Self-assessment as a heutagogical mechanism for double-loop learning in teacher induction

Abstract

The first year of teaching is often organized around external standards, leaving novice teachers limited authority over what counts as professional growth. This study examines what becomes possible when teachers construct and apply criteria for evaluating their development. It conceptualizes criteria-making as a form of heutagogical evaluative agency and asks whether this process opens opportunities for assumption-questioning and double-loop reflection. The study used a qualitative, interpretive document-analysis design in two induction workshops. Thirty-one first-year teachers collaboratively generated and operationalized assessment criteria and selected four to six criteria for self-assessment reports. The corpus comprised two collaborative presentations and 31 reports. Analysis combined inductive constant comparison to identify dimensions of professional practice with theory-informed coding for learner agency, capability, reflection and metacognition, learning how to learn, and three levels of reflective depth: descriptive or confirmatory, single-loop, and double-loop reflection. Participants' criteria clustered around four interdependent dimensions: relational–moral practice, instructional design and classroom orchestration, responsive noticing and adaptation, and professional participation and self-development. The task enacted evaluative agency by requiring participants to select, justify, operationalize, weight, and apply criteria to their experience. Reflective depth varied. Some passages confirmed existing understandings, many proposed changes to strategies and routines, and some contained textual evidence consistent with double-loop reflection. Assumption-questioning was most evident in accounts of unexpected pupil responses, unsuccessful strategies, difficult encounters with parents, and tensions between care and authority. The study contributes to heutagogical theory by conceptualizing criteria-making as evaluative agency: participation in constructing the standards, evidence, and values through which professional learning is interpreted. It also shows that this agency was scaffolded and relational, emerging through collaborative deliberation, facilitator-provided structure, and individual judgment rather than unsupported independence. The findings suggest that learner-generated criteria may provide a language for retrospectively examining professional surprise and reframing the assumptions it exposes. Criteria-making may therefore create an opportunity for double-loop reflection but does not guarantee it. Because the data are participant-generated documents, the findings concern reflective meaning-making, evaluative agency, and reported adaptive judgment; they do not establish causal effects, sustained changes in classroom practice, or pupil outcomes.