Teacher agency and dialogic feedback: Using classroom data for practitioner inquiry

• Dialogic feedback afford teachers decision-making space to improve students' learning outcomes.
• Agency in teacher learning contexts centres on the affordance of intellectual space to think.
• Agency can be seen in relational positioning during dialogic feedback collaborations.
• Teachers can explore with repertoires of possibilities during dialogic feedback.
• Teachers can links between cultural, structural and material domains of their learning contexts.

Evidence based discourse has increasingly permeated Anglophone staffrooms and classrooms, fuelled by the impetus to ‘raise standards’ and bolster global competitiveness through improved teacher performance. ‘Giving’ feedback to teachers as part of this performance culture is a view of teacher professional development that undermines teacher agency and does not contribute to a robust conception of teacher learning. This engagement with teacher agency recognises the situatedness of teacher learning and transformative professional learning processes. This paper furnishes ecological examples of teacher agency derived from a qualitative study into teachers' feedback practices. It complements existing literature on agency as a collaborative concept.