The Importance Of Relationships In Educational Reform
Our guest authors today are Kara S. Finnigan, Associate Professor at the Warner School of Education at the University of Rochester, and Alan J. Daly, Professor and Chair of Education Studies at the University of California San Diego. Finnigan and Daly have published articles on network analysis in education in academic and practitioner journals, and recently co-edited Using Research Evidence in Education: From the Schoolhouse Door to Capitol Hill(Springer, 2014), which explores the use and diffusion of different types of evidence across levels of the educational system.
There are many reforms out there; what if these ideas are not working as well as they could because educators are simply not communicating or building meaningful relationships with each other or maybe the conditions in which they do their work do not support productive interactions? These are important issues to understand and our research, some of which we highlight in this post, underscores the importance of the relational element in reform. To further explore the social side of the change equation, we draw on social network research as a way to highlight the importance of relationships as conduits through which valued resources flow and can bring about system-wide change.
A few years ago Arne Duncan noted that “[NCLB] has created a thousand ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed.” We think that may have to do with the over reliance on technical fixes, prescriptive approaches and the scant attention to the context — particularly the social context — in which reforms are implemented. But what would things look like if we took a more relational approach to educational improvement?
Imagine for a moment that you are the head of a large organization that is failing on whatever performance measures are deemed important. You push “knowledge” into the system through meetings and informational resources. You set aside time for meetings to share this knowledge and/or require that employees work together to make sure everyone is on the “same page.” After doing this, as many reforms suggest you should, you find your organization Shanker Blog » The Importance Of Relationships In Educational Reform: