Network Logic - Index of

Network logic
meant by that. How, from the perspective of teachers, could a
professional development project be called transformative? We were
particularly interested in this question because, when most teachers
talked to us about professional development, they described it as a
waste of time and an interruption to their work rather than a support
for it. Typical in-services, they often complained, rarely provide
follow-up and, even when a topic is interesting, it rarely has anything
to do with helping them in their classrooms. What was it, we
wondered, about the NWP that seemed to earn such passionate
accolades from teachers?
We began our study aware that networks – these seemingly loose
and flexible organisational forms – are becoming an important way to
organise teachers and schools in productive efforts toward school
improvement. 3 We also recognised there are growing and deepening
understandings about the power of professional communities for
teacher learning, though such communities are complicated, rare and
fragile. 4 A crucial question left hanging, however, is whether or not
network learning ever actually finds its way into classroom teaching
and student accomplishment.
We learned that the NWP is a national network made up of many
local networks throughout the country. Each local site comprises a
school–university partnership offering summer and year-long
professional development for teachers. The NWP bills itself as a
professional development initiative, providing multiple avenues for
teachers to learn about literacy and writing. Because the NWP has
been around since 1974 we had met many NWP teachers over the
years and knew how ardently they affiliated themselves with their
professional community and its mission. Research literature exists, of
course, about networks, about professional communities, and about
teacher learning. But the NWP had integrated all of these so
completely and placed them in such synergistic relationship with one
another that to study the dynamics of this interplay offers a
particularly intriguing, yet daunting challenge. The more we became
immersed in our study, the more we struggled to untangle these
tightly woven threads in order to understand what was going on.
66 Demos