Chapter 5: Teachers’ Work and Instructional Management, Part I: Alternative Views of the Task of Teaching¹

Using the theoretical ideas of Charles Perrow (1967), this paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the nature of teachers’ instructional work and tests some hypotheses about the circumstances under which the nature of teachers’ work varies within and across schools. The conceptual framework developed here focuses on variation in two main dimensions of teachers’ instructional work: task variety and task uncertainty. Data gathered from a survey of high school teachers shows that teachers’ levels of experience and education affect the amount of task variety and task uncertainty faced by teachers, as do their subject area specializations, and their beliefs about the nature of learning and teaching. The implications of these findings for research on school organization and management are considered.