Teacher professional development is at the core of educational quality improvement. Contemporary perspectives hold that teachers' growth is not merely an accumulation of knowledge and skills, but also a deepening process of their professional identity and moral judgment ability (Pei et al. 2023). However, on the path to professional excellence, teachers often encounter complex situations that go beyond technical aspects and touch upon the core of values - moral dilemmas. This is not an occasional disturbance but a regular part of daily decision-making, constituting a key arena where teachers' professional identity and ability are tested (Ehrich, 2011). Therefore, understanding how teachers deal with moral dilemmas in their professional development is of fundamental significance for supporting their transformation from technically proficient individuals to professional decision-makers.

Against the backdrop of the current global educational transformation and local policy adjustments, the practical environment for teachers has become increasingly complex. Take China's "Double Reduction" policy as an example. Its macro goal of reducing students' burden and reshaping the educational ecosystem has, at the micro level of teaching, intensified deep-seated contradictions. Teachers are now compelled to navigate the persistent tensions between "educational equity" and "teaching to individual aptitude", "policy ideals" and "performance evaluation realities", and "students' all-round development" and "academic competition pressure" (Li, et al. 2023). This has placed teachers in a policy-driven "high-intensity ethical laboratory", where moral dilemmas are more prominent than ever. Fundamentally, this predicament is structural: teachers are expected to strike a balance between implementing burden reduction and ensuring admission competitiveness, responding to policy requirements and meeting parents' expectations, and adhering to educational ideals and adapting to school evaluations. This balance is not merely a matter of strategic choice but involves conflicts between professional values and educational ethics. For instance, a primary school teacher may face such a dilemma: to comply with the "Double Reduction" policy, he needs to reduce homework and extracurricular training, yet he is concerned that this might undermine students' competitiveness in the admission process, thereby affecting parents' evaluation of the school and students' admission rates. This situation forces teachers to make moral choices between burden reductionand admission competition- to adhere to the educational ideals of the policy or succumb to the pressure of reality. Such choices often come with significant psychological burdens and job burnout (Skaalvik, 2014).

Although existing research has paid extensive attention to the impact of the "Double Reduction" policy, there is still a lack of in-depth exploration of the internal cognitive and meaning-making mechanisms of teachers. However, this process of cognition, decision-making, and action in the face of difficulties is precisely the most challenging and constructive core in teachers' professional development. Based on this, this study adopts the grounded theory method, aiming to deeply explore: in the structural tension formed by the "Double Reduction" policy, how do teachers perceive and interpret the moral dilemmas they face? What characteristics do these moral dilemmas exhibit? What are the roots of their generation? By revealing the moral cognition and behavioral logic of teachers, this study hopes to provide a new perspective for understanding teachers' professional development and offer empirical evidence for the construction of an effective teacher support system.

This study mainly adopted method in qualitative research.Twelve elementary school teachers in City S were interviewed (six senior grades teachers and six junior grades teachers). In the coding stage, based on approximately 100,000 words of interview content, 25 initial categories, 4 main categories, and 1 core category were formed. The main categories include Practical Forms of Moral Dilemmas, Practical Strategies for Dealing with Dilemma Situations, Teachers' Subjective Cognitive Understanding, and The Root Causes of the Generation of Moral Dilemma Situations. Centering on the core phenomenon of Teachers' Cognition and Response to Moral Dilemmas, a systematic analysis of the four main categories reveals that all phenomena can be governed by a core category: Teachers' Moral Proactive Practice under Structural Constraints. In the current Chinese educational context, teachers are generally confronted with structural constraints formed by the interweaving of multiple factors such as policy directives, school systems, expectations from parents and schools, and student differences. These constraints manifest as various practical forms of moral dilemmas. In the face of these predicaments, teachers do not passively accept them but, based on their subjective cognitive understanding (including their understanding of their roles, the use of their power, the demarcation of their responsibilities, and their internal educational beliefs), actively mobilize personal and external resources and adopt a series of practical strategies to deal with the dilemmas. This process is essentially a proactive practice"of moral judgment, decision-making, and action by teachers under complex structural conditions, with the aim of maintaining educational values, fulfilling educational responsibilities, and preserving their professional identity as much as possible in the face of difficulties.

Research findings reveal that the essence of teachers' moral dilemmas lies in the value conflict between rights, with its core feature being structural embeddedness. That is, the predicament mainly stems from the deep tension among macro policies, school systems, and social cultures, rather than the individual incapability of teachers. This makes the resolution of the predicament have no standard answer and highly dependent on teachers' situational judgment and practical wisdom. At the cognitive level, teachers exhibit a strong orientation towards practice and realism, with their cognitive focus centered on "What can I do?" and "Where are the boundaries of my responsibility?" Teachers' sense of efficacy and sense of boundaries are key variables influencing their cognitive and emotional experiences. Tracing back to the root cause, the emergence of the predicament is the result of the interaction of multiple forces at different levels: at the macro level, it is manifested as the internal contradiction of policy goals and the disconnection in their implementation; at the meso level, it is the performance-oriented culture in schools, the unsmooth mechanism of collaborative education, and the conflict of role expectations; at the micro level, it stems from the increasing diversity among students, the diversity of educational concepts among parents, and the impact of technology. However, teachers are by no means passive recipients. They demonstrate remarkable moral agency, and their coping strategies are a combination of practical rationality and value concern, specifically manifested in strategic prioritization, situational management, establishment of professional authority, and setting of psychological boundaries. This indicates that teachers are strategic actors who can actively construct meaning and seek action space within structural cracks.

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