The ‘New’ Science of Networks and the Challenge of School Change

To promote effective teacher collaboration, school leaders must examine all the social networks already in place and must ensure that expertise and other social resources are available at multiple levels in the school community. ********** WHAT DO finding a job, finding others who share an interest in quilting, getting medical advice, and improving teaching and learning have in common? All of these actions require individuals to draw on information or expertise through their ties to others in social networks. The study of people's social ties, the resources they obtain from them, and the communication tools--such as the Internet--that facilitate the flow of expertise and resources makes up an evolving science of networks that can help us better understand how to support and promote school change. The science of networks is not new in itself, but its application to the functioning of schools is. Sociologists have used mathematical methods for analyzing social networks since the 1960s and 1970s to study how people use social ties to find information, resources, and even other people to help them accomplish their goals. (1) Some of the earliest diagrams made of social networks concerned relationships among students. (2) More recently, researchers have begun to use social network analysis to analyze school leadership, teacher communities, and the diffusion of innovations in schools. And it turns out that--as in other domains--networks matter for school change. A social network refers to a set of people and the relationships among them. Sometimes these relationships are concentrated in small subgroups, and the larger network can be described in terms of the connections between subgroups. (3) So we can describe a school as a network that is composed of a set of subgroups, such as grade-level or subject-area teachers, students arranged by different grade levels, and smaller cliques of students within those grade levels. A network analysis then helps us understand how expertise, information, and resources flow from person to person and from subgroup to subgroup in the social structure. In teacher networks--the focus of this article and of our own research--the kinds of information and resources that circulate include ideas about teaching, learning, and assessment; talk about how to coordinate different school activities; stories of students and their successes and difficulties; strategies for managing learning in groups; tips for how to use technology; and views on administrators and administration. Some of this information is potentially of great use in facilitating school change, as when a teacher shares an idea about how to use a particular strategy for teaching writing in the classroom or demonstrates a method of assessment for a colleague. Of course, not all interactions facilitate school change. Talk about students can degenerate into gossip that leads to undeserved student reputations. Talk about certain teachers can isolate them. Talk about the administration can undercut the authority of particular reform goals. Setting up more frequent and regular meetings in which teachers talk about practice is a common strategy schools use for improving teaching, but it doesn't always work. Two important questions that the science of networks can help answer are When does teacher collaboration lead to school change? and What are the forces that increase or restrict the flow of information and expertise among members of a teaching community? As part of a study funded by the National Science Foundation, a group of researchers at SRI International, Michigan State University, and Pennsylvania State University set out to answer these questions. We used social network analysis and a longitudinal design to identify patterns of collaboration and sharing of expertise among teachers that led to self-reported changes in practice. We focused our research on 23 schools in California. …