The Interaction of School Context and Teachers' Beliefs. R&D Report No. 8023 / Jan Nespor.

This report focuses on the issue of how constraints of the school environment and teachers' beliefs about teaching influence classroom performance. Case studies of three teachers in two schools (one in a rural, the other in an urban district) are presented. Objective characteristics of the school settings (e.g., patterns of material and physical resource distribution) are described in detail. The classrooms of the teachers, and their explanations and justifications of their practices, are then examined. The report concludes by summarizing the patterns of resource distribution operating in the two schools and districts and examining teachers' beliefs about teaching as a form of "commitments" to different definitions of teachers. Commitments are then explained in terms of the interaction of organizational control patterns and teachers' strategies of adaptation to organizational settings. The central theme of the analysis is that teachers' classroom performances are not shaped by the independent influences of contextual constraints and beliefs and intentions, but are instead shaped by the interaction of beliefs and constraints. (Author)

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