ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the effectiveness of some of the strategies which are likely to be used when a school or, in a wider context, a local authority, attempts to persuade classroom teachers to make fundamental changes in their classroom practice. Such a change might involve, for example, a decision to adopt the kinds of teaching strategies advocated in the previous chapters to increase the proportion of collaborative group work taking place. If the research evidence is to be believed, such decisions taken in the primary school rarely lead to successful innovation. The ORACLE research of the mid1970s (Galton et al. 1980) described classrooms which were, typically, the same as those investigated by Mortimore et al. (1988) and Tizard et al. (1988). In between this period other studies, admittedly in small, mainly rural schools (Galton and Patrick 1990), also demonstrated that similar patterns of classroom organisation and of pupil-teacher interaction extended across all types of schools at both infant and junior level. Primary classroom practice seems, therefore, to have remained remarkably stable during the 1980s.
