Studies of professional identity are generally conducted using participatory frameworks and from the perspective of a particular development initiative. They provide understandings of teachers’ move towards more comprehensive participation in the practices the initiative promotes. Studies in line with this main trend, however, leave questions of teacher identity unanswered when teachers are not enrolled in long-term development programmes. I argue that to address such questions a different framework is needed, one that maintains the participatory stance, but focuses on the individual teacher rather than a development initiative. It is the intention of the Patterns-of-Participation framework (PoP) that I introduce to re-centre the individual in this sense. To make my point, I discuss how research frameworks may be conceptualized and compared and use the resulting "frameworks framework" to contrast studies of the main trend with the intentions of PoP.