Fostering Agency and Co-Regulation: Teachers Using Formative Assessment to Calibrate Practice in an Age of Accountability

Albeit from varying perspectives, multiple stakeholders (i.e., policy makers, researchers, administrators, teachers, parents) call for teacher professional development as a means of fostering and/or enacting educational reform (Borko, 2004; Cochran-Smith, 2004; CochranSmith & Fries, 2005; Darling-Hammond, 1996, 2000; Little, 2001; Timperley & Phillips, 2003; Zeichner & Noffke, 2001). But tensions often arise between stakeholders with varying roles, stemming at least in part from conflicting assumptions concerning where responsibility for decision-making should be situated, and the role of professional development in effecting change. For example, if professional development is offered with the goal of “training” teachers to implement mandated curricula using prescribed instructional methods in pursuit of performance indicators that they have had little hand in defining, then teachers are likely to feel disenfranchised from change processes. Yet at the same time, policy makers facing public pressure to improve outcomes for students may feel powerless to effect change in a system where responsibility for educational planning is distributed. To escape from the unfortunately all-too-common situation where stakeholders hold conflicting and seemingly irreconcilable perspectives, in our research we examine how professional development might be conceived in a context where teachers, administrators, parents, researchers and policy-makers act as partners in educational reform.