Analyzing Teachers’ Professional Interactions in a School as Social Capital: A Social Network Approach

Abstract

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.

The Use of Social Capital in Teacher Research: A Necessary Clarification

“…Consequently, beyond the use of centrality measures and quantitative designs to analyze teachers' social capital, its antecedent and consequences, it is important to go deeper into the meaning of these interactions. Combining qualitative data such as interviews to have more details about teachers' interactions seems a promising practice to this end (Penuel et al, 2009). This combination is in line with the emerging research tradition calling for mixed methods social network analysis (Froehlich et al, 2020a).…”

“…A promising avenue to this end is to combine quantitative (quantitative social network approach) and qualitative (qualitative social network approach: Herz and Altissimo, 2021, interviews, and observation) research methods (i.e., mixed methods social network analysis). In this perspective, MMSNA is a promising area (Penuel et al, 2009).…”

Child and adolescent peer relations in educational context.

“…Children are not the only ones who have a peer ecology at school. The adults who work at the school-teachers, principals, staff-do too ( Penuel, Riel, Krause, & Frank, 2009) . Charles Payne, in his outstanding 2008 book So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools , made the point that even the best, most rigorous, and validated randomized control intervention will not be successful without appreciation of the weak social infrastructure and dysfunctional organizational environments of many urban schools.…”

The development of university teachers’ collaboration networks during a departmental professional development project

“…Collaboration has various beneficial effects. It can strengthen the connection between the formal and the enacted curriculum through enhancing teachers' collective ownership of the curriculum (Penuel et al, 2009;Voogt et al, 2016) as well as increases the acceptance, implementation, and sustainability of the educational reform (Bolander Laksov et al, 2020;Daly, Moolenaar, Bolivar, & Burke, 2010). Further, it can improve teacher well-beingthrough increased job motivation, self-efficacy beliefs, collegiality, and reduced feelings of isolation (Moolenaar et al, 2012;Vangrieken et al, 2015)-, and teachers' teaching practices, beliefs, and attitudes (Voogt et al, 2016).…”

“…In this study, we examine university teachers' collaboration networks in a professional development project from a longitudinal social network perspective. Social network analysis (SNA) can provide information on the structure of teachers' professional networks and on how the relationships can be influenced (Penuel et al, 2009). To measure network change, we surveyed teachers at the start and at the end of an eight-month professional development project that focused on community building through curriculum design activities.…”