ABSTRACT
The organizational context in which most teachers work is designed to support predictable routines (Rowan, 1990), yet teaching for understanding can take off in unexpected directions, placing substantial new demands on teachers and on the contexts in which they work. To support teaching for understanding, schools will need to increase their capacity for change, and we can expect confusion and conflict about aims and approaches to be a major issue in schools undergoing organizational change. In our work examining school and district contexts, therefore, we take a broad view of resources, identify teacher professional development as the primary engine of change, and view school organization as a dynamic system, both influencing and influenced by the programs implemented in it (Gamoran, Secada, & Marrett, 2000). We propose that schools can best support teaching for understanding by responding to teacher learning: allocating substantial time for professional development, supporting teacher autonomy in instructional content and pedagogical methods, and allocating resources in ways responsive to teachers' efforts. The goal of the work reported here was to identify and understand the supports and barriers in the school and district contexts of teachers attempting to teach for understanding.
