COOPERATIVE LEARNING AND THE ORGANIZATION OF SECONDARY-SCHOOLS

This article describes the inter-relationship between school organizat ion and classroom instructional style. Two distinct models of school o rganization, the bureaucratic and open-systems models, are characteriz ed in terms of three major dimensions of school life; a. the behavior of administrators, teachers and students, b. work design and tasks, an d c. space-time allocations. It is shown that the bureaucratic model o f school organization parallels, and sustains, the traditional whole-c lass method of teaching in all of the three dimensions. An open-system s model of staff organization at the school level is required to susta in an alternative form of classroom instruction such as cooperative le arning. The approach presented here emphasizes the inter-relatedness o f all three dimensions of schooling at the organizational and classroo m levels. It also claims that the implementation of genuine instructio nal change, that entails new patterns of interpersonal relations in th e classroom, is contingent upon similar changes being made at the leve l of the school as an organization. Lack of attention to school organi zational change may explain why efforts at changing instruction at the classroom level frequently fail to yield results.