Teacher identity and agency in an era of accountability

The current zeitgeist in education in the USA emphasizes accountability for schools, students, and teachers, based on performance that can be easily quantified. Within this, current debates involving who should be teaching, what a good teacher looks like, and how best to evaluate and reward teachers are actually debates about the teaching profession. Inside such social and policy debates, however, lie real teachers with complex professional selves. The qualitative study reported here investigated how primary school teachers constructed self-understandings of what it means to be a professional inside the current educational reform context in the USA. Drawing from social-practice theories of identity…