This paper explores questions about knowledge production, institutional power, and the contributions of educational anthropology to social theory of reform and cultural change. It investigates gender and development in Jordan, where many women avoid formal employment because of its public and gender-mixed nature. Teaching is often considered the “best” career choice for a woman because she will be around children at work, at home during school breaks, able to flexibly enter and exit the profession, and in limited contact with men in public. However, female teachers are uniquely empowered to influence changing cultural norms because of the explicitly transformative “Education Reform for a Knowledge Economy”(ERfKE) in Jordan over the past decade. Teachers dynamically negotiate what it means to be a woman in Jordanian society by presenting the values embedded in education reforms and making decisions about what to teach, how, and why. Though the mandated teaching goals now include teaching for critical thinking, cooperation and teamwork, technological fluency, multilingualism, democratic participation, and entrepreneurship, it is difficult for teachers to figure out how to do this. Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork with public school teachers predominately in a girls’ public K-12 school in the capital Amman, this paper examines how teachers engage in the everyday definition and implementation of national education reforms. This paper follows five selected teachers from different genders, neighborhoods, and subjects across the curriculum in order to critically analyze how Jordanian educators respond, challenge, adapt, and mediate transformational education reforms. Their lived experiences illustrate agency within structure, from impromptu visits from the queen to voluntary teacher training workshops on using mobile devices in the classroom. Drawing on theories of social emergence, performativity, and practice, I argue that teachers are active participants in the social construction of knowledge and the knowledge economy. This paper proposes a framework of empirical practices and repertoires of justification that teachers employ in order to teach for social transformation within culturally acceptable boundaries. The research focuses on instances of improvisation, decision making, and other examples of agency within structure such as personalization of the curriculum. Thus, this paper shows that teacher participation in the ERfKE reforms is a context in which they model, articulate, challenge, and transform gender roles in society.