Research Findings

The findings will be reported in three major sections, (1) teachers' role orientation and its relationship to pedagogy; (2) school culture and teacher pedagogy  and (3) the relationships among all three constructs—role orientation, school culture, and teacher pedagogy.  The first two sections begin with descriptive statistics that provide a representative portrait of U.S. teachers from the probability sample of schools in our study.  The discussion of the co-occurrence of attributes (e.g., the correlation between professional role orientation and constructivist teaching practice) combine data from both the probability sample and the specially selected schools (high technology presence or involvement in reform). 

Teachers' Orientation Towards the Teaching Role

Descriptive Statistics

Within-School Teacher Interactions. A slight majority of all teachers have at least weekly discussions with other teachers at their school about professional matters such as teaching methods, ideas for group projects, using computers, or news in their subject area.  About one-fourth report daily interactions with their colleagues on such matters.  Discussions about personal matters, unrelated to teaching, overall are only somewhat more frequent than discussions about professional issues.  (See Table 2.)

On the other hand, it is also the case that nearly one-half of teachers don't have professional conversations as often as weekly, and for any given topic (e.g., teaching methods, group projects, etc.) at least 20% of teachers rarely discuss these matters with other teachers. One-fifth of the all of the teachers report visiting or being visited by colleagues to observe teaching on a regular basis (several times a month). While this is a small number, it does represent a substantial amount of professional exchange for these teachers and perhaps a change from the past where peer observation was rarely seen.

Table 2: Frequency of Teacher Informal Interactions with Other Teachers at their Own School
How often do you have the following types of interactions with other teachers at your school?	Seldom/ Never	Several/ month	1-3/ week	Almost  Daily
Discussions about how to teacher a particular concept to the a class	21%	44%	22%	13%
Discussions about ideas for student or group projects	20%	45%	23%	12%
Discussions of different views about an issue within our common subject area (e.g. science)	23%	44%	21%	12%
Discussions about computer software or the Internet	26%	41%	23%	10%
Discussions on any of the above topics	6%	37%	32%	23%
Informal discussions of personal matters, unrelated to teaching	15%	23%	27%	35%
Visits to another teacher's classroom to observe teaching	78%	16%	4%	1%
Informal observations of MY classroom by another teacher	79%	17%	2%	2%

 

B eyond-School Teacher Contact. The most common form of exchange beyond the classroom is through conferences and workshops.  The vast majority of teachers participate in at least one such activity per year, and more than 40% reported attending three or more workshops or conferences during the year (Table 3).  A majority of teachers participate in committees involving teachers from other schools, but such contacts, on average, are fewer than contacts through workshops.  Only a minority of teachers use e-mail to interact with other teachers, and fewer than 20% do so regularly. Given the widespread access of teachers to the Internet, both at home and in their classroom (Becker, 1999), the limited use of e-mail for communicating with other teachers may reflect the limited personal acquaintanceship that most teachers have with others in their profession.

Table 3: Frequency of Professional Contact  with Teachers at Other Schools
	Not so far this yeara	1-2 times	3-5 times	More Often
A workshop or conference with teacher from different schools	14%	44%	29%	13%
A committee meeting with teachers from other schools	45%	27%	20%	8%
Electronic mail with teachers from other places	61%	14%	9%	16%
a  The time period represented is most of a school year.  Teachers completed surveys between March and June of 1998

Table 4: Percent of Teachers Involved in Professional Leadership Activities
In the past three years, which of these experiences have you had?	Yes
I have informally mentored another teacher	38%
I have been formally assigned to mentor another teacher	23%
I have given a workshop or talk for at least 25 teachers	35%
I have given workshops for teachers on at least 5 occasions	15%
I have taught a college-level course for credit	10%
I have published an article for professional educators	5%
Four or more of the above	7%
Three or more of the above	20%
None of the above	40%

In this section, we examine the empirical relationships between teachers' role orientation and our measure of transmission-oriented versus constructivist teacher pedagogy. For this analysis we have grouped the probability sample and the reform and high technology samples together. ¹⁰  The purpose for including the specially selected schools in the correlational analyses is to provide comparisons of means and percentages among small sub-samples of teachers that are more reliable than when simply using the probability sample alone.

Within-school informal interaction with other teachers.  We first look at the relationship between teachers' informal professional interactions with other teachers at their school and the extent to which they use transmission-oriented or constructivist teaching practices. The Within School Informal Interactions scale includes both discussions of substantive and pedagogical issues and informal observation of other teachers' (or their own) classes.  Teachers are divided into low, medium, or high frequencies of interaction.  As shown in Table 5, teachers who interact frequently with their peers at their schools  (14% of  the teachers ) are more than 3 times as likely to be in the category of "most constructivist" teachers (roughly the upper quartile on the pedagogy index) as teachers who are not involved in these informal exchanges around teaching and learning.

Table 5: Within-School Informal Professional Interaction by Pedagogy
	TEACHER PEDAGOGY
Within-School Teacher Interactions	Information/Skill s Transmission	2nd Quartile	3rd Quartile	Knowledge Construction	Total (N)
Collaborative Practice (14%)	10%	22%	24%	45%	100% ( 645)
Medium contact practice (58%)	24%	25%	28%	23%	100% ( 2,359)
Private Practice (28%)	37%	29%	21%	13%	100% (978)
All teachers (100%)	26%	26%	25%	23%	100% (3,982)
Note. Where N's appear in tables, they are raw, unweighted counts of the number of respondents.  Percentages will not match N's because they are based on weighted N's

In contrast, the relationship between within-school professional interactions and Pedagogical Change is modest at best (r=.09). This low correlation may indicate that this aspect of Role Orientation (i.e., interacting with other teachers at their school professionally) may be a stable characteristic that had already affected pedagogy for most teachers earlier in their career and is not as likely to influence recent changes.¹¹

Contacts with teachers at other schools. Teachers who interact with teachers in other schools through workshop and committee participation and electronic mail communication also tend to have more constructivist-compatible pedagogies than those who do not.  For each of  the three aspects of interaction with teachers at distant schools, we set a criterion level to indicate substantial involvement in that activity (3 or more workshops or committee meetings/year and 6 or more email exchanges). Table 6 compares teachers who were scored as meeting three, two, one or none of the criteria. Nearly 40% of teachers who were most active in communication beyond the school (indicated by substantial involvement in all three activities) used a knowledge construction approach in the classroom, compared to fewer than one-fifth of teachers who met none of the criteria.  In contrast, teachers who lacked substantial involvement in any of the three areas were three times as likely to approach education with a knowledge or skill transmission strategy.

Table 6: Professional Contacts with Teachers at Other Schools by Pedagogy
	TEACHER PEDAGOGY
Teacher Contacts Beyond the School (# of criteria met)
	Information/Skills Transmission	2nd Quartile	3rd Quartile	Knowledge Construction	Total
Most contact (3) 7% of all teachers)	10%	23%	29%	38%	100%
Medium contact (2) (20%)	17%	25%	28%	30%	100%
Low contact (1) (28%)	25%	26%	26%	24%	100%
Private Practice (none) (45%)	34%	27%	23%	17%	100%
Total	26%	26%	25%	23%	100%

Table 7: Change in Primary Method of Evaluating Students by Breadth of Beyond-School Teacher Contact
		How often you evaluate students through their products instead of tests?
Contact with Teachers at Other Schools		Less than 3 years ago	Same as before or never did	More now	Much more now	Total (N)
High contact (3)		0%	17%	49%	34%	100% (80)
Medium contact (2)		1%	40%	40%	19%	100% (213)
Low contact (1)		1%	40%	41%	18%	100% (286)
Private Practice (none)		2%	51%	35%	11%	100% (409)
Total		2%	44%	39%	16%	100% (988)
Note:  The number of cases in this table is smaller than others because each item concerning changes in pedagogy was asked to a random 25% of all respondents.

Table 8: Number of Leadership Activities by Pedagogy
Number of Leadership Activities	Information/Skills Transmission	2nd Quartile	3rd Quartile	Knowledge Construction	Total
Three or more (Leaders) (19%)	17%	20%	28%	35%	100% (596)
Two (18%)	24%	25%	24%	27%	100% (761)
One (23%)	28%	25%	26%	21%	100% (828)
None (Private) (40%)	32%	29%	24%	15%	100% (1248)
Total	26%	25%	25%	23%	100% (3981)

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