Rationale and Context of the Research
Orientation of Teachers to the Teaching Role Teachers vary in terms of how they conceptualize their role–their duties and responsibilities as
teachers. Some teachers view their work as taking place solely within their classrooms in what is essentially an isolated, individual practice. They are content to let educational decisions about curriculum, policies or
standards be made by outside experts and focus their work on implementation issues. Others view their responsibilities as extending beyond classroom teaching to include participation in a larger community of educators and
administrators. They see their role as including decision makers around significant issues in teaching and learning. Although few teachers see teaching exclusively in one way or the other, it may be useful to think of this contrast
as a continuum from private to collaborative practice. How teachers define their role will determine how they spend their limited time both in and beyond the classroom. Traditionally, the job of teaching involved accepting sole responsibility for the education of a small group of students over some period of time, often working alone. As schools grew in size, the organization shifted
to graded classrooms for younger students and subject-specific courses for older students, and to having more teachers and students in the same school building. But the structure of one teacher to each class of 15 to 35 students
has remained remarkably uniform. Some teachers orient almost exclusively to their assigned students using what they have learned in the past to structure their lessons. Some teachers use their autonomy to implement their
personal theories about teaching and learning in their subject-area while others use the closed door to hide their difficult struggle with the complexity of teaching. In either case, to ask for or offer help risks assumptions of
incompetence or interference with the autonomy of others. Teachers with a private orientation have little time for meetings, conferences, or other forms of professional engagement. Novice teachers learn through practice without
the benefit of the vast knowledge base of more experienced teachers. Experienced teachers are often seen as resisting change while asserting their right and independence to establish goals, design curriculum and structure their own
approach to teaching (Lortie, 1975). Low student achievement behind closed doors led to a basic mistrust of teachers by curriculum designers in the '60's, by accountability-oriented reformers in the '80s, and more recently by
some technology advocates (Winn, 1989). One solution was the design of "teacher proof" learning materials where teachers were directed to follow step-by-step recipes or formulas with little or no need for experimentation
or invention by teachers. More recently, highly interactive technology supported learning materials have been promoted as the solution to poorly educated teachers or teacher shortages (Bork, 1996). Implementation of these programs
and procedures does not call for extensive collaboration among teachers and in fact encourages a low evaluation of teachers as professionals. A contrasting
orientation to teaching is seeing it as a collective endeavor by professional educators rather than a private practice of individual teachers. Teachers at this end of the "orientation to teaching" continuum see their
responsibility simultaneously in terms of their relationship to their students and to a larger educational community. Teaching is viewed as a process of continual, reflective inquiry and
exchange of ideas with other professionals which leads to the development of a shared technical language and a shared knowledge base (Little, 1993). Teachers today are expected to prepare all students to reach
significantly higher academic standards than have ever been attempted in this country (Murnane & Levy, 1996). The student populations that teachers are asked to work with are diverse and have complex learning needs
(Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard & Linz, 1996). The range of methods and approaches and the theories of teaching and learning demand extensive intellectual preparation and continual learning on the part of teachers (Wiske,
1998). Teaching expertise can grow from a process of inquiry through experimentation, reflection, analysis and benefits from an exchange with others engaged in similar processes. In this view, a individual teacher can never
know enough to warrant closing the classroom door. Collaborative practice encourages dialog over research findings, sharing ideas from conferences and collective work to evolve the most effective strategies for reaching
consensus about good teaching practices. When teachers with this orientation experience pressure from contradicting recommendations from school, district or national policies they work collectively to formulate a collective
synthesis rather than expecting each teacher to resolve the conflict individually. Teachers who adopt a collaborative stance toward teaching are more likely to build a professional identity than those engaged in private
practice. This professional identity includes publishing papers, offering workshops and speaking at conferences. They view their relationship to other educators within and beyond the school as an important determinant of the
quality of student learning in the classroom (Glazer, 1999). Teacher Role Orientation as Patterns of Interaction with Other Teachers These two contrasting orientations will affect
the form of interaction teachers have with their colleagues as well as the way teachers benefit from educational opportunities. In this study, we look at the nature of teacher interactions with other teachers at the same school,
with teachers and educators at other locations, and with the larger educational community, particularly interactions that suggest professional leadership in that community. We will use these markers to identify teachers who view
teaching as a collaborative practice and contrast such teachers with those whose lack of interactions with other teachers suggest a more private practice. We then examine how the presence or absence of social
relationships within and beyond the school affect teachers' own classroom teaching. School culture is one of the most powerful variables affecting teaching and
learning (Fullan & Hargreaves, 1996). While many factors contribute to creating the whole school culture, in this paper we will be focused specifically on those that define the context of work for teachers--the collective
philosophy of teaching at a particular school--and not those created by the students. Schools, like all social organizations for work, have cultures that reward, foster, discourage, or constrain the actions of teachers. Those
cultures are partly determined by policies and practices of school leaders, by the recruitment of individuals into various positions in the organization, and by a pattern of expectations that emerge from the interactions of
participants. Just as teachers' work orientations contain varying mixtures of attention to their own classroom practice and interest in and collaboration with other teachers' practices, so to, school cultures vary between those
with a more restricted definition of the teacher role and those that encourage and facilitate teachers' broader involvement with peers in their school or beyond. These two poles of work culture are embodied in contrasting
organizational structures that are designed to address two fundamental needs of social organization (Aldrich & Marsden, 1988). Hierarchical, bureaucratic structures are characterized by differentiated roles and
responsibilities which enable individuals to take clear and authoritative actions based on the expertise that comes from specialization. However, autonomous decision-making may create a norm of private practice–of
non-interference. In contrast, participatory and fluid organizational structures evolve from the goal of integrating individuals into a cohesive common culture. Such structures produce norms of collaboration, mutual
assistance, and collective responsibility and decision-making. The expectation that teachers' efforts will be almost entirely directed towards improving
student outcomes in their own classroom is consistent with a hierarchical and bureaucratic organizational structure. The public school system came of age during an era in which most productive enterprises were characterized by
highly specialized job responsibilities, centralized decision-making, detailed regulation through universalistically defined procedures and rules, and standardized work routines. In this organizational structure, which
remains as the dominant form of schooling, the curriculum–an ordered set of courses, topics, and skills which all students are expected to learn–is defined by state and district education specialists. The teacher's job is to
present information and explanations about those topics and skills to their individual classes of students and to establish a routine of clearly defined activities that efficiently enable students to master the prescribed facts and
skills. Tests are used, not just to judge whether students have mastered what they were taught, but as part of an effort to sort students homogeneously into grade levels, programs, and classrooms. These efforts to specify
uniformity in content and tasks across classrooms and to manage diversity by creating homogeneity within classrooms rest on an implicit assumption that effective schooling depends on having the right content transmitted to the most
appropriate students at the best time. The school culture that prevails is one that gives each teacher relative autonomy over a class of largely procedural decisions but at the same time restricts him or her from involvement in
fundamental curricular and organizational decisions. School principals, district administrators, local school boards, and state and national policy-makers set the course of action for teachers. They set educational standards,
develop frameworks, evaluate materials and mandate the use of specific textbooks. A highly specified, systematic curriculum is viewed as crucial to address the high mobility rates of families with children. This common
curriculum is the cultural capital that needs to be distributed to all students in order to reduce the strong effects of socio-economic inequalities on educational outcomes (Hirsch, 1996). High performance on standardized tests
drives the system of education encouraging a focus on content knowledge that is easily tested. Raising test scores is viewed as evidence of increased quality of teaching and learning. Such a structure is highly functional
for certain aspects of the educational enterprise. In particular, it provides a supportive environment that encourages teachers with limited pedagogical preparation or skill to successfully transmit factual knowledge and
procedural skills. To be successful, all teachers must be motivated to follow federal, state, district and state mandates and programs and implement them at the classroom level. They need to motivate their students to do the
required work. However, as new conditions emerge that challenge the ability of autonomous teachers following externally developed scripts and procedures to accomplish academic goals, a climate of "school reform" is likely to
develop. The most common approaches to reform—admonishing teachers to teach better, raising the stakes for failure, implementing new standards for student achievement and new tests to measure it, and even raising salaries and
improving working conditions—do not challenge the bureaucratic school culture (Hirsch, 1996). Instead, these reforms are implemented in order to increase efficiency and success. However, others argue that a wholly different
school work culture is necessary for the goals of reformers to succeed --a professional culture. At the other end of the continuum from schools enmeshed
in a bureaucratic culture are schools where the work culture supports intense teachers' interaction over the school's mission, goals, curriculum, and even over teachers' instructional practices. It is a model where individual
practitioners give up some degree of procedural autonomy in exchange for involvement in negotiating the larger principles and priorities of the educational enterprise. The image is one of of professionals planning their enterprise,
sharing beliefs that they, as well as students, are learners, in an evolving structure adapting to individual needs and changing circumstances. From this perspective, teaching requires continual learning and
adaptation with improvisational characteristics requiring quick judgements that cannot be scripted ahead of time (Engestrom & Middleton, 1996). Decisions are based on a guiding philosophy about teaching and learning, a deep
understanding of current political and social issues, and a thoughtful sensitivity to learning needs of students. Teaching is a complex integrated whole --one that cannot be decomposed into subsystems mastered one at time in
workshops and used as formulas in practice. Instead, teachers need to pool evidence, discuss possibilities, and formulate learning experiences tailored to the changing needs of their specific student population. In doing so, they
create a shared knowledge base, common beliefs, and vales about the institution of schooling making it possible for novice teachers to benefit from the experience of the collectivity (Brown, Greeno, Lambert, Mehan & Resnick,
1999). Today's large comprehensive schools allow for an economy of scale, but teachers have limited opportunity to develop broader understandings of the educational enterprise. Powerful norms of privacy, coupled with a practice
of having teachers teach all day, tend to confine teachers' own intellectual development to procedural and instructional matters. A culture of teacher-professionals drives intellectual engagement with basic issues of
curriculum and school organization. Such cultures may be facilitated by a structural reorganization of schools into small units in which teachers take broader responsibility academically and socially (Darling-Hammond, 1997).
Smaller units, less hierarchically structured, and less role differentiated, make it easier for teachers and students to work collaboratively on issues that affect the whole enterprise, not just what happens in any one classroom.
Recent reform and restructuring proposals and programs have involved teachers in these forms of collaborative teams and partnership (Sizer, 1984; Stringfield, Ross, & Smith, 1996) Often explicitly modeled after
new forms of participatory management in business,. professional school-level teacher organization is formed to articulate a common vision and establish plans for accomplishing it. We are interested in exploring the
relationship of this approach to school-wide learning by teachers and type of learning environments they structure for their students. Our hypothesis is that teachers engaged in collaborative learning organizations will be
more likely to teach in ways that are compatible with constructivist pedagogy than with traditional knowledge transmission models. Indicators of Professional Work Culture
Several aspects of school culture seem particularly indicative of the emergence (or lack of emergence) of a professional culture and we use these as markers of its existence: collaborative work among teachers; the development
of common goals and priorities among teachers and between teachers and school site administrators; opportunities for teachers to learn from one another; and collective responsibility for teacher performance in all classrooms.
After determining the relative tendency toward either a bureaucratic or professional culture, we look at whether teaching practices are related to school culture. Relationship of Role Orientation and School Culture to Teacher Beliefs and Practices
Although current discussions of teaching reforms touch on a wide assortment of instructional practices, our examination of the conversation suggests that most of them either explicitly or implicitly derive from
theories of learning that can be grouped under the rubric of "constructivism" (Brooks & Brooks, 1993). Educational theorists such as Dewey (1916), Piaget (1952), and Vygotsky (1978) provide a rationale for
"constructivist-compatible" teaching practices including, for example,
These constructivist-compatible instructional activities are quite distinct from a "transmission" view of learning that emphasizes teacher-centered whole-class explanation and closely scripted student seatwork,
and which suggests that students acquire concepts and skills through listening, copying text, and practicing sets of similar problems (Pea, 1996). How teachers organize their classes to a large extent reflects their beliefs about
good teaching. Nevertheless, their practices, and to a lesser extent even their philosophies themselves, are subject to influence based on their continued experiences in teaching, the values and opinions expressed by their
peers around them, and by the expectations of influential others which are transmitted to them through formal rules and procedures and informal norms (Glazer, 1999). Our study examines the relationship between differing teacher
orientations towards teaching and the influences of school culture and teachers' pedagogical beliefs and practices. In particular, we investigate the following questions: