Educational change initiatives can have a significant impact on district culture and can alter the ways in which teachers interact with each other.  Some initiatives focus solely on educational outcomes and ignore the importance of professional culture.  Negating the importance of culture can diminish a commitment by staff which, in turn, can affect sustainability.  Culture, however, cannot be explained as a material phenomenon.  According to Goodenough (1957), culture is not merely people, behavior or emotions, it is “the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating and otherwise interpreting them.” (p. 167).  Hargreaves has extended this definition a step further by distinguishing between content and form of teacher culture. The content of teacher culture can be seen in what teachers think, say, and do. It is “the way we do things around here”.   Content incorporates substantive attitudes, beliefs, and values of an organization or a sub-group within it.  These attitudes, beliefs, and values are what brings groups of people together or tears them apart. Often, teacher cultures are addressed from the point of view of the leader.  The principal is considered the cultural leader of the school putting teachers in a subservient role.  Hargreaves argues that if there is no shared ownership for the attitudes, beliefs, and values, sustainability will be challenged when leadership changes.   The form of teacher cultures refers to the patterns of relationships and associations among the members within that culture (Hargreaves, 1996).

This paper uses Hargreaves’ (1996) conceptions of content and form in teacher and teaching culture as a lens to interpret the changes in teachers’ professional culture as a result of a recent Ontario policy initiative that sought to support students with special education needs while also bringing benefits to all students.  The cultures of teacher and teaching provide an insight into how teachers learn what it means to teach, decide on the type of teacher they want to be, and form frameworks for professional learning (Hargreaves, 1996).  This lens is appropriate for the analysis of this new Ontario reform because professional learning communities are envisioned as a driving force for educational change in the policy document, Education for All.  Using a mixed methods approach involving site visits, qualitative interviews and an extensive survey of ten participating Ontario boards, our findings indicate that over the three year implementation period, there were significant shifts in the form and content of teachers and teaching culture.  These shifts in content and form of teacher culture were evident at the school and board levels.

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