Summer 6

Reading

Penuel, W. R., Riel, M., Krause, A., & Frank, K. A. (2009). Analyzing teachers’ professional interactions in a school as social capital: A social network approach. The Teachers College Record, 111(1), 124–163.

Background

Bill Penuel is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado. Penuel began his career at an independent research organization—SRI—studying issues related to STEM education. He is continuing this line of research, and also is investigating teacher professional development and research-practice partnerships (with Cynthia Coburn, whom we encountered last week). Margaret Reil worked with Penuel at SRI and currently directs the Center for Collaborative Action Research at Pepperdine University. Ann Krause was formerly an Assistant Professor of Ecology at the University of Toledo, but she recently left that career to make hand-crafted boots and shoes (not all professors love their jobs, it turns out 🙂).

Ken Frank is a Professor of Measurement and Quantitative Methods at Michigan State University. He is affiliated with the College of Education and the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. These disparate affiliations reflect his orientation as a quantitative sociologist, able to apply the tools of social network analysis, for example, to a wide range of problems. Frank’s current studies include the effects of the Michigan Merit Curriculum on educational outcomes and the diffusion of knowledge about climate change.

In this article, Penuel, Riel, Krause, and Frank explore the role of social capital in relation to reforming literacy instruction in elementary schools. They utilize the tools of social network analysis, as well as surveys and interviews, yielding a “mixed methods” study. You can skim some of the Methodology section.

Questions

1. The authors describe four benefits to analyzing social networks (starting on p. 129).

1. List these benefits.

2. Choose one of the benefits that you think would be the most useful to you as a school or school system leader. Explain why.

2. The authors measured perceptions of trust and collective responsibility (p. 136). Last week we discussed the challenges associated with measuring complex dimensions such as these.

1. Discuss why measuring these perceptions is important.

2. Describe how they measured these perceptions.

3. Discuss potential challenges with interpreting these perceptions.

3. Drawing on the Results section, create a table comparing similarities and differences at Crosswinds and Glade, across multiple dimensions. Add a column for your current school as well, hypothesizing on how it might compare across the dimensions in your table.

4. Extra Credit: Find the typo in one of the headings.

Reading

Daly, A. J., Liou, Y.-H., Tran, N. A., Cornelissen, F., & Park, V. (2014). The rise of neurotics: Social networks, leadership, and efficacy in district reform. Educational Administration Quarterly, 50(2), 233–278.

Background

Alan Daly is a professor in the department of Education Studies at UC San Diego. Prior to his academic career, he was a teacher, counselor, and middle school principal in California. His practitioner experience has enabled him to adroitly identify key social problems in education. In particular, Daly and his team have been instrumental in popularizing the use of social network analysis in education.

This paper builds on others’ work regarding the identification of social patterns in schools and school systems. Daly and colleagues examine relationships between leaders’ advice seeking (reminiscent of Blau), personality traits and perceptions of efficacy.

This paper is quite long. Read carefully the first two pages of introductory material, skim some of the sections on social network theory and personality traits. Review the hypotheses closely—do they make intuitive sense? You can skim some of the Methods also. Read the “The Relationships Between…” sections and the Discussion for the main findings.

Questions

5. How do the authors motivate the paper; i.e., why do they think studying this is important?

6. Choose one of the “The Relationships Between…” sections. Briefly summarize the findings and provide an example where this applies in your own organization.

7. Review Table 6 (p. 259). Choose one of the three findings that was not supported. If the hypotheses seemed intuitively reasonable, how might you explain why it was not supported?

8. Bonus: “The model was significant in explaining 56% of the variance in advice out-closeness.” What does this mean?