Research On The Antecedents And Their Mechanisms Of Teacher Professional Learning

Teacher professional learning is an important way to realize the teaching goal, which is consisted of collaboration, reflection, experiment, and reaching out to the knowledge base. More and more researches pointed that teacher professional learning is the critical factor to promote teacher quality and then influence the success of educational reform. How to promote teachers to be active learners and create the positive environment to support teacher professional learning have been the important topics in educational administration field.From the social exchange theory, teacher professional learning can be viewed as a social exchange process. School leaders provide visible and invisible resource to teachers to express their concerns and promote the positive emotion such as teacher trust and teacher agency. For the principle of mutual benefit, teachers take more active part in professional learning to promote school development. The important role played by school leaders, teacher trust, and teacher agency to teacher professional learning may appear self-evident. However, what dimensions consist of school leaders, teacher trust, and teacher agency and the mechanism about how the factors influence teacher professional learning remains unclear. All of those not only limited the future development of teacher professional learning theory, but also hindered the improvement of teacher professional learning in practice.Based on these considerations, teacher trust and teacher agency were chosen as mediators to explore the relationship between school leaders and teacher professional learning. The quantitative and qualitative methods were combined to explore the dimensions of school leaders, teacher trust, and teacher agency that influence teacher professional learning, and the mediating effect of teacher trust and teacher agency between school leaders and teacher professional learning. More specifically, we proposed the dimensions of school leaders, teacher trust, and teacher agency through the deep interview. Then, based on the related mature scale, we developed the scales which are suitable for the China context. Mplus 7.0 software was used to verify the dimensions of school leaders, teacher trust, teacher agency, and teacher professional learning. In the structural equation model, we used path analysis and bootstrap analysis to explore the mediating effect of teacher trust and teacher agency between the relationship of school leaders and teacher professional learning.In order to deeply understand the influence mechanism of how school leaders influence teacher professional learning to further enrich and verify the result of quantitative research, case study was adopted. We selected three schools. In case one, teacher professional learning was organized "outside-in" and professors were invited to guide the reform. In case two, teacher professional learning was initiated from "top-down" by their principal. In case three, teacher professional learning was self-organized by their teachers. From different perspectives, we know more clearly about the functional mechanism of teacher professional learning.The results were shown as follow:(1) School leader influenced teacher professional learning consists of four dimensions:building a learning vision, providing learning support, managing learning program, and modeling. We labelled this kind of school leader as learning-centered leadership. Teacher trust influenced teacher professional learning consists of three dimensions:calculative trust, relational trust, and faith trust. Teacher agency influenced teacher professional learning consists of four dimensions:teaching effectiveness, learning effectiveness, optimism, and constructive engagement.(2) Both teacher trust and teacher agency are the important mediators between learning-centered leadership and teacher professional learning. More specifically, bootstrap estimates indicate significant mediating effects of both teacher agency and teacher trust on learning-centered leadership. Moreover, the analysis further identified a significant mediating effect of teacher trust and teacher agency together on learning-Centered Leadership.After the above work, we explored the dimensions of learning-centered leadership, teacher trust, and teacher agency to influence teacher professional learning, and established the scales with satisfactory reliability and validity. Then, we tested the mediating effect of teacher trust and teacher agency in the relationship of learning-centered leadership to teacher professional learning.Base on our research, we can explore the virtue dimension of learning-centered leadership, the possible conflict between individual agency and collective agency, different effect of dimensions of teacher trust in the future. In order to test the applicability of the results in a larger scope, we need a larger sample, and test the multigroup invariance. Then, we can also work to expand the theoretical framework of teacher professional learning in the future.