The contexts within which teachers engage in personally meaningful discourse about teaching and learning are explored. Connections are drawn between the perspectives and experiences of teachers and the organizational structure of the workplace. Methodology involved a pattern analysis of responses to an open-ended survey administered to 90 K-12…

Instructionally, schools tend to be "weakly normed" organizational systems in which teachers bring relatively little pressure upon each other to change and/or improve their classroom performance. Because teachers tolerate a wide range of behavior among their colleagues and are reluctant to offer criticism of each other, those responsibile for…