ABSTRACT
Lortie begins by briefly reviewing the history of school teaching in America. He reviews the balance of continuity and change that’s taken place in schooling over the last three centuries. By measuring how the work of teaching changed over time, and how it didn’t change, we can understand the school system and how it influenced school teaching. He then explores the context of teaching during his present day. Lortie discovers three major orientations that are shared by all teachers. However, even these are not new. They were mostly detected by Waller in the 1930s and again by Jackson in the 1960s. These orientations have been universal to the experience of schoolteachers for almost 80 years. Continuity becomes evident in these foundations, therefore, and definitive patterns now begin to become explicit for defining teacher development.
