Within the last ten years the Danish upper secondary school has undergone radical changes (Beck 2008b). School subjects are to be taught along the lines of cross-disciplinarity, and teachers are to work in teams. New kinds of organization of teacher work demands new ways of organizing school life; the leader role is put in the foreground of the organization, making a need for more tight coupled interactions. At the same time a general “outsourcing “ of public administration along the lines of New Public Management has made schools sensitive to marked mechanisms.
     These changes have had a radical impact upon the way students, teachers and leaders conceptualize good teaching (Hargreaves 2003). The traditional teacher identity is challenged by new demands, which can both create ambivalence, loss of meaning and new possibilities for professional identity (Beck and Rüsselbæk Hansen 2013). Students experience different and sometimes frustrating phenomena, for instance gaps between official intentions and the teachers’ practice. The interesting thing is that students in an era dominated by the more instrumental competence-discourse keep on focusing on the individual signature of the teacher and in this way points out the importance of the face-to-face-meeting, while teachers seek to improve their teaching using new schedules, methods and team-organization and at the same time try to meet the student needs. We will argue that such dilemmas are not unproblematic. Leaders have their eye upon organization matters and create a discourse about teachers having difficulties in implementing new structures because of their traditional ways of thinking. Leaders do not seem to pay attention to how this relation is effected by the new educational demands.
     The intention of the paper is to investigate how different agents (students, teachers and leaders) articulate the “meaning” of teaching and learning. Especially we want to put focus on the way the teacher role is articulated by the three parts: How do students talk about good teaching and good teachers? How do teachers talk about good teaching and their teacher role? How do leaders talk about the teacher role and strategic issues attached to this role?   
     Our theoretical framework is inspired by modernization theory (Foucault 1991, Giddens 1991, Ziehe 2005, Rose 1989), sociological theories about ‘roles’ and professional identity (Archer 2007) and psychoanalytical theory about identity construction and psycho-dynamics (Britzman 1998; Salzberger-Wittenberg 2006; Beck 2013).

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