Teacher empowerment and instructional quality: unpacking the roles of social and mutual empowerment through professional development

This study investigates how teacher background and empowerment constructs influence instructional quality through the mediating role of professional development (PD) engagement routines. Using structural equation modeling on a sample of 2,560 teachers from the TALIS 2018 dataset, the research explores how demographic factors and empowerment dimensions make a difference in collaborative routines in PD as well as instructional quality. The findings indicate that while individual teacher characteristics exert direct influences on instructional quality, these effects are substantially amplified through the indirect pathway of PD engagement routines. Notably, mutual empowerment serves as a critical conduit for routines in PD engagement, whereas status-based social empowerment appears insufficient in isolation. The results suggest that educational policy should shift from macro-level status initiatives toward supporting school-level organizational structures that institutionalize reciprocal support and daily professional exchange to sustain instructional excellence.