Running Head: USING SNA TO STUDY TEACHER LEARNING
Using Social Network Analysis to Study How Collegial Interactions Can Augment Teacher Learning from External ProfessionalDevelopment
William R. Penuel
University of Colorado
Min Sun
Virginia Tech
Kenneth A. Frank
Michigan State University
H. Alix Gallagher
SRI International
Number of words: 8,949 (10,988 with references)
Abstract
This paper presents an analysis showing how collegial interactions can augment the mechanism of teachers’ learning from professional development. The analysis relies on social network data and self-reports of writing instructional practices from teachers in 20 different schools that were part of a longitudinal study of the National Writing Project’s partnership activities. The results indicate that organized professional development and interactions with colleagues who gained instructional expertise from participating in prior professional development were both associated with the extent to which teachers changed their writing processes instruction. Furthermore, the effects of professional development varied by teachers’ baseline practices. The study illustrates the potential for using data on teachers’ social networks to investigate indirect effects of professional development and the variation in professional development effects associated with different initial levels of expertise.
A consensus—backed by a growing body of evidence from well-designed studies—has emerged about features of professional development that can change teacher knowledge and practice. Specifically, research has found that professional development can enhance teacher knowledge and improve instructional practice when it is sustained over time, focuses on enhancing the knowledge and skill needed to teach in specific content areas, employs active learning strategies in which teachers practice new pedagogical skills and receive feedback from others, and creates opportunities for collaborative learning from peers (Desimone, Porter, Garet, Yoon, & Birman, 2002). Professional development with these characteristics can also support better curriculum implementation (Penuel, Fishman, Yamaguchi, & Gallagher, 2007) and enhanced student learning (Penuel, Gallagher, & Moorthy, 2011; Saxe, Gearhart, & Nasir, 2001).
A separate body of research has focused on teacher learning from collegial interactions. This research has explored the conditions under which teachers within schools form professional learning communities that enable teachers to reflect on and improve their practice (Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006). Case analyses have illuminated the critical conditions for forming such communities including a shared goal for improvement (Scribner, Sawyer, Watson, & Myers, 2007), a commitment to opening up one’s practice to others (Little, 2002), and strong alignment between the formal or designed social organization of schools and the actual pattern of collegial ties (Bidwell & Yasumoto, 1997). These conditions in turn enable teachers to reconstruct their practice through repeated interactions around artifacts and representations of teaching practice and student thinking (Kazemi & Franke, 2004; Little, 2003), opportunities to observe one another engaged in the act of teaching (Lewis, Perry, & Murata, 2006), and routines for scaffolding interactions about teaching (Horn & Little, 2010).
In recent years, researchers have used quantitative techniques to analyze the effects of professional development and collegial interactions on teacher practice as indicators of what teachers can learn from professional development. Quantitative studies of professional development have yielded useful insights into a number of correlates of effective professional development. One such correlate is co-participation in professional development with colleagues, as reported by teachers (e.g., Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001).Although this approach can and has shown that participating with peers is a correlate of effective professional development, it offers little insight into how collegial interactions might matter for teacher learning. Social network analysis offers one approach to studying such processes, and a number of researchers have begun to use social network data to model the conditions under which collegial interactions can influence teachers’ instructional practices (e.g., Penuel, Frank, & Krause, 2011). In particular, models fit to social network data can estimate the social influence of particular colleagues on one another’s practice; when coupled with data on these colleagues’ expertise, researchers can gain insight into the effects of particular interactions on practice.
In this study, we use some techniques of social network analysis to model how teachers’ informal collegial interactions can augment the effects of organized professional development activities.The context for the study is a national evaluation of partnership activities within the National Writing Project (NWP), an infrastructure for instructional improvement focused on writing instruction. In the partnerships studied, leaders in Local Writing Project (LWP) sites and schools co-designed and led professional development that had a common content focus (writing), but they employed a wide range of strategies for reaching and supporting teachers and varied in their duration. We used this variation in exposure to professional development within schools to study how professional development could be augmented by collegial interactions, as well as how this mechanism worked differently for different groups of teachers, by drawing upon social network data and self-report data on instructional practice collected from annual surveys over the course of the first three years of the study.
Theoretical Background
Teacher Learning in Organized Professional Development
There is a growing body of evidence to support what Ball and Cohen (1999) call a “practice-focused” theory of teacher learning and development. This theory situates the learning needs of teachers within the kinds of teaching practices policy makers seek to promote. It posits strategies for making practice the focus of organized professional development activities and the object of ongoing investigations, so that learning becomes fully embedded within teachers’ everyday work. In short, it seeks to maximize teachers’ learning about, in, and through reflection on practice.
One practice-focused strategy of organized professional development for which there is strong evidence is to provide teachers with a sustained focus on a particular content area. In their study of mathematics reform in California in the late 1990s, Cohen and Hill (2001) found that teachers who were able to reconstruct their practice to align with the principles of new professional standards for mathematics teaching were ones who had participated in content-focused professional development on how to implement so-called “replacement units” that reflected the standards. By contrast, teachers who participated in professional development focused on instructional strategies not linked to specific content or who had limited exposure to professional development changed their practice very little. A number of subsequent studies, including nationally representative surveys of teachers and experimental evaluations of professional development, have found evidence of a link between content-focused professional development of an extended duration and changes to teachers’ practice (e.g., Desimone, et al., 2002; Penuel & Gallagher, 2009).
A sustained focus on the content of target practices is critical because teachers interpret new reforms through both their initial teacher preparation and prior waves of reform to which they have been exposed (Coburn, 2004; Spillane & Zeuli, 1999). Often there are gaps between teachers’ current practices and target practices of reforms (Blumenfeld, Fishman, Krajcik, Marx, & Soloway, 2000; Cohen & Hill, 2001). If that gap is too large, teachers are likely to fall back on older practices or assimilate new frameworks into how they talk about teaching without making significant changes to what they do in the classroom (Spillane & Zeuli, 1999). A sustained focus on target practices in a content area that draws attention to differences and similarities between current and target practices may help to increase the chance that teachers will make changes to practices rather than assimilate frameworks into existing practices (Coburn, 2004).
Beyond focusing on teacher practices, professional development that employs “active learning” strategies can support teachers in making changes to their practice. Like other learners, teachers learn best when they have the opportunity to construct knowledge using new tools for thinking and to reflect on and revise their ideas (Darling-Hammond, Bransford, LePage, & Hammerness, 2005). Strategies that have proven successful in providing such opportunities include giving teachers a chance to try out new practices outside the crucible of the classroom, such as in extended workshops and retreats (Lieberman & Wood, 2001, 2003), to experiment with new approaches to teaching familiar content and to receive task-focused feedback from peers and coaches (Coe, 1998; Vaughn & Coleman, 2004), and to develop an understanding of students’ problematic ideas with respect to specific subject matter by looking at artifacts of student thinking (Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, Chiang, & Loef, 1989; Cohen & Hill, 2001). Research provides evidence that the more of these strategies that professional development activities employ, the greater the observed change to teachers’ practice (Garet, et al., 2001; Penuel, et al., 2007).
Teacher Learning in School-based Professional Learning Communities
Some organizational conditions in schools promote teacher learning in ways that are distinct from externally delivered professional development activities. For example, many schools seek to cultivate school-based professional learning communities(Grossman, et al., 2001; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006). Leaders and faculty members in such schools seek to establish norms that break down the historical isolation of teachers from one another and of individualism and privacy that are well-documented in the sociology of teaching literature (Hargreaves, 1993; Ingersoll, 2003; Lortie, 1975). These school faculties seek to instantiate Ball and Cohen’s (1999) theory of “practice-focused” professional education within workplace practices so as to enable teachers—through their collegial interactions about instruction with others—to reconstruct their practices to align with goals for school-wide reform.
Under certain conditions, a number of these efforts can be successful, as case study researchers have documented. One such condition is that leaders set a clear and focused purpose for teachers with respect to instructional improvements. When particular teams of teachers receive or co-construct with leaders a charter for their work, their work together to improve practice produces a common sense of purpose to use as a benchmark for progress (Kaufman & Stein, 2010; Scribner, et al., 2007). Another condition is that teachers must be willing to open their practice to scrutiny by colleagues (Little, 2002). This involves representing their practice to others, so that the ordinarily “small horizon” of practice in view of colleagues becomes bigger, and thus open to personal and collective reflection and critique(Little, 2003). It also involves a willingness to take an inquiry stance toward one’s own teaching and to engage productively but critically with difference and conflict among faculty members with respect to views about teaching (Achinstein, 2002; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Grossman, et al., 2001). A third important organizational condition for professional community is cohesion among the faculty. Interactions among cohesive faculty, in which there is a high level of relational trust and where there are strong, positive collegial ties that link teachers across the school, can communicate the knowledge and norms necessary to support teachers to change practices (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Penuel, Riel, Krause, & Frank, 2009).
These organizational conditions both enable and are cultivated through particular social practices that support teacher learning in their schools (Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010). Of central importance are routines and protocols that scaffold deep conversations among teachers about their practices (Horn & Little, 2010; Kazemi & Franke, 2004; Little, 2003). First, protocols for looking at student work together or examining practice can provide a safe context for opening up and representing one’s practice to others and thus facilitate teachers’ willingness to experiment with new practices (Curry, Gearhart, Kafka, & Little, 2003; Little & Curry, 2008). Second, the analysis of common artifacts, anchored to lessons or samples of student work, can also help teachers come to appreciate multiple approaches to teaching content and the plausibility of drawing different inferences about what students know and can do (Ryken, 2009). Conversations anchored in practice can help teachers problematize their own practice and appreciate the need for re-examining their own knowledge and the frames of reference they bring to teaching (Herbel-Eisenman & Phillips, 2008; Smylie, 1996).
Using Social Network Analysis to Model Teacher Learning from Professional Development and Collegial Interaction
Few researchers have sought to develop theoretical accounts of or test models that focus on how teacher learning from organized professional development and collegial interaction relate to one another. Addressing this gap is important, because both forms of teacher learning have limitations. In practice, external professional development rarely proves sufficient for making significant changes to individual teachers’ practice or to the culture of teaching in schools (Fullan, 2007; Garet et al., 2011); One reason is that teachers have limited access to high quality professional development (Wei, Darling-Hammond, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009). The costs of sustained, content-focused professional development are high, and continuous changes to teachers’ assignments can render content-focused professional development received as part of a previous assignment relatively useless for teachers in their new assignment (Shear & Penuel, 2010). Furthermore, even when teachers do have access to high quality professional development, organizational conditions in schools and districts can limit teachers’ opportunities to experiment with new practices in their classrooms or engage in deep conversations with colleagues about problems they face in implementing new practices (Bryk, et al., 2010; Coburn & Russell, 2008; Gallucci, 2008; Stein & Coburn, 2008).
Some research suggests that interactions among colleagues can sustain the effects of professional development, either when they come to their intended conclusion or because funding or new policies limit teachers’ access to activities. For example, a follow-up study of the successful Cognitively Guided Instruction professional program for elementary mathematics teachers found that in schools where teachers continued to talk together about student thinking in mathematics as part of teacher teams in their schools, they were able to sustain improvements to their practices (Franke, Carpenter, Levi, & Fennema, 2001). In a different context—in which policy shifts reduced the availability of professional development available to teachers, some schools were able to sustain ongoing teacher learning opportunities when there were a high number of content-focused teachers in a school, and when teachers share a common vision for instructional practice (Kaufman & Stein, 2010). These studies, however, did not examine how professional learning communities might shape the effects of ongoing formal professional development.
Our own conjecture, derived in part from our own past research, is that frequent collegial interactions focused on instructional matters related to the content of professional development can augment the effects of that professional development. In contrast to past studies that have focused either on formal professional development or learning in teacher professional communities, the studies from which we derive this conjecture combine data on teachers’ social networks with data on their exposure to professional development. We then model changes to teachers’ instructional practicesas a function of teachers’ exposure to colleagues’ expertise through social interaction and their participation in professional development.
The type of social network model we fit to our data is particularly well suited for our purposes. Social influence models analyze the attributes of people as a function of relations in a social network (Frank, 1998; Friedkin & Johnsen, 1990; Marsden & Friedkin, 1994). Such models presume that the attributes measured at the end of a particular time period (“outputs”) are a function of individual and group characteristics at the beginning of that period (“inputs”), plus social interactions that happen in between (Friedkin & Johnsen, 1990). Social influence operates through many different kinds of mechanisms, but one of the most important ones and the one that is the focus of our study is information seeking(Anderson, 1971; Burt, 1992; Granovetter, 1973). People can exert social influence over others when they have information or expertise that another person seeks; the exchange of this information often results in the seeker aligning their attitudes with the provider of help or acquiring knowledge that allows the seeker to do something the provider can already do but that the seeker needs to learn(Brown & Duguid, 1991; Tyre & von Hippel, 1997).
An example of a social influence model in education is presented in Frank and colleagues’(Frank, Zhao, & Borman, 2004) analysis of the diffusion of technology use in six schools. In that analysis, researchers modeled technology integration as a function of teachers’ access to expertise through collegial interaction and social pressure. The researchers’ models considered both the capability of collegial providers of help regarding integration (as indicated by the number of people who nominated them as helpful) and their expertise (as indicated by self-reports of technology integration in their helpers’ classrooms).
Social influence models provide insights that are distinct from other kinds of quantitative analyses of the context of teaching and from qualitative studies of collegial interactions and their effects on teacher learning. Many quantitative studies of the context of teaching focus on survey scales that ask teachers to report on the school as a whole (e.g., Lee & Smith, 1996). Such approaches do not consider the ways such perceptions might be a function of social selection, social influence, or both; furthermore, they provide little insight into the social structure of interactions through which social influence operates (Maroulis & Gomez, 2008). Qualitative studies often provide rich detail on social interactions and can trace well the conditions under which such interactions produce significant changes to teachers’ practices in and related to the classroom (Horn, 2010). At the same time, such studies necessarily focus on subgroups or teams of teachers, because data collection requires intensive effort be focused on a few participants. Collecting and analyzing social network data sacrifices the depth of such analysis for an increase in breadth and comprehensiveness: models fit to the data enable researchers to draw inferences about how the social structure and composition of school communities as a whole influence teachers’ attitudes and instructional practices.