Learning to adapt: tool appropriation and teacher agency in needs-driven instructional development

This study is situated in a three-year research and development (R&D) programme focused on instructional development, involving 170 Swedish teachers across five municipalities (2021–2024). It investigates how teachers’ professional agency developed through the appropriation of conceptual and practical tools introduced within the collaboration. Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the study conceptualises instructional development as a mediated and contextually situated process and examines how professional agency may evolve as teachers appropriate introduced tools in response to identified instructional challenges. Data comprise 101 teacher-authored case narratives and interviews with 12 teachers. Using directed qualitative content analysis, the study explores how teachers interpreted, adapted, and mobilised conceptual frameworks and practical tools in relation to locally defined student needs. The findings indicate a shift from deficit-oriented interpretations of student difficulties towards needs-driven instructional analysis. Assessment information was increasingly reinterpreted as a resource for instructional development, and teachers described integrating subject knowledge, didactical strategies, and situational judgement more deliberately. Collegial collaboration and documentation functioned as mediating arrangements supporting both individual professional agency and, in some instances, emerging collective transformative agency. The study contributes to research on teacher learning by illustrating how tool appropriation can mediate expansive reorientations of instructional reasoning and practice.