The context for this study is the Danish upper secondary school which is undergoing remarkable changes these years. The reform has created remarkable structural changes including an extensive team based structure. The changes have not been without consequences to the internal organizational culture of schools. Mandatory team cause that teachers are forced to take a position towards other teachers’ approaches and to have an “inner dialogue” about their own investments in team collaboration. Values are squeezed to the surface making room for dialogue, new solutions – and conflicts. The consequence has been a change from an organization with relatively stable values and loose couplings to an organization with more explicit confrontation between agents with different values.

The development of the Danish upper secondary school may be interpreted as a movement from a “multicultural” school (we are different but we do not interfere with each other) school to a school where the “monocultural” idea of shared values and one and only one – often leader-initiated – direction is fighting with the idea of an “intercultural” school (we are different, but we interfere with each other, and this interaction is necessary for both school and teacher development). And with the multicultural tradition as a latent thread to both ideas.

In teacher and leader reflections on team work in relation to organization, subject teaching and teacher collaboration in team, these three ideas are present with consequences for both organizational discourse and practice. In addition the process of reform and structural change lead to changes in interaction between teachers also to changes between teachers and leaders. They have different attitudes to identify with the discourse of change. Teachers belong to a profession and a tradition, which is not in the same degree the case for leaders. The idea of a school leader has changed from the primus inter pares to the professional leader.

Research question:

How do teachers’ different didactical values affect their attitude towards teamwork and organizational development?

How do leaders handle this process of change and what are the managerial implications of diversity towards teaching and learning?

Teachers’ create their values towards teaching and education from various sources. They are influenced by the “doxa” of their scientific field or discipline from their university studies, from their socialization into an organizational culture based on everyday interaction with colleges and students. The outcome of the relation between the individual teacher and these contexts create a diversity of positions. We will analyze three exemplary and illustrative positions from our quantitative findings. The individual oriented objectivists find that student must acquire existing knowledge during an individual process. Social oriented constructivists’ holds that students may learn to create new knowledge during shared learning processes. Both-and oriented pragmatists are located in between. They emphasize individual and social as well as reproductive and productive ways of learning. We have compared these didactical values with teachers’ attitudes towards team collaboration and in our paper we will present the main results from the studies, which seem to be quite significant, and relate them to our theoretical framework as mentioned above.

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