Workload and the Professional Culture of Teachers

Helen S. Timperley · Viviane Robinson

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Teacher Education and Leadership Studies School Leadership and Teacher Performance Educational Leadership and Practices

Abstract

An increase in teacher workload and stress has been identified as an undesirable consequence of sitebased school management. We argue that this increase can be attributed, in part, to the ways in which teachers organize themselves. Organizing principles developed to meet the challenges of managing single-cell classrooms, such as autonomy, collegiality and strong subject department identity, may impede the systemic thinking required for developing coherent school-wide initiatives. We illustrate this argument with a school-based case study in which a group of teachers undertook an initiative to improve the achievement of a minority student group. This group of busy teachers unintentionally created workload pressures by developing parallel structures to solve similar problems, by relying on volunteers with high workloads to undertake key tasks and by uncritically accepting all suggestions for how the students might be assisted. Engagement in systemic reform in ways that do not unreasonably increase workloads may require teachers to adopt different organizing principles from those developed for managing their single-cell classrooms.

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References

1991The fifth discipline, the art and practice of the learning organization 1973Review of research in education 1976Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems 1995Change Forces: Probing the Depths of Educational Reform 1994Changing teachers, changing times: teachers' work and culture in the postmodern age 1990The Persistence of Privacy: Autonomy and Initiative in Teachers' Professional Relations 1994Learning in and about complex systems 1990The persistence of privacy: autonomy and initiative in teachers professional relationships.

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