This study examined an urban district's capacity to diffuse instructional innovations. Social network analysis (SNA) was used to examine the relationship between "informal" teacher support networks and "formal" teacher support networks engineered by administrators through required membership on a team. This study also sought to uncover how school leaders considered study findings in light of their district's theory of change to improve teacher collaboration. Method: About 1,100 employees responded to a sociometric survey that queried for demographics, team membership, and advice-seeking behavior. SNA methods were used to examine network cohesion (i.e., size, density, isolates, ties) and degree centrality. Statistical analyses (chi-square and multinomial logistic regressions) were performed to examine how team membership were associated with teachers' advice-seeking behaviors. Visual inspection of sociograms was used to communicate and make meaning of findings with district personnel. Findings: The majority of teachers' informal instructional support ties were concomitant with shared membership on an administrator created formal
Teacher collaboration is a vital factor in successful school reform, and the networks in which educators are embedded support (or constrain) access to essential social capital resources. In this study, authors used social network analysis to examine the changing structure of teacher collaboration networks over the course of a rural District’s 3-year Professional Learning Community (PLC) initiative. Visual depictions (sociograms) of district- and school-level teacher collaboration networks were generated, and measures of network cohesion – including size, density, connectedness, components, and degree – were calculated at three points in time. Authors worked in partnership with district administrators to explore how location of teachers and principals, and network capacity for diffusion of innovation, changed over time. School leaders may not know how to purposefully influence communication ties between teachers, relying instead on the invisible web of personal affiliations through which professional opinions travel. This study contributes to the field’s understanding of how administrator choices about organizational structure affect “cross-pollination” and the networks through which teachers are able to access and contribute the knowledge and ideas they need in order to deliver high-quality curriculum and instruction to all students.
Educational evaluation (Ed Eval) and professional learning communities (PLCs) are two of the nation’s most predominant approaches to widespread instructional improvement. Yet key attributes of these reform initiatives are too often experienced by teachers as burdensome, or even detrimental, rather than helpful. The authors of this article contend that school leaders will be more successful in their school improvement efforts when they integrate the most promising elements of PLCs (disciplined collaboration, deprivatization of practice, and classroom-based assessment) and Ed Eval (use of professional performance standards, observation and feedback, and a focus on results) into a tiered system of job-embedded professional development. The authors articulate the promises and pitfalls of Ed Eval and PLCs and reenvision how they could be integrated into a system through which subpar teaching is systemically addressed, acceptable teaching is improved upon, and outstanding teaching is sustained and replicated. The authors showcase elements of integrated system using vignettes based on the experiences of an actual high school-level English language arts teacher team.
In this NSF CSforALL funded research study, the authors sought to understand the extent to which an urban district's teacher instructional support network enabled or constrained capacity to implement and diffuse Digital Literacy and Computer Science (DLCS) instructional practices throughout the K-12 curriculum. Social network analysis was used to investigate informal teacher advice-seeking and advice-giving patterns of DLCS support. Network measures of cohesion and centrality were computed. Findings revealed that DLCS-focused teacher support networks tend to exhibit very low density, have relatively few ties, include a high number of isolates (teachers with no connections), and centralize around a particular actor. In addition, a low level of overlap was found between DLCS networks and primary instructional networks. Overall, study findings suggest that teacher networks are not well-structured to support the flow of DLCS advice and support. The authors conclude that examining and strengthening teacher networks of instructional support may be a crucial step for educational leaders concerned with school improvement and the diffusion of DLCS curricula in US schools.
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