Are we doing a good job?

Any organization, with schools certainly being one of them, manages to solve the problems it faces in order to survive. The school’s culture starts to grow and build itself then as these problems are repeatedly and reliably solved in a similar way; thus the assumptions and beliefs underneath them becoming shared and unconscious while shaping the school’s view of itself and its context (Schein in Evans, 2001). These assumptions while being deep and stable appear throughout the school in the form of values and artifacts (Evans, 2001)

Values such as cooperation and loyalty but also values like competitiveness and mistrust develop as ways to solve problems and challenges faced by a school, and the more they reliably solve these problems, the more they become to be accepted as a reality and transformed into a shared belief that is taken for granted (Evans, 2001). Evans (2001) distinguishes between two types of values: deep ones that unconsciously affect the decision-making process and persons’ behavior; and others that even though schools profess, their members do not typically practice.

It is reasonable then to expect that the deepest and shared values of a school should permeate teachers and students’ attitudes and behavior, as well as their relationship in the classroom. But, the isolation in which teachers develop their work appears as a frontier for this to happen. If, after closing their classroom door, teachers have the power to implement the curriculum according to their own values and if -on top of that- they don’t share the schools’ values and assumptions (whatever these are); then the contents and values that are actually taught may widely differ from the ones intended.

If a given school is missing a strong leader committed to the schools’ values and able to engage teachers with them or if, pushed by its leaders, the school develops a culture based -for example- on competitiveness and mistrust; then would it be possible to think that students are receiving a different set of values from each of their teachers? Going one step further, if in order to improve instruction, teachers need to improve their capacity to judge their work (Cohen, 1990), how could they know if they are doing a good job if their benchmark is drawn by their own set of values?