Do Students Learn More When Their Teachers Work Together?
This is the second post in a series on “The Social Side Of Reform”, exploring the idea that relationships, social capital, and social networks matter in lasting, systemic educational improvement. For more on this series, clickhere.
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 group’s 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 — as Daly and Finnigan did last week — 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 Shanker Blog » Do Students Learn More When Their Teachers Work Together?: