GC-DWC and Partners Redefine How Teacher Agency Drives School Success in Uganda
Lasting improvements in school systems cannot be driven solely from the top down; they rely on the professional expertise and commitment of the educators standing at the front of the classroom. Policy changes achieve very little if they fail to consider the lived realities of those implementing them.
Seeking to center these perspectives, a research initiative aimed at understanding and redefining teacher agency in resource-constrained environments has officially concluded. The two-year study was conducted by researchers from the University of Notre Dame’s Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC) and the Luigi Giussani Foundation (LGF), in partnership with Schools2030.
Working with primary school teachers across Uganda’s Arua and Kampala regions, the study bridges a critical gap in global education research: understanding how teachers in majority-world contexts understand agency—the extent to which they feel able to make decisions and take action within their professional role—and how that agency relates to teacher well-being, job satisfaction, and peer-recognized influence. Additionally, this study advances the way teacher agency is measured. Teacher agency has been primarily measured through self-report instruments, utilizing Likert-type scales (rating systems where teachers choose how strongly they agree or disagree with a statement, such as on a scale from 1 to 5). This study broke new ground by pairing a newly developed self-report survey with social nomination data. Teachers were asked to name colleagues they perceive as demonstrating agency, helping to map how agency is recognized and distributed within each school's relational network. Triangulating these two data sources allowed researchers to compare how agentic a teacher feels against how agentic their peers perceive them to be—a comparison that has rarely been done in prior research on teacher agency.
“Teacher agency is a broad and complex concept, but once it is carefully deconstructed into its core dimensions, it becomes much more meaningful to define and measure,” shared Martin Ariapa, Co-Principal Investigator for this study and senior manager of Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, Research and Learning (MEARL) at LGF. “Equally important is ensuring that these dimensions reflect the realities of the context in which teachers work. By grounding our conceptualization and measurement of teacher agency in the lived experiences of Ugandan teachers, we are confident that we have developed a framework that is both contextually relevant and scientifically robust.”
Measuring Teacher Agency Through Both Individual and Relational Perspectives
Existing research has relied almost exclusively on self-report Likert-type scales to measure teacher agency. This study offers a contextually grounded, psychometrically validated tool to measure teacher agency, the Teacher Agency Measure (TAM). The TAM is a paired-scenario, self-report tool that captures teachers’ own perceptions of their agency across two constructs:
- Their involvement in daily classroom and school-level decision-making.
- Their impact on colleagues, school practices, and the learning environment.
The TAM is accompanied by a social nomination tool to understand the relational perspective of agency within a school. By combining the TAM with this peer-nomination approach, the study connects how teachers perceive their own agency with how they are recognized by their peers.
The Three Stages Behind the Findings
The completion of this research project marks a journey from teacher-led qualitative insights to large-scale quantitative data collection across two districts in Uganda. The study unfolded across three integrated stages:
- Stage 1: Group Model Building Workshop
The study began by bringing together 18 primary school teachers from Kampala and Arua (drawn from 10 urban, 4 peri-urban, and 4 rural schools). In a collaborative setting, these educators developed a shared, context-specific definition of teacher agency and mapped out the interconnected factors shaping teachers’ ability to translate agency into action.
- Stage 2: Development and Adaptation of Teacher Agency Measures
Building directly on the workshop’s insights, the research team developed the TAM to accurately reflect locally defined constructs. The TAM was refined using cognitive interviews with local educators to guarantee clarity and cultural relevance.
- Stage 3: Deploying the Survey
In the final stage, researchers administered the newly developed TAM to 577 primary school teachers across 30 government primary schools in Arua and Kampala. The TAM self-report instrument underwent psychometric validation. Alongside teachers’ self-reports of agency, teachers participated in a social nomination data collection that identified colleagues they perceived as demonstrating agency within their schools. Through this approach, the study captures both the individual and relational dimensions of teacher agency within Ugandan primary schools.
Study Findings
The data show that teacher agency is best understood as two connected concepts: a teacher's role in decision-making, and the impact they have on their classroom and school. Autonomy, initially expected to stand on its own as a third concept, turned out not to be independent at all. Instead, it functions as what enables a teacher's decision-making and impact, a finding that echoes how Ugandan teachers themselves defined agency during the study's initial workshop. The study also confirmed that a teacher's own sense of agency reliably predicts whether their peers recognize them as an agent of change, validating the self-report tool while showing that the social network lens adds a relational layer that self-report alone cannot capture. The study also identified supportive school administration, clear policies, and adequate resources as the strongest contributors to higher teacher agency. These findings reinforce an ecological understanding of agency: agency is not simply something a teacher has or lacks; it is shaped by the environment teachers work within, and the relationships surrounding them.
The Path Forward
Investing in teacher agency is not a secondary administrative goal; it is the engine that drives sustainable, equitable, and lasting education reform. To invest in teachers' professional development, agency must be understood and measurable, in relation to the contextual factors that shape it. Global literature on teacher agency has been heavily conceptualized in minority-world settings, leaving a gap in understanding how it can be understood in majority-world, resource-constrained settings. This study grounds agency in the lived experience of primary school teachers in Uganda and developed contextually appropriate tools to measure it.
“Working closely with teachers throughout this study reinforced that teacher agency is deeply
rooted in context,” Dakota Peterson, GC-DWC research associate and Co-Investigator for this study, reflected. “The educators we spoke with offered invaluable insights into the challenges and opportunities they face, and their perspectives shaped every stage of the research. This study demonstrates the importance of designing education policies and interventions that recognize teachers not just as implementers, but as active agents of change.”
When school systems intentionally foster and champion teacher agency, they actively build an ecosystem where both educators and students can flourish.
To read the complete, detailed findings from the final phase of this research, download the full Stage 3 Non-Technical Brief.
About the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC)
The Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC) at the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame collaborates with researchers and practitioners to ensure the well-being—physical, emotional, social, and cognitive—of children and adolescents in low-resource and conflict-affected settings. Established to serve as a coherent platform for the Institute for Educational Initiative’s growing portfolio of global child development and learning programs, the GC-DWC creates environments that foster resilience and encourage children and adolescents to thrive. Using an innovative Whole Child Development (WCD) approach tailored to context-specific needs, the GC-DWC translates research into timely and thoughtful action, adapts research tools to improve the development of learning programs and policies, and activates systems (families, schools, communities) to lift children and adolescents out of adversity. Learn more about the GC-DWC’s work to transform child development globally:
iei.nd.edu/gc-dwc
About Luigi Giussani Foundation (LGF)
LGF is an indigenous for impact organisation that has for the last 17 years been responding to educational challenges in Uganda through research and capacity building at all levels of education. They journey towards this goal with learners, teachers and other school stakeholders through critical thinking pedagogies, continuous Teacher Education Professional Development programmes, innovative research and through addressing critical areas of education such as early grade education and education in emergencies. LGF is also involved in advancing gender-responsive education through gender equity in training interventions and tackling youth unemployment through skilling programmes. They employ a multifaceted approach in the education field because they are passionate about learning that produces resilient, responsible and self-aware individuals whose thoughts and actions contribute to their good and that of society. Learn more about LGF's work: https://lgfug.org/
