Often professional development is provided pre-packaged to teachers who adopt or reject it depending upon their previous beliefs and knowledge. However, this does not take into account the influence of context on the professional development facilitators who wish to operate in a socially just manner. With little previous research in which professional development facilitators examine their own practices, the complexity in which they operate has been ignored generally. In this paper, we explore the constraints and opportunities in setting up a mathematics professional development project in one school whose students came from a low socioeconomic area. We unpack some of the main decision making points using Kemmis and Grootenboer’s (2008) ideas on the connection between practice architectures and dispositions, as described by Aristotle and Habermas. This enabled us to identify how the circumstances and context shaped what we offered to the school and to teachers in the way of professional development. It also allowed us to better understand how we had influenced the situation itself and thus see how we affected the decision making of participants. Thus, we were better able to understand our own praxis within the complex activity space in which we operated.