Previous qualitative studies show that when the formal organization of a school and patterns of informal interaction are aligned, faculty and leaders in a school are better able to coordinate instructional change. This article combines social network analysis with interview data to analyze how well the formal and informal aspects of a school’s social context are aligned. The focus is on two elementary schools engaged in initiatives aimed to use data to inform instructional decision making. The multimethod case study integrated findings from questionnaire and interview data. Data were collected over two years from case study schools. By fitting multilevel social selection models to longitudinal social network data collected from surveys, the authors estimated the relative influence of formal and informal processes on patterns of advice giving in each school. They used interview data to contextualize and corroborate findings. The social selection models they fit revealed distinct patterns in each school that helped explain why one school had been successful in developing a shared vision for change and a second school had been unsuccessful. The authors’ research shows that efforts to promote formal collaboration can and do vary in their success in ways that are evident from social network analyses. These case studies imply directions for future analyses of the social context of teaching and schools.

Audience considerations play an important role in the development of text by experienced writers but are often nonexistent in the writing of school-age children. The lack of audience awareness found in school writing may index the slow development of the social-cognitive skills necessary to conceptualize different audiences or it may result from the decontextual approach to writing that is prevalent in classrooms. This study examined the quality of students’ writing in two audience conditions: to their teacher for a term assessment and to a distant peer audience to share ideas. Seventh-grade students wrote two compositions on the same topic, one addressed to peers in other countries via a computer network and the other to their teacher for their semester grade, counterbalanced for order effects. In both conditions, there was significantly higher ratings of the papers written to communicate with peers than those written to demonstrate skill in writing. The findings suggest that the development of functional writing environments to contextualize students’ work can lead to improvements in the quality of students’ classroom writing.

Background/Context Researchers have proposed a number of lenses for analyzing teacher professional communities in recent years. These lenses have been useful in describing key dynamics of professional communities; however, none provides a compelling approach to how to integrate data from the school as a whole with case study data on individual interactions to create a coherent account of the structure and dynamics of teacher professional communities. Objective Our objective was to present and illustrate the application of social capital theory for analyzing the role of formal and informal teacher interactions in helping teachers enact changes to instruction associated with ambitious school reforms. Social capital theory posits that valued resources and expertise are embedded within social networks and that it is through social ties that one gains access to and can make use of resources to effect change. The network perspective directs researchers to focus simultaneously on the overall social structure of a school and on the expertise and resources exchanged through interactions among teachers that take place in meetings, staff rooms, hallways, and classrooms. Setting Our illustrations are contrasting cases of teacher communities in two elementary schools in California. In both school communities, the principals were committed to the idea of fostering greater interaction among colleagues as a strategy to improve literacy instruction. Both schools had similar levels of resources to support their goals through external funding from the state, but the schools had had different levels of success in implementing their reforms at the time of the study. Research Design We used an explanatory case study methodology that relied on social network, survey, and interview methods as sources of evidence for several alternative hypotheses relating to how the distribution of resources and expertise may have contributed to these schools’ different levels of success in implementing their reforms. Conclusions/Recommendations The comparative case analysis of the two schools provided evidence that analyzing the internal structure of the school community was necessary to help account for the distribution of access to resources and expertise in these two schools. Moreover, there was some evidence from survey and network data that the distribution of valued resources and expertise was related to the level of change observed in each school.

This paper is about networking failures as well as networking successes. A research strategy for comparing educational activities conducted across electronic networks was employed to examine the critical features of successes as well as failures in designing electronic communities. The analysis provides a set of guidelines for those who plan to use telecommunications as a tool for creating global communities.