Worldwide, a shift has taken place from segregated to inclusive education (Banks et. al., 2007).  A pivotal factor in realizing inclusive learning environments is teacher collaboration (King-Sears, Janney & Snell, 2015; Mitchell, 2014). One cannot expect that a single teacher, working alone, has all the knowledge and expertise to meet the diverse needs of all learners (Caroll, 2009 ). Despite the importance of collaboration, there are still some challenges. First, teachers don’t often succeed in establishing collaborative partnerships (Petry, Ghesquière & Jansen, 2013). The image of the teacher working alone in his or her class is still prevalent (Struyf et. al., 2012). Second, there is, to our knowledge, no empirical evidence on how the collaboration should be shaped to promote inclusive learning environments. Third the concept of teacher collaboration is often ill-defined and has been interpreted in different ways – for example, as co-teaching; professional learning communities; communities of practice (Fluijt, 2014; Mortier, Hunt, Leroy, Van de Putte & Van Hove, 2010; Westheimer, 2008).

The social network theory (SNT) and its corresponding methodology, social network analysis (SNA) offers opportunities to address these challenges. By examining social networks, teacher collaboration can be captured in a more straightforward way. The assumption underlying a social network approach is that the patterns of social relationships in school teams that result from their interactions, reflect whether and to what degree collaboration takes place (Moolenaar, 2012). SNA permits to investigate  the structure and the composition of teachers’ networks from a bottom up approach rather than limiting the interactions within the locus of for example a professional learning community (Coburn & Russell, 2008). SNT focuses on the exchange of knowledge and expertise through social relationships. It tries to reveal and understand certain patterns in the structure of the social network and searches for network mechanisms that explain the outcomes (Moolenaar, 2012). As such, this approach permits to explore how collaboration should be precisely shaped to promote inclusive education.

SNT and its related methodology, SNA, are only recently introduced in educational research. To our knowledge, there is no research that has focused on the use of a social network perspective on studying collaboration in order to create inclusive learning environments. As a consequence, there is no social network instrument to assess collaboration in inclusive schools. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop and validate a social network instrument that provides teachers, school teams and researchers insight in the social networks with regard to the creation of inclusive learning environments. We will apply a whole network approach to create a picture of the network of the whole school team and their external partners.

In order to meet the goal described above, this research delineates the following research questions:

• Which network questions are of importance in the light of creating inclusive learning environments?
• Which network measures are manageable and relevant for teachers and teams to investigate and strengthen their network regarding the creation of inclusive learning environments?
• What kind of network visualisations are inviting and accessible for teachers and teams to investigate and strengthen their network regarding the creation of inclusive learning environments?
• Does the developed social network instrument measure collaboration in order to create inclusive learning environments in a valid way?

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