The adoption of team teaching or team organization in an elementary school causes change in the organization's work system or in the basic structure of its managerial system, or both. Distinguishing between the two kinds of change has been a central feature of the MITT (Management Implications of Team Teaching) research project at the University…

Seminar papers focus on two sequentially-related projects concerning the implementation phase of educational innovation: (1) a set of observational case studies of schools in their first year's effort to initiate differentiated staffing plans and (2) briefer but more pointed case studies of elementary schools that reputedly had succeeded in…

This report analyzes the effects of multiunit school organization on elementary teachers' patterns of task-related communication. Multiunit teacher work teams, or units, are characterized by discussions between teachers about the intimate details of their daily work; this contrasts with the structurally undifferentiated organization of…

Building on previous investigations of the effects of team-organized instructional arrangements on elementary school teachers' sense of autonomy, this report reexamines data from 14 multiunit schools which still retained the team instructional plan at the end of the second year of implementation. Indicators measured were interdependent teaching…

This report summarizes two studies conducted during the late 1960s on effects of team instructional organization upon elementary teachers' decision-making influence in educational affairs and their job satisfaction. The first study, by University of Oregon researchers, compared interview and questionnaire data from Wisconsin teachers in four…

A longitudinal study of elementary schools formally implementing the Multiunit School model collected data suggesting that teachers' feelings of autonomy and job satisfaction are less closely associated with teacher participation on faculty teams for the management of instruction and school administration than with the presence or absence of…

Five of the six papers in this monograph describe case studies of four schools in the initial year of implementing differentiated staffing. These studies attempted to identify issues and generate hypotheses regarding the process of innovation implementation that would be worthy of more precise subsequent investigation. Researchers ended the…

This conceptual expression of "task interdependence," or role coupling, derived from research of elementary teachers in self-contained schools and team teaching schools, recommends that organizational theory provide clear concepts and measures to capture significant variations among schools. Research, measuring the…

This report is an early release of a measurement instrument used in a longitudinal project Management Implications of Team Teaching (MITT), and is taken from a larger, technical Project MITT report, "Governance and Task Interdependence in Schools: First Report of a Longitudinal Study." The instrument, "task interdependence,"…

This report compares two approaches to measuring task interdependence, a theoretically fruitful concept for analyzing an organization's technical system. Task interdependence exists among operating personnel in the degree that task performance of one operative constrains, augments, or otherwise poses contingencies for the performance of another.…

To test conclusions of previous investigations about the influence of team teaching upon task interdependence among elementary school teachers, University of Oregon researchers took measures in 14 elementary schools in six eastern states before and after installation of a multiunit instructional organization. Based upon research at Stanford…