Using critical incidents to understand school cultures

Abstract

This paper addresses the need to find new ways of examining workplace cultures quickly and effectively, in order to facilitate school improvement. Emphasising the importance of school culture, it illustrates how critical incidents can be analysed so as to help teachers to understand the factors which shape their practice. It is argued that the proposed method has the potential to go beyond systems of external monitoring, in such a way as to enable schools to develop procedures for self-review