ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the author's experience to conceptualize why classrooms are so complex. The author's hope was to provide the evidence that teachers must be included somehow with researchers if school improvement was the goal. Isolation does many things for teachers. On the positive side, we can try all kinds of things that might look strange to an outsider. If we are open to learning, teaching is an incredible way to connect not only to our students' learning, but to our own. All these things that we come to realize about elementary teaching and the tensions that arise in the process make engaging in improvement conditional on the social context of the school. Both national and local issues and concerns affect the school. The secondary school is more complicated, more bureaucratic and much more difficult to negotiate. But besides dealing with adolescence, teachers in secondary school must figure out how they will deal with the faculty culture of the school.
