A Goal Theory Perspective on Teachers’ Professional Identities and the Contexts of Teaching

Teachers are at the center of efforts to motivate students to learn in school. Understanding teachers’ professional identities and the contexts of their work is important for understanding their pedagogical choices and practices, and the effect these can have on students’motivation to learn (e.g., Talbert and McLaughlin, 1993). By adopting a comprehensive view of schooling that attends explicitly to teachers’ professional identities and work contexts, researchers may gain new insights into the multiply determined factors in school that cultivate positive motivational orientations and achievement among some students, or potentiate motivational and learning difficulties among others (Maehr and Midgley, 1991, 1996).