Autonomy Should Give You Freedom to Do Your Job — Not Freedom to Harm Others
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the difference between professional autonomy that empowers teachers and unchecked autonomy that allows harmful practices.
Key Takeaways
- Autonomy has limits - Professional freedom means having discretion in your practice, not the freedom to do whatever you want regardless of impact
- Other people's autonomy shouldn't harm students - When one teacher's choices negatively affect colleagues or students, that's not autonomy — it's negligence
- Accountability and autonomy coexist - True professionalism means being trusted to make decisions while remaining accountable for outcomes
Transcript
autonomy should give you the freedom you need to do your job without giving other people the freedom not to do their jobs and in education i think we often get this wrong we often give people too much autonomy over things that really undermine their ability to do their job and take away their autonomy around how to do that job.
And one of the biggest places where this shows up for us is when kids come in having not been taught what they're supposed to be taught in a previous grade.
If people have the autonomy to do that and not teach what they're supposed to teach, then that's going to be a problem, right?
That is always going to produce gaps in students' background knowledge, and that's going to affect their learning when they get to us.
And that's something that we've complained about forever, right?
Oh, why didn't they learn what they're supposed to in the previous grade or over at the elementary school?
That's what the middle school says.
Middle school complains about the elementary.
High school complains about the middle school.
Colleges complain about all of us.
And I think we've got to get on the same page about teaching what we're supposed to teach and making sure that we are not exercising the autonomy to leave out big things that we need to not leave out.
But that doesn't mean that we need to micromanage every aspect of the job because we can't both hold people accountable for the job and not give them the autonomy they need to do that job.
And I think we need to see curriculum as the job, not just some little annoyance, right?
I think too often curriculum is an afterthought.
Curriculum is maybe you have one, maybe you don't, maybe you make up your own, who really cares?
Well, if we want to get students anywhere specific, it has to be through curriculum, and that means we can't just have total autonomy over curriculum.
So I think the right way to approach curriculum from an autonomy perspective is to give the best teachers control of the curriculum and at the district level you've got to make some decisions who is in charge of the curriculum who is in charge of saying which specific books we're going to teach in third grade ela and i spoke with a brilliant elementary principal earlier this week and i'll have the show out soon about their alignment around which specific books we're going to teach in which grade which week and which skills we're going to teach with them a huge amount of alignment And it seems like the kind of thing that would impinge on teachers' autonomy, but teachers love it because they don't have to worry about that.
It's decided for them.
They don't have to make it up from day to day.
And they don't have to worry that they're duplicating what the kids did last year or failing to build on it.
And they don't have to worry that the kids coming their way from the previous grade have gaps because they know exactly what they've been taught because they decided together as a faculty.
So I think we've got to get smarter about autonomy.
We neither need to increase or decrease autonomy.
We just have to use it better.
Let me know what you think.