The cultural changes influence the schools and draw attention to differences in ways of expressing ourselves both inside and outside schools. An open attitude calls for interesting conversations but the topics often go far beyond our understanding. Even within the same language the cultural differences brings up traditions and habits that origins from another region. Particularly, variations in verbal and nonverbal talk may spread an uncertainty that hold back mutual awareness and understandings of different backgrounds.

The purpose of this educational micro social investigation is to deepen the insight from a teacher perspective about how negotiations are established and how decisions are made during schoolteacher meetings. Negotiations between teachers have not been investigated very much and, how the talk and negotiations are created and established, have not been a research theme. However, these negotiations are essential and especially in teachers meetings where decisions about young peoples’ lives and future are made. Therefore, the research question is what means are used by teachers in collegial talk, as multiparty talk, for achieving attentiveness in negotiations that are established towards making decisions during schoolteachers meetings? The analytical focus for this study is following: What kind of features in the code shifts and in the speech events provide more understanding about teachers’ collegial talk? The objectives are to contrast speech events, as sequences with code shifts, for analyzing negotiations and, for expressing the results with evidence grounded in previous research and literature.

The theoretical framework relates to the phenomenological element in Bourdieu’s analysis of habitus (1979) and the phase of mutual field where teachers meet each other. Different background knowledge and subject traditions shape different ways of understanding each other. The study emphasizes the tension in these meeting points from three perspectives as an interdisciplinary approach. The first perspective approaches the meeting points from the interactional sociolinguistic with speech events and contextualization cues according to Tannen (1989; 1984) and Gumperz (2003; 1982).  The second perspective emphasizes meeting points with Goffman’s micro sociology (1981) and code shifts in the alignment to different persons. The third perspective, the educational perspective, positions the study in teacher meetings where teachers negotiate about several types of questions and themes concerning the school. The third perspective uses Hargreaves’ teacher cultures (2003; 1998) and the orientation to individualistic or collaborative tendencies. The interdisciplinary approach examines concepts from these different disciplines. Therefore, the complexity is critically looked as eclectic where the most problematic is to draw solutions from interpretations of verbal and nonverbal communication. However, the multidisciplinary approach highlights also the problematic with a more restricted perspective that brings a narrow look at collegial talk and multiparty talk. Finally, the study observes collegial talk from both micro, meso and macro level. The levels are then considered to reveal features of the phenomena as code shift on the micro level and relate these features to teacher cultures and to educational systems on the meso and macro level.

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