Kira J. Baker-Doyle

In search of practitioner‐based social capital: a social network analysis tool for understanding and facilitating teacher collaboration in a US‐based STEM professional development program

This paper presents the first in a series of studies on the informal advice networks of a community of teachers in an in‐service professional development program. The aim of the research was to use Social Network Analysis as a methodological tool to reveal the social networks developed by the teachers, and to examine whether these networks maximized teachers’ access to practitioner‐based social capital. We define practitioner‐based social capital as the knowledge and resources for teaching practice that are accessible through a social network. Our findings indicated that teachers did not naturally build advice networks that would cultivate the highest levels of practitioner‐based social capital. This study offers new possibilities for social network research on teachers’ learning communities in understanding the dynamics of teacher networks. Further, program facilitators will use this information to strategically foster improved teacher collaboration and learning, which will be described in forthcoming studies in this series.

No Teacher Is an Island: How Social Networks Shape Teacher Quality

Abstract Since the late 1990s, teacher professional development models have shifted from a focus on individual improvement to collaboration as a means to foster support, information, and resource exchange between teachers. Following this shift, researchers began to use social network research methodology in the early 2000s to reveal the ways in which informal relationships affect teachers’ practices. This chapter reviews current literature on teachers’ social networks and teacher quality to describe the ways in which social networks mediate teachers’ practices. It provides detailed examples from two studies on teachers’ social networks and suggests ways that scholars can incorporate the constructs of social capital and social networks into large-scale research on teacher quality.

How Can Community Organizations Support Urban Transformative Teacher Leadership? Lessons From Three Successful Alliances

Abstract Teachers who organize for educational equity and social justice generally do so through teacher-led professional networks. Community organizations (COs) that seek to support such teacher leaders can face challenges in working with their organic and often horizontally organized networks. This article examines three case studies of COs that developed successful alliances with urban teacher leaders in teacher-led networks and identifies specific strategies COs used to support the teachers.

‘Next thing you know, her hair turned green’: absurdity and uncertainty in high-stakes teacher test space

ABSTRACT This article explores what happens behind the closed doors and in the ‘black box’ of high-stakes educational testing. Our specific concern is licensure exams that are often gatekeepers into teacher education programs and the profession. Leveraging the spatial turn across critical social theory and other disciplines, we conceptualize the test space of these exams in order to account for the powerful reach that test companies have into teacher education and the ‘ideal’ restrictive space that test takers navigate. Against this conceptual background, we share findings from a larger qualitative study to illustrate how test takers ‘practice’ test space into something more manageable and familiar by leveraging various affordances presented to them. Overall, our study accounts for the spatial dimension of high-stakes educational tests and initiates productive ways to begin thinking about the structure and agency of these spaces.