This paper presents an analysis of the informal advice networks of a community of teachers in an in-service professional development program. The aim of the research was to use Social Network Analysis as a methodological tool to reveal the social networks developed by the teachers, and to examine whether these networks maximized teachers’ access to practitioner-based social capital. Preliminary findings indicate that teachers did not naturally build advice networks that would cultivate the highest levels of practitioner-based social capital. These findings present information that program facilitators can use strategically to foster teacher collaboration and learning. Further, it offers new possibilities and directions a for social network research on teachers’ learning communities in interpreting and understanding the dynamics of teacher networking.

Teacher networks have been shown to provide, flexible, ongoing professional support, and be important sources of teacher knowledge (Lieberman, 2000). Despite the apparent value of developing networks and professional communities, until very recently, there have been few studies that investigate the dynamics of teachers’ informal networking and how they impact teacher participation in professional development programs (James, McCormick, & Pedder, 2003). Our research aims to use Social Network Analysis as a methodological tool to understand teachers’ participation in a STEM professional development program, which seeks to build sustainability through professional networking.

In this study, we explore two questions about the teacher interactions. First, within the professional development group of teacher participants, to what extent did teachers’ informal advice networks afford access to practitioner-based social capital? We define practitioner-based social capital as the ability to access knowledge and resources for teaching practice through a social network. Our second question is, how might we use this information to evaluate or restructure participation formats in the program to maximize opportunities for building practitioner-based social capital? Thus, our goal is to develop an analytic tool and framework for revealing teachers’ informal social networking activities in professional development programs and the practitioner-based social capital opportunities in the group, in order to facilitate the development of such social capital for greater program sustainability through the teachers’ networks.

 

This work is part of a comprehensive large-scale NSF-funded project under the program title Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST). The ITEST program is designed to increase opportunities for students and teachers in underserved schools to learn and apply information technology concepts and skills in the STEM content areas (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). For this study, we focus on participants in a three-week 75-hour teacher professional development summer workshop.

Ten females and six males with a range of ethnicities participated in the workshop from 10 high schools and 1 middle school in the district. Courses taught ranged from grades 8 – 12 in science content areas. The average number of teaching years was 15.8 with a range of 1 to 39 years of experience.

Participants completed a series of four social network surveys over the course of the summer workshop (about one survey per week). The social network surveys required participants to identify the persons they sought advice from in the group since completing the previous survey, and, for each person listed, characterize the main reason(s) for their choices. Participants also described how well they knew the other participants in the program, and the type of relationship they had or were forming (collegial, mentor, mentee, friendship, or other).  

In addition to SNA surveys, other data sources were used to triangulate results drawn from the SNA surveys which included, pre-and-post program surveys that focused on teacher experience and content knowledge, researcher field notes, anecdotal observations, informal teacher-research conversations, and participant contributions on the project’s Google Groups database which was primarily for sharing information with the community, both research-led and peer-to-peer.

We sought to compare the characteristics of the participants with the highest in-degree advice-network measures (those individuals that participants most frequently sought for advice) with the participants who afforded the highest potential for access to practitioner-based social capital in the group. The in-degree advice measures were calculated by the number of times an individual had been sought for advice by another in the group.

            The practitioner-based social capital access measure was determined by a categorical framework that ranked individuals based on their content knowledge and their mentoring qualities. The content knowledge ranking was informed by: number of years of experience, formal leadership role within their school, amount of content knowledge as determined by kind(s) of post-secondary degree(s), generalized vs. specialized subjects taught, workshop experience in content domain, initial understanding of content domain, and experience with education and information technologies.The advice-sharing rank was informed by: the degree to which they were characterized as “having mentorship qualities” by members of the group, the frequency of participation in online activities, and observational data. 

Participants were rank-ordered for both of these characteristics (content knowledge and mentoring qualities), and then categorized in one of four categories: High Content Knowledge (HC) and High Mentoring qualities (HM), HC and Low Mentoring qualities (LM), LM and HC, or LM and LC. A premise of our framework is that individuals in the HC/HM category would afford the highest possibility of access to knowledge and resources for teaching practice related to the program, and therefore, have the best potential for building or promoting practitioner-based social capital between group members. Detailed description of our algorithms for calculating low and high rankings will be included in our full paper.

Our preliminary findings indicated that, while teachers tended to seek more advice from individuals with high levels of content knowledge, their informal networking practices did not maximize their access to practitioner-based social capital in the group. Three individuals were identified as HC/HM, yet only one of these individuals was frequently sought by participants (see Table 1). Participants did tend to seek advice less frequently from individuals characterized as LC/LM. One factor that may also contribute to this pattern was that more than half (68.75%) of participants were ranked as having low mentorship qualities.

The HC/HM individuals had the highest levels of content knowledge and were most frequently described or observed as having mentorship qualities; these individuals have the highest potential for fostering supportive relationships and knowledge-building in the group. However, these attributes were not prominent in the advice-seeking network patterns of the group. These findings raise important questions about how to redesign and facilitate our program. In addition, they suggest that this analytic tool can help to reveal social dynamics of a group, as well as help facilitators rethink collaboration and networking practices in order to develop greater access to practitioner-based social capital. Therefore, our findings and analytic framework offer detailed insights into group participation dynamics and a unique theoretical lens that can be applied to a range of research on communities of learning.