ABSTRACT
Strategies are ways of achieving goals and of adapting to constraints. They are a basic concern within interactionist studies of teaching, for they focus attention upon teachers' interests and their construction of action within the constraints imposed by the context of teaching. A prominent survival strategy is to work for good relations with the pupils, mellowing the inherent conflict, increasing the pupils' sense of obligation, and reducing their desire to cause trouble. Pupils with their own survival problem might try to increase their benefits by playing off one teacher against another, so it can promote instability. Losing free periods can be quite traumatic, for survival becomes that bit harder; it can be very much harder if, in exchange for an idyllic 'free', one is confronted by somebody else's extreme survival problem—a 'bad' form in 'bad' circumstances. Many new courses and styles of teaching that have come into vogue since the Newsom Report are characterized by a large amount of absence.
