Researching and Understanding Educational Networks

Robert McCormick, Alison Fox, Patrick Carmichael, Richard Procter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136953507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

In the twenty-first century, what could be more important than networks? Such is the power of their influence and attendant technologies that it is unsurprising that our thinking about networks is permeated with images and metaphors from electronic networks. This orientation may equally influence thinking about education, whether that is of students or teachers.

Researching and Understanding Educational Networks extends the discussion of educational networks in a unique and novel way by relating it to teacher learning. Following an investigation of teacher and school networks in the UK, the authors found that theoretical perspectives taken from existing work on such networks were not adequate to provide an understanding of their potential, nor to provide the basis for researching them in ways that reflected the variety of teacher experience.

This book presents analyses of the problems with existing theories of teacher learning, which for example draw on ideas of 'communities of practice', and explores what network theories can be brought to the problem of how teachers and schools create and share new knowledge about practice. Innovative networking theories discussed include:

• social network analysis
• social capital theories
• actor-network theory
• investigations of electronic networks including computer-meditated conferencing
• how people learn at events such as conferences.

Researching and Understanding Educational Networks explores a new application of networks theories derived from quite different fields of work, and extends it both by being concerned about networks beyond organisations and specifically about educational networks. Their application to educational networks, and to teacher learning in particular, is a unique contribution of the book. This enables it to be of interest to both researchers and those studying for higher degrees, including students who are professionals working in schools.

Chapter 1
Educational policy and technological contexts

Introduction

The Learning How to Learn project sought to understand how teachers and their students could develop ‘learning how to learn’ practices (James et al. 2007). This was set in a world where ‘knowledge economies’ require lifelong learning and the need to respond to social and economic change. For those in schools, it asks that they focus students’ attention on their learning, and hence the popular term ‘learning to learn’. For teachers and those who support them, this orientation requires a new focus on their pedagogy. They too have to learn. But in the Learning How to Learn (LHTL) project we went one step further and wanted them too ‘to learn how to learn’. This was not a research project taking a passive view of its subjects, but had an agenda both to change practice and to investigate the issues that this raised. Any such undertaking brings with it a legacy of attempts to deal with teacher learning, on both intellectual and policy fronts. In this chapter we will attempt to explore these contextual factors.

First we will look at the specific change we wanted to bring about, namely ‘assessment for learning’, an idea that at its core tries to focus students and their teachers on learning. As our concern is with teacher learning, we will explore some of the antecedents for our particular interest within the project in networks within education, some of which use different conceptions, most notably ‘professional communities’. Some of these antecedents have had ambitious visions of the role of networks of schools and teachers, and we will explore one in particular that saw them leading as it were to an ‘epidemic’ in education, such could be the impact of these networks. Whatever academics do in universities or through policy think tanks, in the end the education system needs to find ways of enabling all institutions to engage in the visions or theoretical models of how networks can improve what is done in schools and colleges. We explore some of these, not with a view to seeing if they were effective, but to understand just what constituted networks and their processes.

All of these are the starting point of the LHTL project’s interest in networks. But we brought one more, the role of technology. Although few of the antecedents of educational networks had any concern for technologies, in our contemporary society they are ubiquitous. Our personal interests and skills drew on an understanding of electronic networks, and this was reflected in the research questions the project set itself. All these considerations set the scene for the rest of the book, and in particular for the need to understand the nature of networks and of the teaching learning they seek to enable. First, we return to the specifics of the project and what we were trying to investigate.

Background

The LHTL project started from the base provided by assessment for learning practices with which many of the research team had been involved: research on specific aspects of assessment for learning (AfL) (reviewed by Black and Wiliam 1998a), or projects that worked intensively with teachers (e.g. the King’s Medway and Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project [KMOFAP]; Black et al. 2003). In the KMOFAP, secondary school teachers and university academics developed new practices of AfL (also referred to as formative assessment) over a long period of time and involving some twenty days of support through group meetings. The LHTL project wanted to see how ordinary schools could build on this previous work and develop it into methods of learning how to learn, without the kind of intensive support provided in KMOFAP. The teachers had to learn new classroom methods in situations for which no such methods existed for their specific teaching situation. Thus, a technique such as questioning used by secondary science teachers had to be developed by those in the early years of schooling for, say, literacy work.

The LHTL project was therefore concerned with some basic questions about professional knowledge creation, and took as its starting points these key research aims (among several):

• to investigate what characterises the school in which teachers successfully create and manage the knowledge and skills of learning how to learn;

• to investigate how educational networks can support the creation, management and transfer of knowledge and skills of learning how to learn.

The project built upon a wealth of evidence about the importance of teachers and schools taking more responsibility for their professional development and their practice, and about how development should take place. Such an approach has a long history with school-based curriculum development in the 1960s and 1970s (Skilbeck 1976) and, perhaps more profoundly, the ‘teacher as researcher’ ideas of the 1970s (Stenhouse 1975). Stenhouse, in particular, saw the creation of professional knowledge as the fundamental task of the teacher, who would investigate his or her classroom and build a professional understanding of practice. These early approaches took classroom-based inquiry as an essential element of the development of professional practice. ¹ This approach was updated in the 1990s as a view of the teaching profession where a ‘new professionalism’ was moving away from individual teacher development to institutional development, and a collaborative culture was developing (Hargreaves 1994). Another strand included critiques of educational research, and here David Hargreaves (1996) saw teachers taking more control over the research agenda and with less of a division between researchers and teachers in the production of evidence as the basis for professional practice. Hargreaves (1999) developed this further through his concept of the ‘knowledge-creating school’, where he outlined four elements of such schools: audits of professional working knowledge, management of the process of creating new knowledge, validating the professional knowledge created and dissemination of the created professional knowledge. The first (audit), second (management) and fourth (dissemination) are of particular interest to the focus of this book and we will examine them later in the chapter.

Although these initiatives appeared to be the views of academics, they have found their way into policy. In England, school-based continuing professional development (CPD) was advocated by the government in 2000, with a key principle being that ‘effective teachers should take ownership and give high priority to professional development, and schools and teachers should share responsibility and commitment for development supported by Government’ (DfEE 2000: 3).

This policy document also talks of work-based learning, where teachers are to see their development as part of their work in school. ² This was taken up by the Teacher Training Agency (later to be renamed the Training and Development Agency for Schools [TDA]) in its policy statement when it took on responsibility for CPD (TTA 2005). More recently, it commissioned research to ascertain the ‘state of the nation’ (England), premised on the idea that schools should be at the centre of determining their own professional development (Pedder et al. 2008).

The above are all based in the United Kingdom, but internationally the professional development literature also reflects this tradition, as is evident in the review by Wilson and Berne (1999). They identified a number of central features of such professional development: teacher education situated in the classroom (school based and embedded in work); collaboration among teachers; focused on student learning; teachers in control of their professional development. However, they concluded that many of these features (and others they identified from the literature) were based on beliefs, unsupported by empirical evidence. In considering in detail a number of initiatives where the focus was on subject matter, student learning and teaching practices, Wilson and Berne concluded that common themes were ideas of communities of learners (teachers as learners) and teachers’ interaction with one another. Indeed, all the examples involved communities of teachers being set up to discuss their classroom practice. (Some of the examples they considered included teacher networks and we will consider these in the next section, ‘Antecedents’.) Since this early review there has been an accumulation of empirical evidence about what is effective CPD, though not all of it can be related strongly to student learning outcomes. (For example, Cordingley et al. [2005a, b] show the effectiveness of teachers’ collaboration in terms of student outcomes; see also Borko [2004] for more general US evidence on CPD.) Looking at a number of major studies concentrating on England, some of which drew on an international literature, McCormick et al. (2008) indicated that there is strong evidence for the effectiveness of the following CPD activities: coaching and mentoring, networks, observation and inquiry. ³ Some of these activities are central to the collaboration that forms the strongest strand in professional development and learning.

In a recent international text on CPD, similar themes come through, but with a recognition of a performance orientation being required of teachers from governments (Day and Sachs 2004). In the same volume as the contribution by Day and Sachs, Bolam and McMahon (2004: 41) characterise worldwide changes in CPD policy and practice that affects teacher learning as being based on a model that included ‘self-developing, reflective teachers, in self-managed schools with devolved funding … [with] professional development programmes aimed at meeting an appropriate balance of individual teacher, school and national needs and priorities’. However, they recognise that there is a tendency for the agenda for professional development to be set nationally. They also say that ‘a new form of professionalism is emerging in which teachers work more closely and collaboratively with colleagues, students and parents, linking teacher and school development’ (ibid.: 47). In concluding and looking forward to what is needed by way of research, they acknowledge that there is little evidence of the impact of research on CPD’s policy and practice. State-of-the-nation research for England (Pedder et al. 2008) indicates that many of the features of CPD discussed above and by Bolam and McMahon (2004) are still absent from schools: teachers mainly experience passive forms of CPD, rather than active ones, and most teachers’ approaches to CPD tend not to be collaborative, nor clearly contextualised in classroom practice (even though they and their school leaders value these features).

Day and Sachs (2004) draw out school-based CPD, partnerships and teacher and school networks as the strategies for CPD that they see as contributing to improving teacher performance and student learning. We will consider later some of the ‘current’ networks that are in the international handbook (edited by Day and Sachs), but first let us trace some of the earlier work on this. Wilson and Berne (1999) consider a number of teacher networks, in particular drawing on the earlier work of Lieberman and Grolnick (1996), which have a strong theme of community at their heart. We shall shortly argue that in many of these approaches to networks, the focus is actually on communities, and that, although these are important for knowledge creation, they often fail to address the wider network aspects and in particular the sharing of knowledge with those who are not involved in creating it. Wilson and Berne note that there is a tension in balancing insider and outsider (to the community) knowledge and expertise and, focusing on networks as an organisational entity, they tend to see a network as a means of the service delivery of CPD rather than as a form of CPD. Others see the formation and use of networks as important in themselves. We first want to examine the antecedents to our concern for networks, as they indicate to us both the strengths and the limitations of what is an almost exclusive concern in the literature with teacher communities. These communities are a powerful and necessary part of the creation and sharing of teacher knowledge, but we shall argue that this exclusive concern has prevented researchers from examining what networks more broadly conceived have to offer; indeed, they have simply redefined networks as communities.

Antecedents

In this section we will examine a number of initiatives that are labelled as ‘networks’, or are related to them, and indicate how these have been perceived and implemented. These initiatives have also formed the way networks have been interpreted in both academic research and policy. In particular, we will consider the UK Classroom Action Research Network (CARN), ⁴ US networks (for example, as indicated by Lieberman and Grolnick 1996), professional learning communities and an initiative that advocated networks of schools in the United Kingdom (Hargreaves 2003a). All of these, apart from the last-named initiative, are based on universities working with teachers and/or schools. In the next section we will look at how some of these found their way into policy through the initiative of government (or its agencies).

The Classroom Action Research Network

Stenhouse (1975) advocated that teachers should be researchers and render problematic their own classroom practice so that inquiry into it can reveal new professional knowledge about that practice, and lead to improvement. This started a whole genre of work with the ‘teacher-as-researcher’ that also incorporated action research. ⁵ These ideas led John Elliott to his work in 1975 on the Ford Teaching Project, which in turn led to the establishment of the Classroom Action Research Network (CARN). This network was founded to bring together teachers who had been carrying out research in their own classrooms, often as a result of their work on higher degree programmes, initially centred at the University of East Anglia and Cambridge Institute of Education; others have carried on this work. In the early 1990s the network changed its name to the Collaborative Action Research Network and has continued to hold annual conferences, which have become international in their venues. ⁶ It regularly published the work of teachers in their classrooms through CARN Bulletins and in 1993 it established an international journal, Educational Action Research. This extended the range of work reported, which in any case had always included writings about theory and research methods by teacher educators and educationists. The network is international with regional groups in a number of countries, and a co-ordinating group. There can be no doubt that the work produced was an effective form of knowledge creation, and that the network enabled some element of sharing, though this latter aspect was not itself subject to investigation. ⁷ This network started a strong tradition of action research, which seems to be the thrust of the con...

Table of contents

• New Perspectives on Learning and Instruction
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Educational policy and technological contexts
• Chapter 2 Theorising networks Introduction
• Chapter 3 Teacher learning
• Chapter 4 Mapping networks
• Chapter 5 Network nodes
• Chapter 6 Network links
• Chapter 7 Network traffic
• Chapter 8 Networks in context
• Chapter 9 Case studies
• Chapter 10 Electronic networks and teacher learning
• Chapter 11 Implications
• Notes
• References
• Author index
• Subject index