What makes changing schools and classrooms (among other social institutions)so difficult?
Does changing a classroom or a school involve changing a whole cultural system? (Well, yes.) What does that mean? How does a classroom/school culture change? A school’s culture is the largely unseen shape of things– adaptive patterns of perceiving, interpreting, interacting and doing, embodied in the routinized details of daily classroom life. The culture’s in the details. Schools are cultural systems and what cultural systems do is stabilize and regulate human activities, providing blueprints for incoming social participants. Within the school cultural system, activities are elaborately organized, with built-in redundancies that maintain this way of doing things. That accounts for the pull we feel when trying another way of doing things. In a sense, the whole school enterprise at all levels, from district office to kindergarten block corner, is bent on resisting change (the elephants are obstinate). On the other hand, since cultural systems and subsystems are means of adapting to cir
