Teachers’ professional collaboration and trust relationships: An inferential social network analysis of teacher teams

In recent years, teachers around the world have been increasingly confronted with various expectations concerning the improvement of their classroom practices and school activities. One factor widely acknowledged to facilitate school and classroom improvement is a strong collaborative culture among teachers. As such, teachers are expected to work in teacher teams, to collaborate closely with colleagues, to co-construct classroom practices, and thus to strengthen trust relationships within the team. A growing number of researchers has analyzed how teachers address these expectations. They suggest that there is a link between teachers’ embeddedness in collaboration networks and teachers’ trust relationships. The present study seeks to contribute to the research literature by presenting results of Social Network Analyses (SNA) and exponential random graph models (ERGMs) on teacher collaboration in nine secondary schools in Germany (N = 366 teachers). We investigate how the involvement of teachers in co-constructive collaboration in schools, measured by the amount of team teaching (TT), relates to teachers’ trust levels. Results of our analyses suggest that a high amount of TT is not necessarily related to a higher degree of trust among teachers at the school level. However, a high involvement of teachers in TT is related positively to their being perceived as trustworthy. Furthermore, the emergence of trust relations in teacher networks depends on general network characteristics, such as homophily, reciprocity and transitivity.