This study demonstrates the understandings that result from teachers' explanations of how they learn when they encounter everyday situations that evoke their learning. The study renders these explanations as a framework for further research on teacher workplace learning in informal settings. The framework emerged from a constant-comparative analysis of the structure, language and content of journal entries written by 10 teachers in Lithuania and the United States in three primary schools: an established Russian school in Lithuania, a Lithuanian school restructured since the political changeover and a newly built school in the American Midwest. In their journal entries, they represented their learning in five domains: their dispositions towards learning, their sources of learning, problems as their focus for learning, processes in which they engaged in their attempts to solve professional dilemmas and their reactions to those dilemmas. We incorporated the qualities of these domains into a conceptual framework of learner profiles. The framework represents the dominant qualities of each teacher, individually, allowing for displays of uniqueness and comparatively to observe commonality and difference. The discussion suggests potential directions and questions for research afforded by this framework.