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This case study tells the story of an in-service elementary physical education teacher, who made a large-scale change from an activities approach to a movement approach based, initially, on “Every Child a Winner” (Rockett & Owens, 1977). Five psychological dispositions facilitated the development of the teacher’s knowledge: (a) the disposition to understand the approach accurately and deeply and to do the job right, (b) the disposition to accept that the approach was difficult to learn and to persist in seeking clarification, (c) the disposition to justify and develop a practice in keeping with a sound educational philosophy and theoretical foundations, (d) the disposition toward change and to learn and implement new ideas, and (e) the disposition to suspend judgment of new ideas. Dispositions can be important aspects of teacher thinking and can help to explain successful knowledge development and teacher change.

This interpretive case study describes five norms of the school culture that facilitated a teacher’s (the second author) adoption and learning of a constructivist approach to physical education. The second author used a movement approach initially based on Every Child a Winner. The first author conducted field observations at the elementary school across 3 years and formal interviews and numerous informal interviews each day of field work with teachers, principals, staff, and children. The five norms or set of norms were (a) the set of norms defining the school philosophy, (b) teacher learning, (c) teacher participatory power and responsibility, (d) continual school improvement, and (e) the tendency “to feel that we can do anything.” The paper describes how the norms influenced the physical educator and the physical educators’ role in creating and maintaining the norms.

Within the past 10 years there have been an increasing number of calls for collaboration between researchers and teachers. A small but growing body of literature has begun to study the collaborative process. The purpose of this study was to examine the collaborative research process between an elementary physical educator (the second author) and a university researcher (the first author) and to describe what the process meant to each during our longterm collaboration. The study examines the effect of collaboration on both teacher and researcher. Standard participant observation methods with an autobiographical component were used. Two major themes captured the meanings of the collaborative research process: shared privilege and shared empowerment. These themes are discussed in relation to the research and literature on collaborative research.