The continuous professional development of teachers is a pivotal element in the provision of high-quality education. Informal social networking sites (SNS), such as Twitter, can contribute to this process by enabling teachers to share their ideas and collaboratively reflect on their practice. In this context, educational scientists have…

Purpose: The study analyzes how equity-focused knowledge brokers, working at different levels of the US education system, understand and discuss capacity building in education systems, such as schools, districts, state and local education agencies, to answer this research question: How do equity-focused knowledge brokers support capacity building…

Background/Context: Teachers and educational professionals can draw on (informal) networks to foster their professional development. Moreover, a growing number of studies have shown that teachers use social networking sites (SNSs), such as Twitter, to keep up to date with the latest news on education and share resources with colleagues.…

Purpose: This study responds to major administrative and policy priorities to support science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education by investigating a multi-sector ecosystem of regional organizations that support a STEM pipeline for education and careers. Design/methodology/approach: We use social network analysis to…

This study investigates whether educators' cognitive and structural social capital is associated with perceptions of innovative climate in charter schools. We explore a new concept to assess educators' cognitive social capital, namely network intentionality, meaning the extent to which an educator is intentional in connecting and…

Purpose: Secondary school leadership provides multiple challenges in terms of the diversity of tasks, multiple demands on time, balancing communities and attending to instructional programming. An emerging scholarship suggests the importance of a distributed instructional leadership approach to high school leadership. However, what has been less…

This study explored a formal structure, the cohort model that a decentralized district put in place over a decade ago. Schools were clustered into cohorts to facilitate professional development for leadership teams for all 44 schools within the district. Drawing upon Senge's components of organizational learning, we used a single case study design…

In this article, Alan J. Daly, Yi-Hwa Liou, and Chris Brown explore the idea of positive affective arousal through "energy exchange relationships" within a district leadership team. Education leaders have long been expected to be not only effective leaders but also motivators who can move change efforts forward. Although there has been…

This exploratory study foregrounds the important, but often understudied social side of pre-service teacher development and its relation to teaching performance in one university-based teacher preparation program in the US. We examine the extent to which pre-service elementary teachers' social relationships and perceptions of peer trust and…

Background: In the past decade, there has been an increasing national policy push for educators to systematically collect, interpret, and use data for instructional decision making. The assumption by the federal government is that having data systems will be enough to prompt the use of data for a wide range of decision making. These policies rely…

A number of scholars are exploring the district context in which schools are embedded. These studies suggest the importance of the district office as a support or constraint to the work of schools and offer strategies for building relations between district and site leaders. While this is an important task, what is frequently overlooked is that…

Researchers, educators, and policymakers suggest the use of professional learning communities as one important approach to the improvement of teaching and learning. However, relatively little research examines the interplay of professional interactions (structural social capital) around instructional practices and key elements of professional…

Since the establishment of educational rights for children with disabilities in the 1970s, special education in the US has included a growing share of students and has constituted an ever-growing share of education budgets. Previous research has focused on the disproportionate assignment to special education of low-income and minority students,…