Early Career Teachers’ Sense of Professional Agency in the Classroom and Associations With Their Perception of Transformational Leadership Vision and School Size

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between early career teachers’ sense of professional agency in the classroom, their perceptions of principals’ transformational leadership vision, and school size. The survey data were collected from 779 primary and junior secondary school teachers with a maximum of 5 years of teaching experience in China. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in the Mplus statistical package. The results show that teachers possess a relatively high sense of professional agency and report that their principals exhibit a rather high ability to sustain shared transformational vision. The results also suggest that teachers’ sense of professional agency is positively correlated with their perceptions of transformational vision. Moreover, the results revealed that teachers’ sense of professional agency in terms of collaborative learning and transformative practice is significantly higher in small schools than in large schools. The results indicate the importance of transformational vision to facilitate teachers’ professional agency.