learning communities and teacher development.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher agency
• professional learning communities
• teacher collaboration

Introduction

During the past two decades, professional learning communities (PLCs) have drawn the attention of educationists interested in teacher professional development. PLCs are groups of teachers who come together to engage in regular, systematic and sustained cycles of inquiry-based learning, with the intention to develop their individual and collective capacity for teaching to improve student outcomes (Stoll et al. 2006, Katz et al. 2009, Hairon et al. 2017). PLCs can create spaces for ongoing, sustained professional development (Vangrieken et al. 2017), different from the often fragmented professional development programmes that many teachers are exposed to (Borko 2004, Cobb et al. 2018). PLCs can be seen as a special case of communities of practice (Wenger 1998), where members engage in professional learning (author ref, 2016), which entails: becoming competent in and confident with the knowledge base of the profession; using the knowledge base to make and justify decisions; and developing professional agency and identities (Darling-Hammond and Sykes 1999). The intention is for PLCs to deliberately position teachers as professional agents in their own professional development, through their making professional decisions as to what they need to learn, based on their understandings of their learners’ needs, as well as the knowledge-base (Boudett and Steele 2007, Jackson and Temperley 2008). However, the enactment of teachers’ agency in PLCs has not been explicitly examined, nor problematised. While much of the work on PLCs argues for agency as a key driver of PLCs, it has not yet considered how teacher as agents might reject PLCs.

There are strong theoretical arguments for PLCs and a burgeoning empirical base of evidence on how communities work, their influence on teacher learning and learner achievement, and the challenges in sustaining them. While the theoretical push for PLCs is strong, the empirical evidence is mixed. There are examples of strong communities as well as communities that experience difficulties in creating learning environments (Horn 2005, Curry 2008, Wong 2010, Maloney and Konza 2011, Owen 2015, Hairon et al. 2017, Horn et al. 2018). There is some evidence that PLCs influence teacher practices and student outcomes but this link is complex and changes with context (Louis and Marks 1998, Bolam et al. 2005, Stoll and Louis 2008b, Slavit et al. 2009, Katz and Earl 2010, Owen 2015, Hairon et al. 2017) (author ref, 2017). While the rhetoric for strong and inclusive PLCs is appealing, implementing PLCs that do support strong teacher development can be challenging (Hargreaves 2008, Vangrieken et al. 2017, Horn et al. 2018). How PLCs are sustained has not been well-researched, and I have not found any research which explores why teachers choose to stay in or leave their PLCs, an important element of participation in and sustainability of PLCs.

In this paper, I focus on teachers in a project which developed and researched PLCs among high school mathematics teachers in Johannesburg, South Africa. Some teachers and schools participated in PLCs for 3 to 4 years, despite a number of challenges, while others left relatively early in their PLC experience. In order to understand teachers’ choices to stay with or leave their PLCs, this paper explores how teachers’ professional agency constrained and afforded their participation in PLCs. I ask two research questions: 1. why did some teachers and schools choose to leave the project and others choose to stay; and 2. how were teachers’ choices to stay or leave produced by and reflective of their professional agency?

Professional agency

A long history of work on agency and structure provides various positions on the ontology of agency as related to social systems or individual characteristics, with agency often being thought of as making choices among alternatives, taking initiative or being able to influence oneself and others (Etelapelto et al. 2013). Agency is both constrained and afforded by social relations and structures, particularly power relations (Mercer 2011, Etelapelto et al. 2013, Buchanan 2015). Mercer (2011, p. 428) argues:

humans as agents [are] able to influence their contexts, rather than just react to them, in a relationship of ongoing reciprocal causality in which the emphasis is on the complex, dynamic interaction between the two elements

In finding a path between individual and social accounts of agency, Etelapelto and her colleagues argue for a subject-centered, sociocultural view of professional agency, which takes the individual and social contexts of agency to be analytically separate but mutually constitutive (2013, p. 45). In understanding agency from this perspective, we need to investigate:

how agency is practiced and how it is resourced, constrained and bounded by contextual factors, including power relations and discourses, and further by the material conditions and cultures of social interaction (2013, p. 61)

Furthermore, agency has a temporal aspect, in that people’s life histories and prior experiences influence their agency in relation to their contexts (Etelapelto et al. 2013, Biesta et al. 2017). Biesta et al. (2015) argue that agency is an emergent phenomenon of actor–situation relations and is something that people do, rather than have, i.e. agency is enacted in context and denotes the ‘quality of engagement of actors with temporal-relational contexts-for-action’ rather than a property, capacity or competence of the person (2015, p. 626). This means that agents act ‘by means of their environment rather than simply in their environment’ (2015, p. 626).

Research on teacher professional agency has been conducted in relation to new curriculum policies (Biesta et al. 2015) or accountability regimes (Buchanan 2015), which significantly influence teachers’ work and which teachers respond to in a variety of ways, by ‘entering into and suggesting new work practices, but also as maintaining existing practices, or struggling against suggested changes’ (Etelapelto et al. 2013, p. 61). Buchanan identifies two kinds of teacher agency: ‘stepping up’ and ‘pushing back’, where stepping up involves teachers trying out new ideas and taking up additional roles, such as coaching or leadership roles; and pushing back involves rejecting or re-configuring practices and policies with which they do not agree. Biesta et al. (2017) suggest that teachers can experience agency and powerlessness at the same time, in response to different conditions at different levels of the system.

What is clear from the above discussion and important for this paper is that teachers always enact agency, even when they choose not to act, or might seem to ‘passively’ accept policies or practices from others. These too are agentic achievements and need to be understood as such in relation to particular social and material conditions and relations of power. In this paper, I examine teacher agency in relation to teachers’ participation in professional learning communities. Since PLCs are deliberately set up to support rather than constrain teacher agency (Stoll and Louis 2008b), we need to understand how teachers enact their agency in relation to PLCs.

Drawing on both the literature and the data, three categories of teacher agency emerged in this study: engaging with communities, abstaining from communities and rejecting communities. Teachers who engaged with their communities found the work of the communities inspiring and relevant to their practice, and enjoyed their learning and their professional development. They continued to participate even in difficult circumstances or when they experienced doubts about the communities and the project. Teachers who abstained from their communities found some aspects useful and enjoyable while others were challenging, and the challenges trumped the learning so that they left the communities, even while recognising their benefits. Teachers who rejected their communities found little positive in the work and disengaged early from their communities and left the project. In some cases, whole communities left the project and in other cases, some teachers left, while the communities continued to function. Abstaining and rejecting both imply disengagement from the communities although they are different from each other in relation to the reasons for disengagement.

Agency and PLCs

A review of the literature, including two systematic literature reviews, converges on five key characteristics of successful PLCs: focus, long-term inquiry, collaboration, leadership support and trust (Vescio et al. 2008, Stoll and Louis 2008a, Katz et al. 2009, Vangrieken et al. 2017). How these characteristics play out in PLCs is central to their sustainability as spaces for professional development. These characteristics proved central in understanding the data in this study in relation to the three categories of teacher agency: engaging with communities, abstaining from communities and rejecting communities.

PLCs need a clear and shared focus, which should challenge members to go beyond what they know, should be broad enough to leverage change and yet not too broad that the collaboration becomes diffuse (Katz et al. 2009). There should be broad agreement in the community that the focus is useful for teacher learning but sufficient disagreement on key aspects of the focus to make for interesting and challenging discussions. Who chooses the focus and how it is interpreted has implications for the kinds of communities that develop and for teacher agency. Engaging with a community includes developing or embracing a shared focus or suggesting modifications to the current focus, while abstaining from or rejecting a community might happen when the focus is not seen as relevant or useful for teachers’ work.

Successful communities engage in long-term, systematic and rigorous inquiry. Ongoing inquiry into classroom-based questions can create possibilities for sustained meaningful learning among teachers. Time is a crucial resource for long-term engagement in communities, and the time required is not always available (Prenger et al. 2018). Ongoing enquiry also integrates the work of the communities into the life of the school, with discussions continuing in various school spaces, and feeding back into the PLC conversations (Stoll et al. 2006). Engaging with the long-term inquiry in a community can happen when time is made available for the PLC work and when schoolwork and community work are seen as complementing each other, while abstaining from or rejecting a community may be seen where there is competition between the scarce resources of time and commitment.

Collaboration is important not only because teachers learn through collaborating but because a key aim of PLCs is to produce collectively generated shifts in practice (Stoll et al. 2006, Hairon et al. 2017). Collective shifts are more sustainable for schools, and teachers working together to achieve a common goal are more likely to be successful than individual teachers working alone. Real collaboration that leads to meaningful learning can be difficult to achieve (Horn et al. 2018) and ‘contrived collegiality’ can occur, where collaboration among teachers is forced and strongly managed for bureaucratic and technocratic reasons, rather than voluntary, and teacher-directed in the service of developmental goals (Hargreaves 1991). How teachers participate in the community work relates to their professional agency, as teachers both simultaneously create and experience the community. Engaging with a community can create vibrant, collaborative communities, with professional and productive conflict, while abstaining from and rejecting communities may be produced by, and in turn produce, challenges to collaboration and collectivity in communities (Maloney and Konza 2011).

Much research suggests that the quality of leadership support for PLCs is important in achieving robust communities. Leadership support stems from the principal and includes other senior teachers in the school, such as deputy principals and heads of department. Leadership support includes providing space and time for the communities to function, and other resources where necessary (Stoll et al. 2006, Katz et al. 2009, Stephan et al. 2012). Leadership support can be administrative, by offering time off from other duties and space to work as a PLC, and may be more substantive, as in taking an active interest in the work of the PLC and joining meetings. Teachers’ perceptions of the support from their school-leaders may contribute to reasons why they engage with, abstain from or leave their communities. How teachers engage with school hierarchies is also an important part of their professional agency in relation to leadership support.

Trust is an important part of collaboration and productive learning relationships. Learning together requires teachers to challenge each other’s ideas and practices and trust helps to avoid defensiveness, conflict and contrived collegiality while supporting challenge and disagreement. Research suggests that where there are strong hierarchical relationships within schools and where teacher morale is low, the trust required to sustain engagement in PLCs may be difficult to attain (Wong 2010, Schechter 2012). Key to engaged agency in PLCs is trusting that judgement will be withheld in favour of development. A second area of trust is a strong belief that teachers and learners are the ultimate beneficiaries of the PLC work. Abstaining from and rejecting communities can occur when there is mistrust in these two areas.

Table 1 summarises the three kinds of professional agency in relation to the five characteristics of PLCs, to form an analytic framework for the study. The latter two categories, abstained and rejected, are discussed together, as these were only clearly distinguished during data analysis and emerged as the characteristics were looked at together.

Table 1. Agency in relation to the features of PLCs

	Focus	Long-term inquiry	Collaboration	Leadership Support	Trust
Engaged	Focus is embraced, modified	Time for inquiry PLC work related to school work	Collaboration appreciated as productive	Substantive and administrative support	Trust in who benefits and what benefits are
Abstained Rejected	Focus not relevant	Time not available PLC work not related to school work	Collaboration contrived and not helpful	Less support	Mistrust in relation to benefits from PLC work

Context of the study

Hairon et al. (2017) argue that it is important to link the contexts of PLCs to their effectiveness. The project of which this study is a part took place in Johannesburg, South Africa. Teacher development policy in South Africa strongly supports the establishment of PLCs as a forum for teacher development and articulates the goals, features and activities of PLCs – for example, PLCs can provide ‘the setting and necessary support for groups of classroom teachers, school managers and subject advisors to participate collectively in determining their own developmental trajectories, and to set up activities that will drive their development’ (Department of Basic Education & Department of Higher Education and Training, 2011, p. 14). The policy positions teachers as agents, with statements such as: teachers should ‘take control of their own development’; and ‘teachers will be able to highlight areas of weakness, and use expertise within the PLCs to help address their difficulties’ (p.14), which suggest that teachers will come together in professional learning communities as professional agents driving their own learning. However, the South African education system, similarly to many others, does not always offer conditions of possibility for such professionalism.

In South Africa, there is hardly any tradition of collaborative teacher work and there are strong hierarchies among principals, heads of department and teachers as well as between less and more experienced teachers. The teaching profession is not well respected in South African society, teachers are not well paid and there is substantial ‘teacher bashing’ in the press. Teachers, particularly those in low socio-economic status schools, often have high teaching loads and teach large classes, and teacher morale is low. Schools that serve learners of low socio-economic status are strongly managed by provincial departments of education, and there is very little trust among various levels of the system, with government, principals, teachers and parents often blaming and judging each other for the widespread low achievement of learners. In this context, the notion of professionalism sits somewhat uneasily and, as I will argue later, creates tensions for the work of professional learning communities. In addition, there is a long-established and widespread culture of privatised practice in schools, which is not conducive to professional collaboration and learning (Little 1990, Lomos et al. 2011). Research in China suggests that a long tradition of working collaboratively may afford certain kinds of communities, however, collaborating to substantively shift teaching practices requires strong leadership and external support (Wong 2010). A study in Israel suggests that strong hierarchies of seniority among teachers as well as strong central management of schools constrain the sustainability of professional learning communities (Schechter 2012). Other factors that contribute to difficulties in sustaining professional learning communities in schools are teacher turnover, particularly in secondary schools, and a lack of the time needed for extended, substantive collaborative work (McLaughlin and Talbert 2001, Boudett et al. 2008).

Project and research design

The focus of inquiry and activities of the current project were set up by the project team before we began work with the PLCs, in order to have something to present to schools when asking if they wanted to join the project. The focus and activities were designed to be somewhat adaptive (Koellner and Jacobs 2015), with possibilities for choice and flexibility for PLCs included. The activities were designed for ongoing inquiry, and protocols for facilitators to develop meaningful collaboration and trust were developed by the project team and used by the communities.

The focus of inquiry was the reasoning underlying learners’ mathematical errors, which was chosen because all mathematics teachers deal with learner errors, however very few delve into the thinking behind such errors. Learner errors are produced by partially valid mathematical reasoning and making that reasoning explicit for teachers and learners can help teachers to value learners’ current mathematical thinking and to support them to develop stronger mathematical thinking (Smith et al. 1993). The focus provided a mechanism to access three important elements of teaching and learning mathematics: how learners’ thinking makes sense to them and can be worked with even (and especially) when partially correct; how teaching practices can shift to take account of learners’ errors and thinking; and teachers’ own knowledge, both content and pedagogical content knowledge (author ref).

A developmental sequence of activities where teachers analysed learner errors in different sites and different ways formed the basis of the PLC work: test analysis; learner interviews; curriculum mapping; choosing leverage concepts; readings and discussion; planning lessons together; teaching the planned lessons; and videotaping and reflecting on the lessons together. One cycle of these activities took about a year to complete. A key area of flexibility was for PLCs to choose the areas of mathematics content to work on, based on their analyses of learner errors in their schools. Communities also adapted activities and sometimes left some out. The focus and activities were broad enough to allow leverage, maintain consistency across schools and allow for community agency in choice of mathematics topics to be discussed in the PLCs, and specific enough to support teachers to do close analyses of their learners’ reasoning.

During the 4 years of the project (2011–2014), 12 schools from 2 districts participated, some joining in 2011 and others in 2012. The districts were selected purposively: they were close to each other and there were schools in each district that were interested in participating. Schools within the districts were selected if three or more mathematics teachers were interested in participating in the communities and if they served mainly learners of low or low to mid socio-economic status. In 2011 and 2012, six schools left the project, and in some schools that stayed in the project, some teachers left, while others joined. Over the 4 years, 50 teachers participated, 22 for 3 years or more.

The study employed a qualitative methodology in order to understand the teachers’ perspectives on their decisions to participate in or withdraw from the project and their choices and decisions in relation to their professional agency. Interviews were conducted in three schools that had withdrawn from the project and three schools still participating in the project, with some teachers in the latter schools having withdrawn. The principal or deputy principal in each school was interviewed, as well as six participating and seven withdrawn teachers (see Table 2).

Table 2. Sample (P = Principal, DP = Deputy Principal, PT = participating teacher, WT = withdrawn teacher)

School	Joined project	Left project	Participants interviewed
B	January 2011		DP, 2PTs, 2WTs
C	January 2011	August 2011	P, 1WT
G	January 2012		P, 2PTs, 1WT
I	January 2012		P, 2PTs
J	January 2012	May 2012	P, 1WT
K	January 2012	March 2012	DP, 2WT

The interviews were conducted by a graduate intern, who had not met the teachers or principals previously. The interviews were semi-structured to allow for some similarity while also allowing for the interviewer to explore the different participants’ perspectives more deeply. The interview questions were grouped into five categories: expectations of the PLCs, including whether expectations had been met; benefits and challenges of the PLCs; time available for the work of the PLCs; collaboration in the PLCs; and support from school management. There were 2–3 questions in each category and the categories correspond broadly to the five key features of PLCs discussed above. The interviews lasted between 30 and 45 minutes, were audio-recorded and transcribed.

Initial themes for analysis were developed in relation to the interview questions and an initial summary was developed for each set of data: principals, participating teachers and withdrawn teachers. The summaries were then compared, looking for similarities and differences across the data sets. The first round of analysis distinguished between the participating and withdrawn teachers and sharpened the account of the five characteristics of PLCs, as they related to the data. At this point, differences were seen between two groups of withdrawn teachers and the conceptualisation of agency was developed to account for the three groups (two withdrawn and participating) and further sharpen the analysis. The author wrote a draft of the data analysis and then re-read all the interviews to check that all important data had been included, disconfirming data had been reconciled, all claims could be backed up by the original data and all quotes were correctly captured.

Findings

Three distinct groups of teachers and schools emerged from the analysis of the five key features: participating teachers with engaged agency; withdrawn teachers with abstained agency; and withdrawn teachers with rejecting agency. The key features of PLCs taken together in each group suggested the three kinds of agency.

Focus

This feature distinguished between two groups of teachers. Participating teachers and some withdrawn teachers, from schools B and C, appreciated and embraced the focus. The withdrawn teachers from schools J and K found the focus irrelevant to their current teaching and demoralising. Typical comments are summarised in Table 3.

Table 3. Comments about focus in relation to agency

Participating Engaged, Withdrawn Abstained

Being able to get the reasons behind learners’ answers, I can now at least try to ask them … to keep on probing the learners until they realise their mistakes. (participating teacher, B1) We analysed question by question, concept by concept, that’s where I saw that maybe, somehow, we are short-changing our learners. That was quite a rude awakening, ja, and I hope that I could use that even in the other subjects that I teach. Because I think it would have a far-reaching positive impact (withdrawn teacher, B3) Because now it was somehow it was a bit painful. If you find that learners who were doing grade eleven, and learners who were doing grade eight, they were given almost the same test. But now when you check the errors that were done by grade eleven learners, were the same as the errors that were done by grade eight. (withdrawn teacher B4).

Withdrawn Rejected

Where, what, how do I benefit from this … it was nice arguing, identifying some of those errors made by learners, trying to think why they made these mistakes, how, why, you know, those different views from learners, people justifying those wrong answers, It was fun, it was fun, but you know, in as much as it was fun … I couldn’t link what we were doing with what we are doing in the classrooms (withdrawn teacher, J) With error checking and all that stuff we felt if the basics were done [at an earlier] level, it will be maybe better. and then most of us teaching grade twelve, how can we address that (withdrawn teacher, K2)

The teachers who appreciated the focus commented that it helped them to rethink their assumptions about learners and what they know, and to take time to understand learners’ thinking rather than to ‘pump’ them with knowledge. Teacher B₃ spoke about a ‘far-reaching positive impact’ in his teaching, even in other subjects. There were also some negative aspects – teacher B₃ points to a ‘rude awakening’ and teacher B₄ found it painful that errors did not decrease in the higher grades. The teachers at Schools J and K argued that the focus on errors took teachers back to basic concepts, which should have been covered in earlier grades, which they did not have time to go back to. Even teacher J, who enjoyed the sessions, said she could not link what they were doing to what she was teaching, nor could they think about how to address the issues. A number of teachers said that acknowledging the level of errors of the older learners could be demoralising.

Long-term inquiry

All of the teachers stated that time was a key challenge to participation: finding time to meet as a group and finding time to do the work of the project outside of meetings, for example the project readings or personal reflections on videotaped lessons. None of the schools had time during the school day for teachers to meet and all of the communities met after school which clashed with teachers’ personal commitments, such as picking up their own children from school. This feature distinguished between the three groups, with participating teachers finding the time to meet because they found the project work valuable in supporting their teaching. The withdrawn teachers from schools B and C enjoyed the early activities and could see their benefits but could not find the time to fully commit to and engage with the communities on a long-term basis. The other withdrawn teachers (Schools J and K) did not find the focus useful and did not have the time to engage so they prioritised their scarce resources for their schoolwork, disengaged and rejected the project. Table 4 shows some typical comments.

Table 4. Comments about time and inquiry in relation to agency

Participating Engaged	Because what I’ve also learnt is that here on earth there’s no time, but one has to make time for anything after all (participating teacher, B2) But as for me I consider it as pressure that I can’t do anything about, other than finding a better way to deal with … I must just find myself time (participating teacher, I2)
Withdrawn Abstained	Schools have their own programmes in place, so you find that sometimes [facilitator] will come, you know, and by that time there’s a staff meeting, or there’s an intervention, you know. It kind of compromised the whole programme (withdrawn teacher, B3) I would give my core business better preference, and then the remainder of the time would be utilised for things relating to the project (participating teacher, B2)
Withdrawn Rejected	You really find no time to give to this other project, because you know I have at least to give also my time to this because it’s my contractual obligation … with the workload that we had, it’s overwhelming, you know really, really it’s overwhelming (withdrawn teacher J)

Most of the participating teachers could see connections between the PLC work and their regular schoolwork and that the activities supported their learning for the classroom, and were able to find time to meet, sometimes with the support of the school leadership and sometimes without it. Five withdrawn teachers (B₃, B₄, J, K₁, K₂) and two participating teachers (B₂, I₂) distinguished clearly between the project work and their everyday school work and arguing that their contractual obligations to the school must take priority over any additional professional development work. While the teachers at schools B and C appreciated the project focus and said that they learned a lot from it, their other commitments made it difficult for them to find time for the project and to give it the time that they thought it deserved.

Related to time are teachers’ workloads, which were spoken about by six of the withdrawn teachers (B₃, B₄, C, G₃, J, K₂) and four of the participating teachers (B₁, G_1, I₁, I₂). The withdrawn teachers in Schools J and K noted that they had many and big classes, requiring a lot of marking and leaving little time for other activities, which was confirmed by the principals. Three of the withdrawn teachers (J, K₁, K₂) also spoke about the error analysis as ‘marking’, rather than analysis, arguing that their school workloads already required so much marking from them, they could not do additional marking for the PLCs.

Collaboration

Collaboration was described as a benefit by all of the participating teachers and three of the withdrawn teachers (B₃, B₄, C). None of the teachers from Schools K and J spoke about collaboration, possibly contributing to their decisions to leave. The teacher from School J did however say that they took a collective decision to leave, they discussed it as a group and decided as a group to leave. Comments from the first two groups are in Table 5.

Table 5. Comments about collaboration in relation to agency

Participating Engaged	It’s the sharing ideas part of it, the debates, you know, the questions, and also learning (participating teacher, B2) Getting to know that you’ve got people that you can call any time … who will assist in looking at the lesson plans, advising, giving support (participating teacher, I2)
Withdrawn Abstained	We were four teachers teaching maths. Then one teacher refused to be involved. So we were three. In the three of us, the other one was so committed [to other aspects of his work]. So most of the time it was me and [name]. And it was of no use, just the two of us (withdrawn teacher C)

While most of the teachers acknowledged the benefits of collaboration in the PLCs and wanted that kind of collaboration, the PLCs only worked for those schools and teachers who could create and maintain the collaboration. The work in PLCs was itself a new practice and required substantial engagement to establish and maintain. This suggests that in the collective work of teacher learning, the agency needs to be shared, teachers work together for the benefit of all and if not all want to do so, it may lead to rejection and push back from others.

Leadership support

Support from school leadership did not distinguish clearly between the participating and withdrawn schools, rather it was the teachers’ responses to the support that was important. The teachers who stayed with the project did so either with the support of their principals and HODs or despite lack of support (School G). The teacher in School C withdrew because of the lack of support of the HOD, while the teachers in Schools J and K withdrew despite perceived support of the project from their school leadership.

The principal at school I was interested in the project, talked to the teachers about it, attended some meetings to ‘show my interest’ and could talk about some of the substantive activities in the project, thus supporting the idea among her colleagues that ongoing learning is important. The deputy principal at School B sometimes excused the teachers from administrative duties to give them time for the project. The principal at school G said he did not know what happened in the community but assumed the facilitators were helping the teachers to teach better. The Head of Department at School G did not participate, saying that she did not want to dominate the discussions. The other teachers at School G continued to participate because they found it useful to collaborate with their colleagues and to engage differently with learners.

Among the withdrawn schools, the teacher from School C noted that the principal supported the project and encouraged them to attend but the head of department did not support the project and did not participate herself, which was a reason for their withdrawal. The teachers from school K said that while the school leadership supported the project because it reflected well on the school, the teachers experienced problems, which is why they withdrew. Teacher K₁’s comment suggests some conflict with the school administration, while Teacher J suggested that they had to find ‘polite’ reasons to leave because they found the project overwhelming:

As an administrator the picture you are giving, whether it’s nice or not nice, you would want things to work for your school. So you would say, let’s try it. But the people on the ground who were supposed to do it, they said, we can’t. Because I still remember we had a meeting and it was a push and pull (withdrawn teacher K₁)

Because really we were overwhelmed we were coming up with reasons, you know, sometimes you don’t have to give your real reason, you try to look and source a polite way of saying (withdrawn teacher J)

The principals from Schools C and J spoke about trying to encourage their colleagues to stay with the project but they did not know much about the details of the project and so had to accept the teachers’ views that the project was not helpful. For the most part in South Africa, principals’ roles are conceived of in terms of management rather than academic leadership, leaving many principals themselves with few resources to support academic learning among their colleagues. The decisions at schools J and K to leave reflects the hierarchical nature of South African schools and teachers’ simultaneous experiences of powerlessness and agency. Teachers are unlikely to express critical views, explain their needs nor ask for explicit support from principals; rather they might accept requests on the surface but then reject and refuse in other ways. The different responses to the HODs’ participation in schools C and G suggest different agency in relation to hierarchies.

Trust

Trust distinguished strongly between the participating teachers and the second group of withdrawn teachers, as indicated in the comments in Table 6

Table 6. Comments about trust in relation to agency

Participating Engaged

We can talk to the other community members freely without, how can I say, stage fright. We are confident because we are talking with colleagues, knowing that no-one is judging you (participating teacher, B1) I don’t know about videorising [sic]. I think we’re coming from an era where people were critical about you, they were looking at all the bad things that you were doing … Now, we understand you’re videorising it so that we can see ourselves developing. But somehow, at the back of our minds, it’s like, is it true? Are they not hiding something from us? (participating teacher, I2)

Withdrawn Rejected

I thought that maybe this is just maybe someone’s project, or maybe we are just facilitating research for the project (withdrawn teacher J) Because at the end of the day, we would see it as a research which benefits someone and not us really (withdrawn teacher, K2)^1

Four of the participating teachers (B₁, G₁, I₁, I₂) commented on the openness and trust among the teachers in the communities, however one teacher raised a challenge to trust – fear of being judged and evaluated on her teaching, particularly because she was videotaped. Her concern came from her experiences during apartheid, where school inspection was judgemental and inspectors held a lot of power over teachers’ careers. Although she knew that the system had shifted in favour of development, her prior experiences made it difficult for deeper trust of the system. The teachers were given the choice of whether to be videotaped and this teacher chose to be videotaped (as did almost all the teachers), suggesting that for her, the balance between trust and concern was, at this time, weighted in favour of trust and learning. But her comments suggest that trust needs to be built continuously. The withdrawn teachers from schools B and C did develop some trust in their colleagues and the project, but other issues such as time constraints, collaboration and leadership support were key to their decisions to withdraw.

For withdrawn teachers from schools J and K, lack of trust was a key element in their withdrawal. The teachers in School K mistrusted the research focus of the project, as well as the reasons why the school leadership wanted the project in the school. They did not see how the project would benefit them and their learners, given the constraints under which they work.

For the teachers who continued to participate, trust and agency came together to support participation. Even though there were some doubts, and most likely always will be, the fact that they were able to trust much of the process supported their agency in participating. The PLC work was a major engagement, requiring courage, time commitments and a strong sense that the project would be beneficial. For those who rejected the PLCs, major mistrust of the project’s motives supported frustration, demoralisation and a rejection of the project’s focus and activities. The teachers who abstained did have some trust in the project and found it useful but withdrew for other, more practical reasons.

Discussion and conclusions

Questions have been raised in the research about the sustainability and achievements of PLCs (Hargreaves 2008, Horn et al. 2018) and ideas generated about how to build successful PLCs (Stoll and Louis 2008b, Katz et al. 2009). It is important to hear teachers’ voices as to why they choose not to participate in and sustain their communities and how their choices reflect and produce their professional agency. The teachers in this study made choices based on what made sense in relation to their working conditions and constraints, for systemic and personal reasons. For some teachers, their commitment to their teaching supported an engaged agency, while for others it supported a more neutral, abstained agency or a direct rejection.

Table 7 summarises the analysis in order to understand how the different kinds of teacher agency constrained and afforded teachers’ decisions to participate in or withdraw from the PLCs.

Table 7. Overview of analysis

	Focus	Long-term inquiry	Collaboration	Leadership support	Trust
Participating Engaged	Embraced the focus and engaged with new practices. Somewhat painful to see learners’ errors.	Even though pressed for time found the project valuable and made time for it.	Learned from discussion and debate in PLC Collaborated with colleagues outside of PLC	PLCs continued with or without support of leadership	Developed trust in the project although with some doubts
Withdrawn Abstained		Enjoyed the early activities but school activities took precedence in relation to time	Sessions useful but limited if not all teachers participated	Withdrawal in school C because HOD did not participate
Withdrawn Rejected	Focus irrelevant and demoralising.	Overwhelming workloads and no time for project	No talk of collaboration	Nominal support from leadership, but teachers did not get the support they needed.	Did not trust that the project was for their benefit.

The analysis has shown differences among three groups of teachers, with some overlaps, in relation to their continued participation in or withdrawal from the PLCs. Among the withdrawn teachers, two groups were distinguished, those who enacted an abstained agency and those who rejected the communities outright. The first group found the project focus useful, developed some trust in the PLCs and enjoyed collaborating with their colleagues, but found that they did not have the time nor leadership support to stay with the project. For the second group, mistrust of the project agenda co-produced discomfort with each of the other key characteristics of PLCs. If the project’s focus on errors was merely a means to support the research agenda, it could not be trusted as a valid focus for professional learning and would limit the teachers’ ability to continue with the curriculum because of the gaps in learners’ knowledge. There was some tension between the school leadership and the teachers in these schools – adding to mistrust of the motives for the project and a sense of hierarchical power relations that did not support the teachers to raise their concerns, either within the school or with the project team. These teachers rejected the project and the PLCs.

The teachers who stayed with the project did so because their engaged agency allowed for engagement with the focus of the project and with each other, as collaborators within and beyond the PLCs. Although they experienced time constraints and mixed leadership support, they were able to deal with these challenges, maintain trust in the core elements of the project and take ownership of the project and the PLCs in ways that supported their learning.

The analysis shows how small differences in contextual conditions among teachers can support different kinds of agency in their participation in PLCs. Because the focus of PLCs is so important (Katz et al. 2009), how different teachers interpret and give meaning to a PLC focus has implications for their participation. While the central idea of PLCs is ongoing, sustained inquiry, integrated into the life of the school (Stoll et al. 2006), and since time is a scarce resource for teachers, particularly those who teach large classes and have big workloads, prioritising their own learning may not be easy for many teachers. Within a context of limited leadership support for the PLCs, a key influence on teachers’ agency and participation may be in how they respond to different kinds of support, illustrated by two schools which responded very differently to the absence of their HOD in the PLC. Hierarchical relationships in schools turned out to be important in the teachers’ agency in relation to the PLCs. While we did not see obvious examples of ‘contrived collegiality’ (Hargreaves 1991), the group that rejected the PLC showed that the hierarchical relationship between school management and teachers contributed to mistrust of the project and its focus, thus making collaboration problematic. Since many schools, particularly, but not only, those in developing contexts, do have hierarchies, it is important to consider how these may influence collaboration in PLCs. Similarly, trust in externally initiated projects is seen to be difficult to achieve and maintain, given the context of difficult and constraining school conditions.

In a research agenda for PLCs, Hairon and her colleagues argue for three key elements of PLCs to be elaborated: construct, conditions and contexts, and causalities. In showing how agency is important in sustaining PLCs, I have shown that agency needs to be considered as part of the construct. In elaborating the contexts and conditions, I have shown how various elements of teachers’ professional lives can influence their participation in PLCs: time, resource constraints, workloads, school hierarchies and trust in the system and the PLCs. These are important professional considerations that need to be taken into account when designing or understanding the workings of PLCs.

Both sets of teachers expressed their professional agency in relation to the project, some choosing to stay and others choosing to leave, influenced by both contextual, systemic, personal and community considerations. A question remains about the consequences of teachers’ choices in relation to their learning and their students’ learning. A discussion about these consequences is important so as not to take a relativist stance on professional agency, that all agency is equally legitimate, but is also tentative because we have less data for the withdrawn teachers. In the interview data presented above, we see that those who engaged in and those who abstained from the PLCs developed a new sense of professional identity in relation to collaborating with each other as well as in relation to understanding their learners in new ways. There is also data that shows that many of the participating teachers improved how they engaged with learners’ mathematical errors in class and developed more responsive teaching (author refs, 2016, 2017). Those who rejected the PLCs did not indicate any long-term learning from the project. Unfortunately, we have no data on the withdrawn teachers’ practices, nor what they chose to do once leaving the project. They may have joined other professional development programmes, which were more useful for them, or they may not have continued with professional development. A research design which followed both sets of teachers and their learners for longer periods of time may have helped to answer this question but the resources for this research were not available.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The facilitators were doing research for higher degrees. They were open about this with the schools and it seems that in this case, the teachers perceived the major benefit being for the research and not their development.