What contributes to first-year student teachers’ sense of professional agency in the classroom?

Abstract

This study explores Finnish first-year primary teacher students’ (N = 244) sense of professional agency in the classroom. In addition, the interrelation between student teachers’ sense of professional agency and the perceptions of teacher education as a learning environment is explored. The sense of professional agency in the classroom simultaneously requires the motivation to learn, efficacy beliefs about learning and intentional acts for facilitating and managing new learning in the classroom. The results showed that these basic elements are embedded in the contextualised components of student teachers’ professional agency, entailing judgements of one’s competence in teaching, transformative and collaborative practice, reflection in the classroom and modelling as a learning orientation. The results further suggested that teacher education provided an encouraging learning environment for student teachers. However, only peer relations in the learning environment were positively related to perceived professional agency.