There are only few empirical findings about the intensity and quality of teacher’s collaboration in European educational research so far. None of them are concerning the vocational education and training. The lack of research should be reduced with the presented survey. The focus of this survey is to get findings about the relations between initialising and implementing pedagogical innovations in vocational schools, the change facilitator style of principles, leadership and the amount and quality of teacher’s collaboration. The survey is based on a theoretical framework that was developed due to findings of organisational psychology and taking into account the different functions of collaboration. This framework was validated empirically before in pedagogical surveys (Gräsel et al. 2006). This framework discriminates between three different types of cooperation that increase in its value: sharing of Information and material, work-sharing cooperation and co-construction. The three different types of cooperation implicate different amounts of work as well as diverging perceptions of cooperation. Furthermore these types of cooperation differ concerning „autonomy“, „trust“ and „common aims“ - three constitutive requirements of cooperation. These requirements are very problematic especially in vocational schools, because teachers are considered as individualists which are used to reach their own goals independently from others. Moreover, teacher’s professional relationships are determined by privacy, professional autonomy and avoiding assistance (e.g. Little 1990). The theoretical modelling of the role of school principals and the concept of change facilitator styles was adopted from empirical findings of Hall and George (1999). They discriminate between three change facilitator styles: responder, manager and initiator.

During this project teachers and principals of 65 vocational schools participating in a programme to implement didactical innovations were asked twice (spring 2007, summer 2008). The instrument used in the survey was a standardised questionnaire that could be answered as well online as in a paper-and-pencil version. This strategy should enable to question all geographically widespread schools on the one hand and to reach a sufficient rate of return on the other hand. To be able to analyse the amount and form of cooperation in the vocational schools there were constructed scales for all types of cooperation (sharing of Information and material, work-sharing cooperation and co-construction) used in the theoretical framework mentioned above. Furthermore it was made a cluster analysis of these types. At the second stage of the survey teachers of 20 selected vocational schools were asked about the school-wide cooperation and the dominating leadership model in their schools.

Recent empirical findings suggest that teacher’s cooperation in schools is still rarely and mostly practiced in form of organizational co-ordination (Terhart/Klieme 2006). This result could be affirmed by trend in the presented survey. Referring to three different types of cooperation - mentioned above in the theoretical framework – it could be stated that even under favourable conditions of pilot projects only 50% of the teacher reach the high-quality cooperation-type of co-construction. All others limit there activities to sharing information und materials or they won’t cooperate at all. Though it could be found out that the cooperation activities of teacher depends on specific aspects. The correlations between type of cooperation and sex, age of service, organizational resources, role of school principals and change facilitator styles were analysed in this survey.