Teacher autonomy and collaboration: A paradox? Conceptualising and measuring teachers' autonomy and collaborative attitude

This study starts from the finding that a complex - sometimes even paradoxical - relationship exists between teacher autonomy and collaboration. Teacher autonomy is often equated to independence and individual work, excluding collaboration by definition. Hence, the first objective includes disentangling this paradoxical relationship by defining perceived autonomy and collaborative attitude as two distinct concepts. As existing autonomy measures are not equipped to capture this distinction, the second objective includes the development of a measure in line with the proposed conceptualisation. This resulted in an instrument consisting of three scales (collaborative attitude, didactical-pedagogical autonomy, curricular autonomy) with confirmed psychometric quality.