Early Career Teachers’ Professional Agency in the Classroom and Socio-contextual Burnout: A Cross-country Comparison

Abstract

This study examines early career teachers’ (ECT) professional agency in relation to socio-contextual burnout in four European countries: the UK, the Netherlands, Finland, and Sweden. Teachers’ professional agency has been shown to be related to their work-related well-being. However, we know little about the societal, cultural and contextual conditions facilitating the sense of professional agency that ECTs have in terms of active and intentional learning in the classroom and how ECTs experience burnout across countries. The aim of this study was to find out if these experiences of agency and burnout vary between countries and if they are interrelated. A total of 3814 ECTs responded to the survey, and the data were analysed using structural equation modelling. We found that the scales of teachers’ professional agency and socio-contextual burnout were invariant and related to each other across the countries. In particular, the aim of ECTs to build a collaborative environment and transform classroom practices with students were found to hold potential to tackle burnout in the four countries examined.