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Within a European context marked by teacher shortages and the intensification of professional burnout (OECD, 2023; UNESCO, 2024), this exploratory study draws on pragmatic sociology (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Thévenot, 2006). Its analysis interprets the findings as expressions of different modes of teachers’ engagement with their professional activity and with the institutional frameworks that regulate it. The most consistent form of engagement remains anchored in the concrete pedagogical relationship, in everyday cooperation, and in care for students— a commitment sustained by situated practices and ethical responsibility. However, this core is traversed by institutional dynamics shaped by performance metrics, accountability mechanisms, and bureaucratic intensification, which tend to misalign the pedagogical meaning of the profession from formal criteria of recognition.

This paper presents the results of an initial questionnaire developed within the framework of the DRAFTER project – Building Teachers’ Vocation for the 21st Century. The study is based on a survey administered to principals of School Clusters (Agrupamentos de Escolas) and Non-Clustered Schools in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, seeking to analyse school leaders’ perceptions of teachers’ professional engagement, well-being, and the conditions for valuing the profession.

The analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative data, enables the construction of an integrated reading of school leaders’ perceptions of teaching. The findings indicate high levels of collaboration among teachers, low levels of professional isolation, and a consistent openness to addressing students’ difficulties. At the same time, they reveal frequent references to accumulated fatigue, bureaucratic pressure, salary dissatisfaction, and the symbolic weakening of teachers’ authority. Open-ended responses converge in identifying priorities such as salary enhancement, improved working conditions, and strengthened social recognition of the profession. Taken together, these elements do not point to a generalized erosion of vocation, but rather to a reconfiguration of professional engagement within institutional contexts marked by increasing demands and insufficient recognition.

In sum, teacher well-being emerges as a relational and organisational phenomenon, produced in everyday interactions and professional cultures rather than as a merely individual variable. Within the context analysed, teaching appears as a vocation under strain yet not annulled: commitment to students and to the professional collective remains active, although conditioned by structures that challenge the sustainability of engagement and call for renewed forms of institutional and public recognition.