Teacher empowerment

Draft

Definition

• According to Teacher Empowerment (2002), Bolin (1989, p. 82) defined teacher empowerment as 'investing teachers with the right to participate in the determination of school goals and policies and to exercise professional judgment about what and how to teach.'

See also empowerment for generic more operational definitions.

Empowerment and educational reform

Empowerment seems to be strongly correlated with task motivation. A empirical study by Dee et al, (2003) based on Spreitzer's definition of empowerment demonstrated that empowered teachers showed higher levels of organizational commitment. The "meaning", "self-determination", and "impact" dimensions, and the total empowerment score had positive effects on teachers' level of commitment to the school. Therefore one can claim that in order to engage teachers in pedagogical reform one must give them some control over their own work and let them influence the reform process. It also means that "fake empowerment" strategies will lead to bad outcomes. (see the Baruch empowerment model.)

Dee et al (2003) showed that “that teamwork may differentiate empowering and non-empowering site-based management. School leaders, interested in developing a personal strategy to enable teacher empowerment, should devise ways to model empowered behaviors for teachers, to encourage co-operative behaviors among teachers and, most importantly, to demonstrate firm trust in school personnel (Henkin and Dee, 2001).”

The same study led to the conclusion that “Empowered teachers with increased task motivation, enhanced feelings of meaning, and strong organizational commitment are the foundation of a dynamic school technology. Schools can create the conditions in which teachers, as empowered actors, can freely exercise their expert judgment, deal effectively with non-routine challenges, change social structures and, in turn, depend on changed structures for self-advancement (Etzioni, 1968). Collaborative social structures, including self-managed teams, can serve as vehicles through which the goals of education professionals and schools are achieved.”

Empowerment in education technology

We can formulate the hypothesis that:

• Teachers must have control over the choice technology they want to use in the classroom.
• Teachers must have control over the software itself, i.e. be able to adapt it to there needs. One solution is to provide teachers with

These issues are related to change management issues. Kynigos (2004) claims that “the design, development and user-support of empowering computational media should be viewed as a continuing effort to build social change architectures, rather than single R&D projects. We suggest that this can only be done through the development and preservation of hybrid communities across organizations"”.

References

• Bolin, F. S. (1989). Empowering Leadership. Teachers College Record, 19(1), 81-96.

• Dee, Jay R., Alan B. Henkin, Lee Duemer (2003). Structural antecedents and psychological correlates of teacher empowerment", Journal of Educational Administration, Volume 41 Number 3 pp. 257-277, ISSN 0957-8234

• Etzioni, A. (1968), The Active Society, The Free Press, New York, NY, .

• Henkin, A., Dee, J. (2001), "The power of trust: teams and collective action in self-managed schools", Journal of School Leadership, Vol. 11 No.1, pp.47-60.

• Kynigos, C. (2004). A 'Black-and-White Box' approach to user empowerment with component computing, Interactive Learning Environments, 12 (1-2) 27-71.

• Keiser, N. M. & Shen, J. (2000). Principals' and teachers' perceptions of teacher empowerment. The Journal of Leadership Studies, 7(3).

• Spreitzer, G. (1992), "When organizations dare: the dynamics of organizational empowerment in the workplace" .

• Spreitzer, G. (1995), "Psychological empowerment in the workplace: dimensions, measurement and validation", Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 38 No.5, pp.1442-65.

• Teacher Empowerment, 2002 Leadership Discoveries, OSU Leardership Center, Word retrieved 15:18, 3 June 2006 (MEST)

• Thomas, K., Velthouse, B. (1990), "Cognitive elements of empowerment: an interpretive model of intrinsic task motivation", Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 15 No.4, pp.666-81.

• Wilson, John R. Empowering Environments, HTML