The Collegial Focus: Teaching Fields, Collegial Relationships, and Instructional Practice in American High Schools

This article presents a theory of the collegial social control of teachers' instructional beliefs and practices that centers on the idea of the "collegial focus," which is an application of Feld's "social focus" construct. It reports on a study of 13 American public and private high schools. Three key findings emerged from the data analysis: (1) faculty social organization in these high schools provided the structural and normative capacity for the collegial control of instruction, (2) local cultures of practice seem to have emerged in department-based collegial foci, and (3) the tendency for collegial foci to correspond to lines of pedagogical division within departments appears to have depended on the strength with which norms of practice in a teaching field were institutionalized.