What Does Autonomy Mean to You as a Professional?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder explores what professional autonomy should look like for teachers and argues that micromanaging feedback undermines it.
Key Takeaways
- Autonomy means professional judgment - Teachers should have discretion in how they deliver instruction within a shared curriculum
- Micromanaging feedback destroys trust - When every observation produces a list of directives, teachers lose their sense of professional agency
- Autonomy and accountability can coexist - Teachers can have freedom in their practice while being accountable for results
Transcript
Too much of what people call instructional leadership is really micromanaging teaching in ways that don't work.
So I'm working on a new article on autonomy and I would love to know as a teacher, what does autonomy mean to you?
What do you need in the way of autonomy to do your job as a professional?
I think one reason teachers need autonomy, the fundamental reason, is that teaching is professional work that requires professional judgment and you can't both expect somebody to be a professional and use professional judgment and then take away all of their autonomy and tell them what to do and give them kind of micromanaging feedback and i think we have two kind of extreme approaches to instructional leadership on the one hand this is by far the most common we completely ignore people leave them alone never bother them Sometimes people like not being bothered because it's better than the alternative, but we just give people nothing in the way of feedback or support.
We just leave people completely alone, and I call that blind neglect.
Leaders don't know what teachers are doing, nobody's getting into classrooms, and everybody's kind of okay with it.
On the other extreme, we have micromanagement, where people are getting into classrooms, And seeing what's going on and then criticizing and saying, hey, you're doing it your way.
You need to do it my way.
That kind of micromanagement I don't think can work because it doesn't replace the professional judgment that you need to do the job of teaching well.
This is professional work.
You can't simply set expectations as a leader that cover everything.
Like there's not enough detail.
in shared expectations and i think you should have shared expectations as a school and as a district but as a teacher you are still going to have to make thousands of decisions every day and you can't just defer to shared expectations or defer to your boss who already told you what to do like teaching just does not work that way fundamentally so let me know what autonomy means to you let me know what you need in the way of autonomy and i'll take that into consideration as i write this article for instructional leaders i've already got one on micromanagement And I have a matrix that describes how micromanagement works and what the alternatives are.
I do think we can respectfully pay very close attention to teaching and be supportive, but not take away the autonomy that is required to do this job well.
Let me know what you think about autonomy for teachers.