Workload and the Professional Culture of Teachers

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.