Over the last three years, I have been completing an EdD on evidence-based practice and teacher agency. My concern is that the former often restricts the latter. My general take is that a consideration of teacher agency can act as a partial remedy for rigid, prescriptive and top-down professional development, especially if such training is narrowly based on the science of learning at the expense of wider, more holistic evidence on teaching and learning.

I was a little concerned, therefore, at a recent DfE-funded training event – organised and hosted by a teaching school hub – when ‘teacher agency’ was reduced to an explanation of ‘mental models’ and the role they can play in developing best practice. The language of mental models, which aims to map teachers’ beliefs, assumptions and internal representations of teaching and learning, has gained traction among some cognitive scientists and edu-influencers as a way to explain instructional decision-making. Whilst the concepts of teacher agency and mental models can be related, they were far too conflated in the training session. This conflation was not just imprecise, but also somewhat disingenuous; it obscured important theoretical and practical differences between the two concepts.

Teacher agency and mental models

Although a contested term, teacher agency generally refers to the capacity of teachers to act purposefully, meaningfully and constructively within their professional contexts. It can be understood through various perspectives, including sociological, post-structural, socio-cultural and identity- and life-course-centered viewpoints (Eteläpelto et al., 2013). This means there are varying takes on what it actually is and how it operates – or could operate – in practice. Nonetheless, for most researchers working with the concept, teacher agency is not an isolated character trait, but an ‘ecological achievement’ that emerges from the interplay between individual capacities, available resources and underlying structural conditions (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015). Agency, therefore, is about the potential for action: what teachers are able to do, if they so choose, and the extent to which they can negotiate and navigate the constraints preventing these possible actions over time.

Mental models, on the other hand, are cognitive frameworks, such as beliefs about teaching, learning and pupils’ behaviour. They are underpinned by knowledge and developed through instruction, experience and significant amounts of practice and feedback (Baker & Rees, 2021). Here, knowledge is mentally organised, or modelled, to better understand and address the persistent problems we face in our roles as teachers. In the session I attended, these models were presented as flow charts where decisions are made via a rational consideration of what we know or what we have experienced.

This is probably best summed up by Kenneth Craik, who is often credited with coining the term:

‘[I]f the organism carries a “small-scale model” of external reality and of its own possible actions within its head, it is able to try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future situations before they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with the present and the future, and in every way to react in a much fuller, safer, and more competent manner to the emergencies which face it’ (1943, p. 61; cited in Baker & Rees, 2021).

However, my concern with conflating mental models with teacher agency results from the assumption that changing our beliefs or understandings of our own individual practice automatically empowers us to produce alternative actions or enact change. This neglects, or underestimates, a key component of most discussions on teacher agency: the practitioner’s actual capacity to act. Any basic representation of mental models as a simple cognitive process ignores the material, institutional and even agentic structures that enable or hinder enactment.

Moreover, whilst these underlying structures – which some researchers see as unobservable and, potentially, unbeknownst to teachers (Scott, 2010; Bhaskar, 2014) – could theoretically be accounted for in a mental model, doing so would render them extraordinarily complex. Their practical application in a busy, unpredictable environment like a classroom would be questionable. The somewhat naive assumption that teacher agency can be reduced to a comprehensive and exhaustive mental model bypasses the well-documented ways in which government and institutional policies, performative pressures and resource limitations constrain agency regardless of knowledge and experience (Biesta, Priestley, & Robinson, 2015).

This is where the growing influence of those voices advocating mental models – whether researchers or edu-influencers – becomes particularly relevant. Their ideas, especially on teacher development and best practice, have been enthusiastically embraced across numerous schools and teacher development organisations. On the positive side, their emphasis on building confidence, encouraging rational reflection and professional feedback (often via coaching) offers an important corrective to overly technical, top-down models of teaching and evidence-based practice. A good example of this is Haili Hughes, who has championed the role of mental models in professional dialogue and practice (see, for example, Hughes, 2024). This has a clear place in our development toolkits and should be part of the debate on applying evidence-based ideas to our practice.

However, whilst the concept of teacher agency can be used to inform or construct a mental model, the mental model does not constitute that agency in and of itself. In practice, I feel mental models are sometimes interpreted and mobilised in ways that blur the line between feeling able to act and actually being able to act. In the complexity of school environments – where policy, institutional and cultural contexts intersect, and where change happens at both a micro level (day-to-day in the classroom) and a macro level (via policy initiatives from our merry-go-round of prime ministers and governments) – there is a risk that agency is subtly reframed as an internal psychological state or cognitive framework, rather than a situated, context-dependent possibility (or ‘ecological achievement’).

To be clear, this is not a critique of the proponents of mental models, their intentions or their contributions. It is often the case that researched ideas, particularly those open to critique and improvement, become mutated when presented by well-meaning trainers and school leaders who were not involved in the initial conceptualisation of the theoretical frameworks they are promoting (although, notably, the presenter I observed was a research lead at a well-known teacher development organisation). Rather, my worry is about how such work is interpreted and enacted within systems that prefer straightforward solutions, which are – by and large – centred on the individual teacher. A focus on empowering teachers through mental models can sit uncomfortably alongside unchanged structural constraints, including heavy workloads, prescriptive curricula and high-stakes accountability. We do not all work in perfect settings; in fact, I doubt anyone does.

Consequently, equating agency with cognition underplays the situated and relational nature of professional action, whether one follows the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens (1984) or the analytical dualism and morphogenetic approach of Margaret Archer (1995). Teachers may hold highly sophisticated mental models yet remain unable to enact them due to the various structures that impede their work. In such cases, the issue is not a lack of insight, but a lack of room to maneuver. To collapse agency into mental models is, essentially, to ignore power.

That said, I do not want to entirely deny the relationship between teacher agency and mental models. The latter can undoubtedly influence or mediate the former; both inform how teachers interpret situations and what actions they imagine possible. In this sense, both concepts have a role in our discussions on formulating best practice both in the classroom and in professional development. However, agency is always enacted in context; it cannot be reduced to cognition alone.

Maintaining this distinction matters for both educational research and classroom practice. Analytically, it allows for more precise accounts of how teachers operate within complex, open systems. In short, teacher agency is not a mental model. Conflating the two risks reducing a deeply contextual phenomenon into a matter of individual cognition, which is fundamentally flawed.

References

Archer, M. S. (1995). Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge University Press.

Baker, T., & Rees, G. (2021, July 14). Expertise, mental models and leadership knowledge. Ambition Institute. https://www.ambition.org.uk/blog/expertise-mental-models-and-leadership-knowledge/

Bhaskar, R. (2014). The possibility of naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences (4th ed.). Routledge.

Biesta, G., Priestley, M., & Robinson, S. (2015). The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 21(6), 624–640. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2015.1044325

Craik, K. J. W. (1943). The nature of explanation. Cambridge University Press.

Eteläpelto, A., Vähäsantanen, K., Hökkä, P., & Paloniemi, S. (2013). What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work. Educational Research Review, 10, 45–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2013.05.001

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Polity Press.

Hughes, H. (2024, May 19). Teacher decision-making and mental models. Haili Hughes’ Substack. https://hailihughes.substack.com/p/teacher-decision-making-and-mental-c1d

Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency: An ecological approach. Bloomsbury Academic.

Scott, D. (2010). Education, epistemology and critical realism. Routledge.

Photo credit: Needpix.com (used under a Creative Commons Licence)