Session Information
01 SES 13 B, Teacher networks and cooperation
Paper Session
Contribution
Much of the research in the field of professional development through collaboration concerns collaboration that is organised and evaluates methods (Webster-Wright 2009, Svendsen 2019); for example, groups of teachers working actively with critical reflection in relation to their teaching practice. However, interactions that teachers engage in professionally also originate spontaneously, take less formal shape, and address a wide variety of aspects of the work, in line with what Wenger (1998) called communities of practice. Communities of practice require a domain of interest, an interactive community consisting of people learning from each other, as well as a shared practice to navigate in. The frequency of interaction can vary and so can the awareness or intention of learning (Wenger 2009). Teachers interacting in professional social networks form such communities of practice and can impact, reinforce or resist professional development and implementation of new educational practice (Datnow 2012). Knowledge about opportunities and constraints in the networks in relation to perceived value can help identify needs of structural support for teacher interaction and how to configurate formally organised networks to reinforce organisational learning (Datnow 2012).
A large survey by Parding et al. (2018), shows that teachers in upper secondary school in Sweden to a larger extent appreciate and value collaboration between teachers over other types of professional development. The authors of the report conclude that teachers “…know how they want to learn (to a large degree by colleagues), but they do not deem that the organisation is structured in a way that allow them to do this to a satisfying extent” (my translation from Swedish) (Parding et al. 2018). These results call for a closer look at teachers’ opportunities and constraints in relation to their professional social networks.
The opportunity for teachers’ professional development is influenced by local culture (Hargreaves 1994), national politics and local conditions such as the size and age of schools and closeness to universities (Parding et al. 2017). Other contextual conditions can also be of relevance, for example subject specific aspects. The present study focusses on biology teachers in upper secondary education in Sweden. In Swedish schools, biology is a small subject replaced by common courses in natural science in many of the programmes given. This means that many of the biology teachers in small schools lack subject colleagues, which can affect their opportunities for interaction with colleagues within the subject (Williams et al. 2010). Therefore, biology teachers might require structures that can support interactions with contacts outside of their school.
The aim of this study was to go into detail in the professional social networks of biology teachers in upper secondary school in relation to perceived needs to enable discussion on how organisational support could be strengthened. Perceived value of contacts in the networks was related to the teachers’ level of experience, access to subject colleagues and to how they perceived similarity in views on teaching with their contacts, important for both trust, collaboration and opportunities for critical discussion. Based on my results, I discuss which opportunities for collaboration require strengthening and support to facilitate teacher collaboration and development of biology education in Swedish schools from the teachers’ perspective. The research questions addressed are:
(1) How do the biology teachers describe their professional social networks in terms of different types of contacts, who they turn to for inspiration and help and how they perceived similarity and value of different contacts?
(2) How do the professional social networks of the biology teachers relate to areas they perceive as important to collaborate on?
Method
Social network maps drawn individually by biology teachers (method adapted from Poole et al. 2019) were used as a starting point to address the research questions. The teachers included contacts that they interacted with concerning biology education and added information on each contact in a think aloud procedure. Individual semi-structured interviews followed, where the teachers where asked questions related to their experiences of professional interactions for development. A mixed method approach was implemented, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data. The transcripts of the think-aloud procedure in creating the maps and the following interview were analysed in an iterative process, searching for expressions relating to the different types of contacts. This structuring content analysis (Cohen et al. 2011 p. 567) enabled synthesis on how the teachers talked about the different types of contacts. How the teachers answered the question concerning where they turned for inspiration and help was analysed by constant comparison (Cohen et al. 2011 p. 600) and the derived themes were put in relation to the teachers’ different situations in terms of level of experience and subject colleagues. Constant comparison was also used to analyse the teachers answer to which areas they consider important to interact with others on, what made them reluctant and what their incentives for collaboration were. Together with the decryptions of the professional social networks this enabled comparisons between the teachers’ professional social networks and their perceived needs and incentives. To further look into how teachers view similarity and value, related to possibilities for critical discussions, perceived value in the contacts were tested for correlation with perceived similarity using Spearman’s rho correlation test (SPSS). Previous studies in higher education have shown close relationship between perceived value and similarity (Poole et al. 2019). Therefore, datapoints that differed two or more scores between perceived similarity and value was scrutinized by going into detail on type of contact and what was said about each contact.
Expected Outcomes
In the interviews, similarity was often described as a goal of collaboration, but with several teachers noting that individual freedom and differences is important to preserve. Concerning spontaneous collaborations, it often springs from what is important at the time being. The importance of spontaneous meetings as a start-up for organised collaboration also relates to the large group of contacts that are both spontaneous and organised, usually working at the same school and with natural meeting space in the form of coffee rooms or shared offices. Regarding digital contacts, the analysis of both the social network data and the interview data points to low awareness of degree of similarity, indicating that critical discussions of views on teaching are rare in such contacts. The less experienced teachers appeared more focused on the various teaching strategies and methods to decrease workload. This is expected, since the first years of teaching usually brings high workload due to constant stream of new lessons to be planned for topics the teacher have not taught before, but deserves attention since distance between current and desired practice might impact which type of professional development a teacher needs, e.g. methods and time saving strategies contra critical discussions on teaching and learning. To conclude, the study shows the importance of possibilities for teachers to spontaneously initiate collaborations with colleagues, on issues important in their context. The competition for time between informal learning opportunities with low steering and formal learning opportunities can be a problem, since informal learning is more difficult to evaluate and measure and therefor easily overlooked in strategic decisions on professional development. However, it does not follow that informal learning is less valuable and we need research that takes this into consideration so that both formal and informal learning can co-exist and be validated in research-based school organisations.
References
Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2011). Research methods in education. New York: Routledge. Datnow, A. (2012). Teacher agency in educational reform: lessons from social network research. American Journal of Education, 119 (1): 193–201. Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times: Teachers’ work and culture in the postmodern age. London, England: Cassell. Parding, K., Berg-Jansson, A., Sehlstedt, T., McGrath-Champ, S. and Fitzgerald, S. (2017). Differentiation as a consequence of choice and decentralization reforms – Conditions for teachers’ competence development. Professionals and Professionalism, 7 (2): 1–15. http://doi.org/10.7577/pp.1855. Parding, K., Sehlstedt, T., Johansson, A., Berg-Jansson, A. and Jakobsson, M. (2018). Lärares arbetsvillkor I kontexten av marknadisering, privatisering, val och konkurrens – beskrivande enkätdata. Luleå tekniska universitet, institutionen för ekonomi, teknik och samhälle. ISBN: 978-91-7790-025-2. Poole, G., Iqbal, I. & Verwoord R. (2019). Small significant networks as birds of a feather. International Journal for Academic Development, 24(1), 61–72. Svendsen, B. (2019). Inquiries into teacher professional development – what matters? Education, 140 (3), 111–130. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E. (2009). Communities of practice: A brief introduction. Webster-Wright, A (2009). Reframing professional development through understanding authentic professional learning. Review of Educational Research, 79 (2): 702–722. Williams, A., Prestage, S. and Bedward, J. (2010). Individualism to collaboration: the significance of teacher culture to the induction of newly qualified teachers. Journal of Education for Teaching, 27 (3): 253–267.
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