What Kind of Teacher Do You Want to Be? Building a Professional Identity in Your First Three Years

What Kind of Teacher Do You Want to Be? Building a Professional Identity in Your First Three Years

A contributing voice from teacher education | Specialist in child development, wellbeing, and community engagement

The first three years of teaching are when professional identity forms, the values, habits, and beliefs about what teaching is for that will shape decades of practice, and research shows this is not accidental. Part of the reason it isn’t accidental is that identity formation was already underway long before those first three years began. Sociologist Dan Lortie’s concept of the “apprenticeship of observation” describes how every new teacher has already spent thousands of hours, as a student, watching teachers teach, forming implicit assumptions about what teaching is and how it’s done well before any formal training starts. The first three years of actual practice don’t begin identity formation from nothing; they actively shape, confirm, or challenge assumptions already in place.

Key facts

• Dan Lortie‘s concept of the apprenticeship of observation describes how anyone entering teaching has already accumulated thousands of hours of direct exposure to teaching, as a student themselves, long before beginning formal training. This means a new teacher’s early professional identity is shaped not only by their first years of actual practice, but by deeply ingrained assumptions absorbed years earlier, often unconsciously.
• Etienne Wenger‘s influential theory of communities of practice describes professional identity as forming primarily through participation in a professional community, moving from peripheral involvement toward fuller participation over time, rather than forming primarily through explicit instruction or belief statements. This suggests a new teacher’s identity is shaped as much by who they work alongside and how they’re included in the professional community as by any formal training content.
• Identity-development frameworks originally developed for adolescent identity, such as James Marcia‘s model distinguishing exploration and commitment, have also been applied to professional and vocational identity formation more broadly, including teaching. Applied here, a new teacher can move toward a genuinely examined professional identity, formed through active exploration of different approaches and values, or toward a foreclosed one, adopting a school’s or mentor’s existing approach without genuinely questioning whether it fits, a distinction directly relevant to the “what kind of teacher do you want to be” question.
• Together, this research suggests professional identity formation in the first three years is shaped by at least three specific forces: pre-existing assumptions from years spent as a student, the specific professional community a new teacher is embedded in, and whether that new teacher is genuinely exploring and examining their approach or adopting one without examination.

The identity forming now was already partly formed before you started

A new teacher asking “what kind of teacher do I want to be” is not starting from a blank page. Years of watching teachers as a student already laid down assumptions about what teaching looks like, and the specific staffroom and school community a new teacher enters now is actively shaping which of those assumptions get reinforced and which get challenged.

This matters for how a new teacher should approach the question the original essay poses. It isn’t simply a matter of deciding on values in the abstract. It’s a matter of noticing which assumptions were already there, absorbed through years of observation as a student, and deciding deliberately whether those assumptions actually reflect the kind of teacher this person wants to become, rather than assuming they were chosen freely just because they feel natural.

Five principles for building a genuinely examined professional identity

1. Diagnose which of your current teaching instincts trace back to your own apprenticeship of observation, assumptions absorbed as a student, rather than to a deliberate professional choice. Distinguishing “this is what teaching looked like to me” from “this is what I’ve decided teaching should be” is a specific, useful exercise most new teachers haven’t been prompted to do explicitly.
2. Pay deliberate attention to which professional community you’re being drawn into, and how. Since identity forms substantially through participation, per Wenger’s framework, the specific colleagues, mentors, and staffroom norms a new teacher is embedded in are actively shaping their professional identity, not just neutral background.
3. Distinguish genuine exploration from foreclosure in your own professional development. Adopting a mentor’s or school’s approach wholesale, without genuinely examining whether it reflects your own values, is a plausible example of professional foreclosure, per the identity-status framework, distinct from an examined, genuinely chosen commitment that happens to look similar from the outside.
4. Build relationships that support genuine questioning, not just imitation. A mentor relationship that only transmits “how we do things here” without space to examine why, or whether it fits the new teacher’s own developing values, supports foreclosure rather than the kind of examined identity formation the research favours.
5. Start by naming one specific assumption you brought into teaching from your own years as a student, and examine it deliberately. This is a concrete, doable first step toward genuine exploration, rather than an abstract instruction to “reflect on your values,” which is harder to act on directly.

Frequently asked questions

Is it actually true that professional identity formation starts before formal teacher training, or does it really begin with the first classroom? It genuinely starts earlier: Dan Lortie’s well-established concept of the apprenticeship of observation describes how every new teacher has already spent thousands of hours as a student watching teachers, forming implicit assumptions about teaching well before any formal training or first classroom experience.

Does professional identity form mainly through explicit training and belief, or through something else? Research associated with Etienne Wenger’s communities of practice theory suggests identity forms substantially through participation in a professional community over time, not primarily through explicit instruction or stated beliefs, meaning who a new teacher works alongside matters as much as formal training content.

What’s the difference between genuinely choosing a teaching approach and simply adopting one without examining it? Applying identity-status research originally developed for adolescent identity, genuinely examined commitment involves active exploration and reflection before settling on an approach, while adopting a mentor’s or school’s approach wholesale without that examination is closer to foreclosure, a commitment that can look similar from the outside but reflects a different underlying process.

What’s the most useful first step for a new teacher wanting to build a genuinely examined professional identity, rather than an inherited one? Naming one specific teaching assumption traceable to years spent as a student observer, rather than to a deliberate professional choice, and examining it directly, a concrete, doable exercise more actionable than a general instruction to reflect on one’s values.

What to do:

1. Name one specific teaching assumption or instinct you’ve noticed in yourself, and write down whether it traces back to your own apprenticeship of observation or to a deliberate choice you’ve made, and one specific thing you will examine about it this week, not a general reflection, but a named action.
2. Search DIKSHA or ask your Block Resource Coordinator for any resource specifically on new teacher professional identity or mentoring in your state context. If nothing exists, note that gap; the absence of a resource is itself useful information.
3. Spend five minutes this week noticing one moment where you taught a certain way simply because “that’s how it’s done” here or “that’s how my own teachers did it,” not teaching, just watching and noting.
4. Tell one colleague about the apprenticeship of observation, and discuss which of your own early teaching instincts you can each trace back to your years as students, rather than to deliberate professional choices.
5. At the end of the week, ask yourself what you would examine differently next week, and what you would look for, such as whether a specific practice still feels right once you’ve genuinely questioned it, to know whether it is working.

Note on sourcing: web search was unavailable during this session, so current, specific citations could not be verified live. The core research described here, Dan Lortie’s apprenticeship of observation concept, Etienne Wenger’s communities of practice theory, and the application of identity-status research to professional identity formation, reflects well-established, broadly known findings in the sociology of teaching and organisational psychology. Lortie’s work and the identity-status framework were also referenced in earlier pieces within this same working session. A reader preparing this for publication should verify specific citations before treating them as fully sourced.

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