Attentional autonomy: A normative account of attention in teachers’ professional judgment

Teachers’ professional judgment depends on attentional conditions that formal discretion alone cannot secure. Institutional requirements, classroom relationships, and cultivated habits shape which educational considerations become salient and remain available for judgment. This article develops a normative account of attentional autonomy : the prudential capacity to let educational reasons appropriately govern how teachers direct, distribute, sustain, and suspend attention. Four perspectives on attention (process, skill, resource, and ecology) inform a model of four interacting avenues for cultivating and exercising this autonomy: attentional skills, pedagogical knowledge, action on classroom conditions, and collective influence over institutional arrangements. The model distinguishes directive, distractive, and deformative threats, emphasizing how deformation alters salience and meaning, including where teachers retain formal discretion. It also identifies institutional supports, including protected domains of pedagogical judgment, confidential formative inquiry, and collective authority to revise working conditions. Such support should enable situated judgment while sustaining opportunities for challenge and reconsideration. Distinguishing teachers’ own attention from their direction of students’ attention, the account explains how autonomy can enable both warranted guidance and appropriate relinquishment of control. Attentional autonomy thus specifies an important dimension of teacher professionalism: the capacity and conditions for responsiveness to educational reasons.