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Collaboration is a widely utilized strategy for addressing complex social issues and for facilitating organizational innovation and performance. Evaluators are uniquely positioned to empirically examine the development and effects of interagency and interprofessional collaboration. In this article, the authors present the Collaboration Evaluation and Improvement Framework (CEIF), an extension of earlier work in collaboration theory development. The CEIF identifies five points of entry to evaluating collaborations and suggests actions that evaluators can take to (a) define and describe the evaluand of collaboration, (b) measure the attributes of organizational collaboration over time, and (c) increase stakeholder capacity to engage in efficient and effective collaborative practices. Use of the CEIF to operationalize and assess the construct of collaboration can enable the evaluator to ascertain how collaborative efforts correlate with indicators of organizational impact and outcomes.

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

Professional learning communities (PLCs) have emerged as one of the nation’s most widely implemented strategies for improving instruction and PK–12 student learning outcomes. PLCs are predicated on the principles of improvement science, a type of evidenced-based collective inquiry that aims to bridge the research–practice divide and increase organizational capacity to solve pressing problems of practice. In this article, the Teacher Collaboration Assessment Rubric (TCAR) is presented in which the evidenced-based attributes of rigorous PK–12 PLCs are operationalized. The author describes how the TCAR has been used for developmental, formative, and outcome evaluation purposes in PK–12 settings. The value of the TCAR and the evaluation of PLCs in other complex organizational systems such as health care and the sciences are also discussed. PLC evaluation can help teams to focus on improvement and to avoid “collaboration lite” whereby congeniality and imprecise conversation are confused with the disciplined professional inquiry vital to organizational improvement.

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.