6. Professional teacher knowledge for student empowerment

A crucial aspect of teachers' professional knowledge is perceiving and operationalizing their power in a manner that does not oppress or inhibit students' creativity, critical thinking or independent thought but rather, they use their power to empower students. Some important factors to consider towards the generation of empowering learning environments include the establishment of strong teacher-student rapports, developing a theoretically sound conceptualization of what it means "to empower" while setting out to promote equitable power dynamics in the classroom.

## 6.1. Empowering teacher-student rapports

as "a process whereby school participants develop the competence to take charge of their own growth and resolve their own problems" ([27], p. 38). Unlike these conceptualizations of teacher empowerment, Carl places the enhancement of students' learning experiences as a core function and outcome of teacher empowerment; "Empowerment does not mean unrestrained and unstructured actions, but rather increasing the learning outcomes and other experiences which may flow from it, thereby contributing towards developing the learner's potential. A teaching environment within which teaching may occur optimally can only be created through effective empowerment" ([28], p. xi).

The impact of teacher empowerment can implicate school experiences for both teachers and students. The empowerment of teachers is linked to a number of desirable outcomes such as heightened teacher self-esteem [29] and job satisfaction [30–33] as well as enhanced organizational and professional commitment [32, 34, 35] and reduced dysfunctional resistance [36]. Teacher empowerment is also linked to enhanced middle school effectiveness [37] and the establishment of positive school climates [29]. Bogler and Somech [34] claims that principals should establish the conditions necessary for teachers to perceive their competency and status such as affording teachers with opportunities to grow professionally. However, Spreitzer [38] claims that individuals must be psychologically receptive if such empowering conditions are

The impact of teacher empowerment on student learning is less than straight forward on the other hand. Although one study describes how teacher empowerment is a significant independent predictor of student achievement in standardized proficiency tests in reading and mathematics [37], two separate studies report no direct relationship between teacher empowerment and student academic achievement [39, 40]. According to the findings of Marks and Louis [39], the conditions that are necessary for teacher empowerment to positively influence student performance are understood to involve the affordance of decision making opportunities relating to teaching and learning decisions [37] in a professional teaching community that has collective responsibility for student learning [39]. It is conceived that teacher empowerment encourages teachers to improve how they teach, to instill a belief that student achievement is linked to their own teaching effort as well as promoting the communication and collaboration among teachers in exchanging of information about teaching effectiveness [39]. While considerable empowerment research that has taken place within the educational context has investigated the collective empowerment of teachers on an institutional level from external sources such as principals or board of management [37], less focus has investigated the empowerment of individual teachers [29, 35, 41] and even less attention has been devoted to investigating the

6. Professional teacher knowledge for student empowerment

A crucial aspect of teachers' professional knowledge is perceiving and operationalizing their power in a manner that does not oppress or inhibit students' creativity, critical thinking or

5.2. The impact of teacher empowerment on school life

28 Contemporary Pedagogies in Teacher Education and Development

to be fully realized.

empowerment of individual students.

A profound precursor to the generation of empowering learning environments is the establishment of strong rapports between individual teachers and individual students. According to Hattie's meta-analysis of what influences student achievement, what teacher's know, do and care is the greatest source of variance among differences in student achievement [42]. The relationship between a teacher and their student is considered to be an interpersonal relationship [43, 44] with students' relational goals and motives implicating this relationship [45, 46]. Among students' relational goals is the need for them to be liked by their teachers [45]. Teachers can help students to achieve these relational goals by ensuring students know they care for them. For students to develop an enhanced sense of empowerment, feeling cared for is vital. The extent to which a teacher cares for their students may be expressed by their immediacy, disclosure, assertiveness, responsiveness, and attractiveness [47]. Teachers need to be realizing just how important it is to express such behaviors given their influence on students' affective learning experiences, to the extent that their cognitive learning is enhanced [47]. Expressing care may be reciprocated, whereby the care that teachers express to their students is reflected in how students will care for their teacher. Providing strong rapports between individual teachers and individual students are established on a foundation of care, teachers can then begin to conceptualize and embrace what it means to empower.

#### 6.2. Conceptualizing empowerment
