Cooperative Learning and the Organization of Secondary Schools

This article describes the inter‐relationship between school organization and classroom instructional style. Two distinct models of school organization, the bureaucratic and open‐systems models, are characterized in terms of three major dimensions of school life; a. the behavior of administrators, teachers and students, b. work design and tasks, and c. space‐time allocations. It is shown that the bureaucratic model of school organization parallels, and sustains, the traditional whole‐class method of teaching in all of the three dimensions. An open‐systems model of staff organization at the school level is required to sustain an alternative form of classroom instruction such as cooperative learning. The approach presented here emphasizes the inter‐relatedness of all three dimensions of schooling at the organizational and classroom levels. It also claims that the implementation of genuine instructional change, that entails new patterns of interpersonal relations in the classroom, is contingent upon similar changes being made at the level of the school as an organization. Lack of attention to school organizational change may explain why efforts at changing instruction at the classroom level frequently fail to yield results.