Teachers’ Jury Workshop: An Innovative Vehicle for Fostering Teacher Agency and Eventual School Belonging

This article discusses the development of a teachers jury workshop drawing on the concept of teacher agency with technical professional high school teachers in Mexico. We argue that for school belonging to take place, teachers need to proactively promote it in the classroom, for which teacher agency is key. We depart from understandings of teacher agency that focus on teachers as individuals decontextualised of structural powers. Instead, we explore how teachers manage to be agentic professionals despite their hierarchical working environments willing to explore collaborative ways in which agency can flourish. We adopt an ecological approach of teacher agency. We also employ an innovative methodology of workshop facilitation designed to identify, prioritise, and solve questions related to school belonging collaboratively amongst teachers who acted as juries. With fifty-seven participants, the teachers’ jury workshop lasted three days. On day 1, teachers reflected on the evidence from their own professional experiences. On day 2, both authors presented research evidence on school belonging. On day 3, the teachers were invited to evaluate the evidence discussed in the previous two days, reach their verdict on the challenges of school belonging and define concrete actions to be implemented at the classroom and school levels.