Principal Proposition

     Over the years, research on teaching, together with the accumulation of practitioner wisdom, have provided teachers with a large array of options for organizing and delivering instruction. These include direct instruction, jurisprudential inquiry, cooperative learning, collaborative learning, mastery learning, various social science models, and many others. Some have been demonstrated to be, in the hands of a competent practitioner, highly effective, while others are minimally effective, even detrimental.

     However, in spite of this vast array of possibilities for more effectively organizing and delivering instruction available to teachers, the dominant mode of instruction continues to be lecture/demonstration/discussion..

   There are a number of plausible explanations for the incongruity between what is known to be effective and the practices in actual use by teachers. These include poor preparation and training, the failure to adequately disseminate new knowledge on teaching, or the idea that teachers selectively choose from among alternatives based on their evaluation of what might work, the level of effort involved, or what the culture of their schools will tolerate.

   The most interesting and potentially insightful explanation of why teachers fail to utilize a variety of strategies that might achieve better results may lie in a better understanding of the forces at work in the school culture that encourage or discourage innovation. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to....