Teachers’ Relational Orientation and Change in Classroom Practice During Reform

• In Event: Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: The Teacher-Student Relationship: Beliefs, Values, and Practices

Abstract

This paper argues that teachers’ individual patterns of selection in their social networks, or relational orientations, can be used as a measure of their tacit and practical buy-in to a new institutional logic introduced during school reform. This idea is elaborated with data from a longitudinal study of teacher social networks during a small school reform. The two-part network analysis shows that: 1) standard processes of network influence shape classroom practices when they are consist with the existing teacher-centered logic of the school while 2) shifts in teachers’ underlying relational orientations toward interdisciplinary and small-school based ties are more strongly associated with their use of student-centered pedagogy in the classroom than are either their own or their peers’ explicit attitudes.

Author

• David Diehl, Duke University