introduction

Research on professional development argues that instructional reform is most successfully accomplished when a practitioner culture emerges that recognizes the need for change and takes responsibility for that change (Darling-Hammond, 1997; McLaughlin, 1990, Little, 1993). Such a culture may be fostered by outside agents such as school reform design teams (Stringfield, Ross & Smith, 1996), through strong leadership by a principal (Meier, 1996), through university partnerships in action research (University of California Office of the President, 1997), or through efforts to develop networked "learning communities" (Riel, 1998a; Schlager, Fusco, & Schank, 1998). But the professional culture that emerges is claimed to be quite distinct from what usually prevails when a district-directed, knowledge-transmission "staff development" approach is used to "train" teachers. Moreover, changes in teachers' pedagogy that might be superficial when they are externally mandated or where the sense of "being trained" is conveyed, may be more successfully accomplished when teachers play a central role in developing the rationale for the change, constructing the strategies for implementation, and choosing the resources to be used.

The notion that instructional reforms will follow from organizational reforms is not totally self-evident (e.g., Weiss, 1993). Individual teachers may not have the breadth of knowledge or organizational skills needed to implement extensive reform. It would be valuable, then, to have systematic evidence that relates the extent to which a professional culture has emerged among teachers in a school with the nature of teaching practices that occur there.

In this paper we use teacher responses in a large national survey to examine teachers' individual orientation to the work of teaching from private practice to collaborative practice as well as the school work culture that prevails in their environment. We characterize work orientations that focus on a teacher's own classroom responsibilities as "private practice" and those that include large elements of professional interaction and leadership as "collaborative practice." We characterize school cultures as being on a continuum from a "bureaucratic culture" to a "professional culture." We relate both work orientation and school culture to teachers' personal beliefs (philosophy) and to their instructional practices (pedagogy). Table 1 summarizes the parallels that we examine among these four dimensions of teaching.

Table 1
Summary of the Constructs

PERSONAL DIMENSIONS

INTERPERSONAL DIMENSIONS

Orientation to Teaching Role

School Culture

Private Practice

Collaborative Practice

Bureaucratic Culture

Professional Culture

Educational Philosophy

Pedagogy/Teaching Practice

Traditional Beliefs

Constructivist Beliefs

Information/Skills Transmission

Knowledge Construction

Our interest in studying teachers' orientation towards teaching and the collective orientation of a school's teaching staff–school culture–is because such variables may be levers for changing teachers' philosophies and pedagogies: We want to know if teachers who engage in collaborative exchanges with their peers within schools that support and reward this behavior teach differently than teachers who work in isolation. If this is so, it might help in understanding the process of reframing teachers' beliefs about what is good and bad teaching and for reforming the practices they follow as they confront classes on a daily basis. We are particularly interested in the relationship between these orientations and teaching that derives from constructivist theories of learning.

Before we describe how these four dimensions were examined, we discuss existing research and theory related to (1) teachers' orientation towards the teaching role, (2) aspects of school culture affecting teachers in particular, and (3) the relationship of teachers' role orientation and school culture to teaching philosophy and practice.