Strauss: Do students learn more when their teachers work well together?

If you think that focusing on improving relationships among teachers is just a warm and fuzzy idea that doesnt really matter to student achievement, read this post by Esther Quintero, senior fellow at the nonprofit Albert Shanker Institute,where this first appeared.

By Esther Quintero

Debates about how to improve educational outcomes for students often involve two camps those who focus on the impact of in-school factors on student achievement and those who focus on out-of-school factors. There are many in-school factors discussed but improving the quality of individual teachers (or teachers human capital) is almost always touted as the main strategy for school improvement. Out-of-school factors are also numerous but proponents of this view tend toward addressing broad systemic problems such as poverty and inequality.

Social capital the idea that relationships have value, that social ties provide access to important resources like knowledge and support, and that a groups performance can often exceed that of the sum of its members is something that rarely makes it into the conversation. But why does social capital matter?

Research suggests that teachers social capital may be just as important to student learning as their human capital. In fact, some studies indicate that if school improvement policies addressed teachers human and social capital simultaneously, they would go a long way toward mitigating the effects of poverty on student outcomes. Sounds good, right? The problem is: Current policy does not resemble this approach. Researchers, commentators and practitioners have shown and lamented that many of the strategies leveraged to increase teachers human capital often do so at the expense of eroding social capital in our schools. In other words, these approaches are moving us one step forward and two steps back.

I would argue Daly and Finnigan did that this somewhat broad and diffuse notion that relationships matter is not some warm and fuzzy idea, but rather that it could hold an important key to educational improvement. Social capital is malleable; policies can and do shape teachers professional networks and how they function. For example, Gamoran, Gunter and Williams (2005) showed that sustained and coherent professional development can be used to create strong collegial ties (or social capital) among teachers. Similarly, Sun, Frank, Penuel & Kim (2013) showed that strategies that promote informalteacher leadership can be a mechanism to disseminate effective classroom practices through interactions something that formal leadership networks are not well-equipped to accomplish.Supovitz, Sirinides and May 2010demonstrated that principals indirectly affect the instructional practice of teachers, which in turn produces improvements in student learning; thus, principals attention to concepts like mission and goals or community and trust have subtle yet real organizational influence. Finally, one could also imagine a set of policies that incentivized not just teacher collaboration, but entire schools within a district (or even across districts) working together, an approach that would bolster social capital and cohesiveness at another level: The entire system.

But lets back up a little bit; why is social capital such a central concept? A number of studies suggest that good things happen for students in schools where teachers work together routinely. Here I review four empirical papers* showing that students learn more when their teachers are embedded in more supportive and collegial professional networks, and that teacher collaboration may have as great an effect on student achievement as teacher human capital. I hope, as do the authors of these papers, that this information can be used to guide future investments in each [form of capital] (p. 1103).

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Despite the importance of teacher interaction and collaboration our understanding of how they influence student outcomes is still limited (see also Datnow, 2012 and Penuel et al., 2009). In fact, few studies make that direct link.

Continued here:
Strauss: Do students learn more when their teachers work well together?