The Emotional Contours and Career Trajectories of (Disappointed) Reform Enthusiasts

Three individual cases, drawn from a larger body of case study data, illuminate a relatively unexamined aspect of teachers’ participation in large‐scale reform‐‐teachers’ experience of heightened emotionality and its relationship to career discontinuity or career risk. Disappointed reform enthusiasts point to three conditions that intensify emotional responses to reform and appear to result in career turning points: (1) the nature and extent of reform‐related conflict within salient work groups; (2) the degree of equilibrium among multiple sources of pressure and support; (3) institutional or administrative capacity to manage the pace, scale and dynamics of reform.