DHB: Collaborative Research: Analyzing the Flow of Network-Embedded Expertise in Schools: A Longitudinal Study of Individual and Organizational Change

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Integrating accounts of individual and organizational change is a fundamental challenge in the social and behavioral sciences. New institutional pressures on schools, brought about by the threat of sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), provide an ideal context for studying organizational and individual responses to exogenous pressures for change. In this collaborative research project, researchers are using social network analysis as part of a longitudinal study of change processes in a sample of 12 schools in California. The study builds on an earlier study (REC-0231981) in these schools and will analyze how social networks and social processes change in response to NCLB policies. The principal question is "How do social processes and structures formed during the implementation of previous reforms and innovations enable and constrain teachers' responses to new institutional forces such as NCLB?" To address these questions, researchers will collect longitudinal data on teachers' classroom teaching practices, principal and other administrative leadership behaviors, and on teachers' social networks using questionnaires and interviews. Researchers will then use a combination of case analyses of organizational functioning, social network analyses to model selection of ties and change in networks over time, and multi-level models to test the influence of network ties and individual characteristics on teacher change. Findings will build an understanding of how schools respond as social organizations to multiple reforms and how access to social resources influences responses to pressures for change. The opportunity to examine evolving change dynamics under strong outside pressure can broadly inform expectations about individual and organizational adaptation under waves of change. Strong findings from the study may make evident the need to develop a more dynamic perspective or may suggest that social networks are quite stable even under massive pressure.