Push versus pull: The effectiveness of formal and informal teacher collaborative structures

Teacher collaboration is believed to help teachers deal with their changing work context and ultimately result in improved student outcomes. However, these are often assumptions and empirical evidence of the effectiveness of teacher collaboration in terms of student outcomes is scarce. Moreover, the common assumption that collaboration is uniform and beneficial on all fronts hampers solid theory-building. This project thoroughly investigates the effectiveness of teacher collaboration: (1) taking the diversity in student outcomes into account (cognitive and psychosocial), (2) investigating the inherently mediating role of teacher outcomes in the relationship between teacher collaboration and student outcomes, and (3) acknowledging that collaboration is not uniform. Two theoretical perspectives on collaboration will be combined: a multilevel perspective that is well suited to investigate formal collaboration (top-down imposed fixed structures, such as subject groups) and a social network perspective that is especially valuable to investigate informal collaboration (bottom-up emerging patterns of spontaneous teacher collaboration). Both formal structures and spontaneously arising relationships among teachers are inherently present in schools and this project investigates the relationship between both and their effectiveness in terms of student outcomes.