Utilising social network approaches to determine the roles of teachers within key resource-sharing networks in schools

Downey, Christopher (2016) Utilising social network approaches to determine the roles of teachers within key resource-sharing networks in schools. International Congress on School Effectiveness and Improvement, , Glasgow, United Kingdom. 06 - 09 Jan 2016.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

This paper discusses how social network analysis (SNA) might be used to identify teachers who occupy key positions within informal resource-sharing networks in their school. For the purpose of illustrating the utility of SNA in researching resource and knowledge exchange two case study schools were selected from the researcher’s network of contacts, using a purposive approach to include a primary and a secondary phase school with outstanding track records of school improvement, indicated by outcomes in national school inspections.
Data were collected via the following methods:
i) a cross-sectional survey was conducted to elicit teachers’ interactions with colleagues working within the same school. These professional interactions within the school were related to two aspects of shared practice, namely the development of learning and teaching strategies and the use of data to evaluate student progress. Network questions were posed in such a way that they might elicit both resource-sharing and knowledge-exchange networks in each area. Data were also collected on a range of demographic factors: gender and years of teaching experience, as well as on teachers roles within the formal and explicit organisational structures of each school.
ii) semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of teachers identified through the social network analysis as being central actors within each network. This was based on measures of network centrality, such as degree centrality and betweenness centrality (Freeman, 1979), which relate to potentially different network roles such as resource sources/seekers and brokers. These interviews provided richer insights into the role such actors play in facilitating resource and knowledge exchange in the areas of data use and teaching development. Data were analysed using content analysis to identify common themes raised by the central actors in the networks.
Social network analysis (SNA) of the survey data from the case study schools revealed that resource-sharing networks related to learning and teaching correspond strongly with formal organisational structures in each school (year-group in the primary school and teacher subject specialism in the secondary school), while the resource-sharing networks facilitating exchange of student data indicated a greater degree of interaction between teachers across these formal organisational structures.
Knowledge-sharing networks associated with developing the quality of learning and teaching in each school were the most distributed in nature. Teachers allocated a formal responsibility to promote the quality of learning and teaching are those who play the most central roles in the network. By contrast the knowledge-sharing networks related to supporting the evaluation of student progress data were highly centralised, with only 2-3 teachers acting as sources of knowledge (indicated by in-degree). The most central actors in the learning and teaching networks are not the same as those teachers occupying the central positions in the data use networks. Interviews with teachers occupying these central positions in the networks suggest that knowledge-sharing about is highly centralised despite the intentions of the key actors, and that the task of disseminating and developing knowledge which facilitates data sense-making remains challenging, despite the case study schools also being examples of high performing schools.

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