Teachers' Workplace Meets The Professors of Teaching: A Chance Encounter at 30,000 Feet

Abstract

In Teachers' Workplace, Rosenholtz presents evidence suggesting that teachers' attitudes and behaviors are direct results of the social organization of their workplace. She describes low- consensus schools, where the many uncertainties in classroom teaching lead to isolation and pluralism, and high-consensus schools, where teachers solve problems collaboratively and, in the process, define common goals and desirable teaching methods. In The Professors of Teaching, education faculty emerge as a highly fragmented, pluralistic group, strikingly similar to the teachers Rosenholtz describes in low-consensus schools. Although some degree of pluralism is inherent in the nature of the professoriate, teacher education as a professional field may be unique in its extreme ill-structuredness. Teacher educators, like K-12 teachers in low-consensus schools, may be driven by the uncertainties of their work to the same coping mechanisms: isola tion and self-defensiveness. The task of restructuring teacher education appears to entail trans forming colleges of education into high-consensus schools. The deeply problematic nature of such a transformation is discussed.