Policy reflects and shapes society's beliefs about schools, teachers, children, learning, and society, as well as the power structures embedded in our communities and decision-making processes. Although teachers may be central to the "implementation" of education policy, they are marginal to the "design" of policy agendas and text, especially around issues of teaching and learning. Their absence in the policymaking process creates a disconnect between the goals and design of education policy and the actual lived challenges of implementation. In examining the dynamics in this critical disconnect, we address the following research questions: How do institutional norms and routines affect teachers' agency in the policymaking process? Following this "research" question is our "action" question: How do we support conditions that support teachers as policy agents? We draw on qualitative data from two sites (West Virginia and Wisconsin) where K-12 teachers partnered with university researchers in a range of capacity-building efforts. Analysis illustrates how teachers interact with certain institutional norms that make it hard to engage in policy design. Based on our findings, we discuss how a teacher-university partnership can better support the conditions that facilitate greater teacher agency in thinking, talking, and acting on policy.