Development and Initial Validation of the Transformative Justice Scale: Assessing Teachers’ Capacity for Transformative Practices in Education

This paper details the development of a scale assessing teachers’ perceived capacity to enact transformative justice pedagogy, the Transformative Justice Scale (TJS). This measure is grounded in transformative justice (TJ) scholarship and is comprised of two subscales. The TJS factor structure was identified via exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, with distinct samples of racially diverse middle and high school teachers. The TJS is time and resource efficient in that it uses teacher self-reports. The TJS contributes to the literature by providing an assessment of transformative or social justice–oriented pedagogy that is not well covered in existing measures. The TJS also would support teacher professional development and coaching because it could be used as a pre- to post-evaluative tool, to foster continuously reflective practice, or to provide structured feedback. Future work should explore these potential applications as well as further develop teachers’ capacity to enact transformative and equity-oriented approaches to practice.