Context and Isolation: The Teaching Experience in an Elementary School

The thesis of this study is that teachers evolve responses to all levels of their occupational experience-ideological, organizational, and interpersonal-in relative isolation. This isolation is seen as a function of the discontinuity between our facility in articulating norms and values appropriate to teaching and our inability to intervene effectively to make such norms and values operable. The thesis is developed through an analysis of data organized in terms of the various contexts in which teaching proceeds-the classroom, the school, the school district, and the parent-community.