brought about successfully–through a climate in which reflective practitioners share and
develop ideas. (Scottish Executive 2006 ,p.4)There has been a strong push to raise the quality—and capacity—of the teaching
profession. For example, the educational policy context in Scotland is presently
shaped by the influential reportTeaching Scotland’s Future(TSF) (Donaldson
2010 ). TSF advocates the development of new forms of‘partnership working’
between universities, schools and local authorities to take forward the implemen-
tation of CfE. Reflecting the language of CfE, it espouses particular ways of
thinking about career-long professional learning which seek to promote an under-
standing of teachers as‘reflective and enquiring teachers who are engaged in
continuous improvement’(p. 15) and‘have the capacity to engage fully with the
complexities of education and to be key actors in shaping and leading educational
change’(p. 19).
Such rhetoric offers a tantalising glimpse of a transformation of the professional
role of teachers in a new‘flipped system’(Evers and Kneyber 2015 ).^1 However, we
would caution that such developments may be highly problematic for a number of
reasons. First, the shift to output regulation has been associated with the devel-
opment of performative cultures, with the attendant risk that consideration of
educational purpose is supplanted by a short-term instrumentalism in schooling
(Ball 2003 ). Second, the rhetoric that teachers matter has tended to lead to an
over-emphasis on the importance of individual teacher capacity and a concomitant
neglect of the structural and cultural conditions which frame teaching, and which
indeed make effective teaching possible (see Priestley et al. 2015 ). Third, and linked
to the abovementioned caveats, the siren call for greater teacher autonomy conflates
the related concepts of teacher autonomy and teacher agency. The former—com-
monly understood as a comparative lack of regulation of teachers’ work—is
arguably an insufficient condition for teacher professional action in, for example,
curriculum making. Autonomy may lead to reproduction of habitual patterns of
behaviour and the continuation of poor practices as readily as it might lead to
constructive educational change and the development of what might be termed a
good education. For instance, in the case of CfE, research suggests a tendency for
schools to audit current practices against curriculum outcomes, often leading to
strategic compliance rather than engagement with the‘big ideas’of the curriculum,
accompanied by poor understanding of its values, purposes and principles (Priestley
and Minty 2013 ). Agency, conversely, following the ecological approach devel-
oped by Priestley et al. ( 2015 ), is dependent not only on high teacher capacity, but
crucially on the availability of resources—cultural, relational and material—that
facilitate effective practice. Such resources might include constructive collegial and
external support for innovation, conceptual framings for educational practice,
researchfindings and intelligently framed educational policy.
(^1) The authors draw upon the metaphor of theflipped classroom—where processes are turned
around to give primacy to learners—in calling for a system where the primary role in shaping
curriculum and pedagogy should rest with teachers, rather than politicians and administrators.
770 M. Priestley and V. Drew