For most teachers in the United States, teaching is no longer a career-long occupation. This article examines the narratives of a particular group of leavers, former teachers who made significant investments in their teacher training and who taught for at least three years before making the decision to exit. The accounts of these invested leavers…

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…

Previous work on new teacher professional identity has focused on identity as a process of negotiation between individual and contextual factors. These negotiations are often filled with a struggle between personal agency and structures that prevent the enactment of an ideal professional self. This study introduces and discusses three teacher…

This article explores how one specially prepared, accomplished teacher managed dilemmas that arose as she worked to enact responsive language arts instruction with English Learners in a policy context that privileged high-stakes accountability and standardization. Drawing on sociocultural learning theory, the article illustrates how the teacher's…