Collaborative Research: A Research Study of Teacher Retention and Network Formation in Noyce Communities of Practice

This Noyce Track 4 Research project is a collaborative endeavor to examine teacher induction as an aspect of teacher preparation that affects the way teachers become embedded within their professional community. It will look at how being a member of a specific Community of Practice (CoP) influences teacher identity, belief in their personal teaching abilities, and desire to remain in the profession related to teacher retention. The institutions (SUNY at Stony Brook University, University of Kentucky, Kennesaw State University, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis) in this study span the U.S. and represent successful Noyce teacher preparation programs with a variety of recruitment strategies (e.g., career changers), induction support structures (e.g., online), and teacher placements (e.g., rural vs. urban). These six sites will also allow for a comparison of Noyce and non-Noyce teachers emerging from the different teacher preparation programs. The goal is to determine whether a core set of program features contributes to the success of each induction program, or if distinct program features are useful for unique populations (e.g., periodic face-to-face meetings for career changers, or online support for urban teachers). The project also seeks to determine which program features lead to different community structures (e.g., collaborating mainly with teachers inside or outside the school), and how that community affects a teacher's perception of the profession (e.g., teacher is connected to professionals across the state and wants to remain in the profession as a career). The primary research methodology used in this research study is Social Network Analysis, which will be used to determine with whom teachers exchange information related to their teaching. The study will benefit the field by highlighting induction strategies appropriate and effective for diverse teacher groups, and lead to a desire for increased retention in the workforce. The study will inform workforce issues in the organizational sciences, in which limited work has explicitly adopted a social network approach to explain human resource outcomes.

The theory being examined in this project is the extent to which teacher identify formation linked to persistence in the profession can be detected in participants' social networks and correlated to Noyce preparation and induction features. The three-stage research design will include documenting the antecedents of network formation, teacher networks, and the outcomes of networks. In Stage I, information will be collected about the support structures present at each site, and which activities and demographics represent the participants' experiences during induction. Coherence between the planned focus of each program, and the experiences of the participants, will be examined. In Stage II, social network information will be collected from participants using an ego-centric network survey (with data focused on a given teacher's local community of ties, e.g. the CoP) of who each teacher exchanges information with related to teaching content and pedagogy, how frequently the interactions occur, and whether the contacts occur in the local school or across regional, state, or national levels. Survey data will be transformed into matrices needed to generate STEM teacher networks, and examined for size, density, strength of ties, and geographic proximity to the teacher, utilizing the latest social network analysis software packages. Network properties from Stage II will be modeled using Stage I data to determine which activities and support structures contribute to different structural CoPs. In Stage III, teacher perceptions of their teaching self-efficacy, identity within the profession, and outlook on remaining in the profession will be collected. Stage III data will be modeled using Stage II network data to determine which CoPs influence desirable teacher outcomes. In order to strengthen claims of causality from the quantitative analyses, teachers will be asked which activities influence their CoP network, and which portions of the network effect their outcomes. Stage I and III instruments will be aligned to NSF Annual Participant Surveys, and Department of Education Teacher Follow-up Surveys, respectively, so results from this study may be generalized to national data in future studies.