What motivates teachers? Important work on a complex question

In this commentary I briefly describe the articles, suggest three themes that unite the works and two questions raised by them, and then elaborate some challenges that these studies pose for researchers and practitioners. The themes include situating these articles in the history of the study of teaching and exploring both the complexity of teachers' motivation and of the statistical designs used to study it. The concerns focus on addressing context in research on teaching and discerning implications for teacher education. Together these studies produce a heuristic perspective, which I attempt to illustrate in one possible model for further research.