Want a Better School? Invest in the People.

When it comes to making an impact on school outcomes, Professor Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell says we often overlook the power of relationships within the school. 

“I think the complexity of how relationships work is one of the reasons why the first place we often go when we're trying to improve schools is to something like policies and procedures,” she says. “It seems very concrete. Put the policy in place. Something's going to happen. Have a new procedure. People are going to follow it. Cross your fingers.” But the real lever of change is in people, she says. Bridwell-Mitchell studies the intricate dynamics of relationships within schools and how they shape outcomes for students, teachers, and institutions. 

“So all the time in organizations, we are shaping the interactions, the relationships people develop. And so from my perspective, we need to be much more intentional about what those efforts are accomplishing in terms of relationships and what impact they might be having on the outcomes that we desire,” she says, pointing out how seemingly innocuous decisions like where to put an office and what time to schedule a class can impact the social dynamic of an organization.

Relationships in schools are nested, where connections among individuals can ripple through classrooms, schools, and the educational system. However, figuring out how to more intentionally develop relationships can be challenging amid time constraints and policy demands. Still, Bridwell-Mitchell says, it is well worth the investment if schools want to transform for the long run. 

“Whatever great idea you think you have to make things better in your context, in your classroom, in your school, in your district — how much you're going to get out of that — the bang for the buck you invest...,” she says. “What you get out of it will be so much greater if you can leverage relationships in the right way.”

In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Bridwell-Mitchell shares how leveraging social networks can spark meaningful change, and why schools must embrace both the complexity and the power of human connection to achieve lasting success.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. Policies and procedures are often viewed as levers for school improvement.

But Harvard's Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell argues, the real transformation depends on social relationships and networks within the school ecosystem. She studies how institutional and organizational conditions enable and inhibit education reform. She learned this while working in a school and witnessed how organizational dynamics stand in between the policies we develop and the outcome we want.

I wanted to learn more about the many complex layers of social dynamics that can make or break efforts to improve schools. First, I asked Ebony to tell me who she's referring to when she says social relationships and social networks.

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: For me, it's one of the most complicated questions to try and disentangle for folks. And what I like to think about social networks and social relationships and what those really are, I'm thinking about those Russian Matryoshka dolls, where they're stacked inside of each other. And so I'm talking about relationships at these many nested levels. So on the one hand, I'm talking about the relationships that might exist amongst students themselves. But those relationships exist inside the classrooms those students are a part of. So those classrooms then are nested inside the schools of which they're a part of. Those schools are nested in systems. I could keep going on.

And it's the relationships at each level that I'm talking about amongst the students in the classroom at the school. But I'm also talking about the relationships across levels. So I have some research that looks at school partnerships and just the relationships between schools and the other organizations that they depend on for resources.

And I have some research looking at teachers and their relationships with one another. I don't study students' relationships, but there's certainly many people who do. So all those various factors of relationships are ones that matter.

JILL ANDERSON: How do social relationships impact student outcomes, school performance?

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: A really important thing to keep in mind, at least from my perspective when I study social networks, I study them because I'm really trying to understand what is involved in things staying the same in school contexts or things changing. And when it comes to the perspective I take on that question, a perspective from institutional theory, a small segment of organizational theory, it really is about three particular things to pay attention to.

One of the things you need to be paying attention to are things like policies and procedures. But that's only one element to pay attention to. Another important element to pay attention to are these social relationships. And a third element to pay attention to is really-- are the mindsets people bring to their work.

And so when I am talking about social relationships, what I'm really talking about is trying to understand two big things. What are the patterns of interaction? And when I say, "patterns of interaction," I literally mean if Jill is connected to Ebony is connected to Frank is connected to Tracy, is there a connection between all four of those people, between a subset of those people, between two people and not the other people? So I'm talking about the actual pattern. But I'm also talking about the content or what flows back and forth between those people because you can have everybody highly connected to one another. And the thing that they're exchanging most often could be negative sentiments about what it's like to work in a school. Or it could be information sharing about how to do practices in your classroom different or better. So I'm thinking about social relationships in those two ways, both the pattern of interactions and what's actually exchanged in those relationships.

JILL ANDERSON: And what's really interesting is how much all of that matters. When I've seen you present on your research before, it's fascinating to see the structure of just the way-- I'm moving my hand in a circle-- how people talk to each other really makes a significant difference and what ends up happening in that school.

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: Without question. And people who study social networks like me, there are certain core patterns, or shapes, or structures we're used to thinking about that have different kinds of implications. And so while it might be hard to imagine them, the names of them help make some of those patterns clear. So there's the bow-tie structure. Imagine people-- somebody at the center of a bow tie, somebody at the ends of each bow tie, and the connections between them. They're kind of like a connect the dots or constellations in the sky. There's the star network, there's the chain network, the classic chain network that reminds you of telephone, like when you were a kid. One person tells another person tells another person-- just thinking about this kind of square box relationship. So those are some of the simplest patterns of relationships. And those patterns get more and more complex the larger an organization or group of people get. But even in a really large group of people, those little patterns are making up that big pattern. And so you can learn a lot about how those relationship patterns matter.

JILL ANDERSON: There are these patterns that exist that are good for spreading new ideas, but not really great for innovation or handling maybe difficult or controversial ideas.

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: One of the things that people imagine, especially people who value relationships, is that the best kinds of relationships are when everybody is really highly connected. Everybody knows everyone else. They interact. And that's true for what you were describing in terms of trying to spread some shared sentiment around and make sure we all trust each other, make sure we're all on the same page. But what happens when lots of people are connected to one another? Two big things happen. One, it's harder to make connections to new people. This is the foundational premise of this very famous paper called "The Strength of Weak Ties," meaning that weak ties can be strong-- weak, meaning you're not always interacting all of the time because people, human beings, have limited time, energy, and effort. I can only devote so much to a certain set of relationships. And if I'm highly connected to people, it makes it harder to form new ties. And it turns out, those new relationships are where new information comes from, new perspectives come from.

So oftentimes, in our organizations, we talk about the importance of diversity, which is essential. But we often don't use that diversity in the ways that would actually help us do things differently in the sense that you can have lots of different people in an organization. But if the people who are more alike are the ones interacting in smaller groups or clicks, you have different people overall, but people interacting with the same people. And so when you're wanting to get new ideas introduced, it's often important to have people who are interacting less what I would call cohesively. But what that really means is they have opportunities to interact with people who are not the people they always are interacting with.

JILL ANDERSON: What factors are influencing that formation of different types of social relationships within schools? Because you mentioned birds of a feather flock together, it seems.

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: Yeah, exactly. Two of my favorite papers, one with a former advisor of mine, actually-- his name is Ray Reagans-- and one by Jim Spillane-- both of them are looking at a very similar phenomenon, which is how your physical location plays a big role in who you're likely to interact with, which should make sense to us. You're more likely to bump into the person who's in the office next to you than the person who works in an entirely different building.

But also, the time when you are available-- so if I happen to be teaching at the exact same time as a colleague who's teaching at that time, I'm not likely to bump into them. But if we have lunch at the exact same time, I am very likely to bump into them. So things like where people are located in their building, the time people have free.

But also, one important factor, especially if you're thinking about how do you shape social relationships, is this factor of what we talk about as friends of friends. I'm more likely to interact with someone who knows someone else that I know. And the reason that's important is because if we're trying to think about social relationships as a conduit for certain kinds of outcomes, the relationships we have right now in an organization might not be the best ones for the outcomes that we want. And so then we're asking ourselves the question, well, what should those relationships look like? And if you're asking yourself, what should those relationships look like, some people may need to come together who never knew each other before. You're more likely to bring those people into contact if you can find a third person who's already friends with those two people. So this friends-of-friends concept-- and these are all versions of birds of a feather, quite frankly-- same location, same time, same friend in common.

JILL ANDERSON: You can tell me if I'm wrong, but I have to imagine that not a lot of folks are thinking about this in such an organized, structured way because relationships feel like they're something that just tend to happen naturally, which is why we stay with people who are familiar with us or, like you said, people in the office next to us.

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: You're definitely right that people aren't necessarily thinking about relationships in this same way that I am, where I'm trying to look at all these different aspects that are important. And in fact, I think it's the complexity of how relationships work is one of the reasons why the first place we often go when we're trying to improve schools is to something like policies and procedures. It seems very concrete. Put the policy in place. Something's going to happen. Have a new procedure. People are going to follow it. Cross your fingers.

But when you start talking about relationships, how do you get your hands around that? And people rightly raise questions about, well, what does it mean if we're intervening in people's relationships? Aren't these personal and interpersonal decisions that potentially should be outside the purview of people who are trying to accomplish things in organizations as leaders or managers?

And one of the things that I always try to remind people of is, even if that were true, all of the time, the way our organizations work are shaping our social relationships. The decision someone made to put me in this office versus some other office had implications for the relationships I would develop as a young scholar. They may not have been thinking about that. But had they been thinking about that, it might have made a big difference for the sets of relationships that I develop.

People who scheduled my classes, by making me available or busy at some times-- or my meetings, quite frankly-- that has implications for how I interact. So all the time in organizations, we are shaping the interactions, the relationships people develop. And so from my perspective, we need to be much more intentional about what those efforts are accomplishing in terms of relationships and what impact they might be having on the outcomes that we desire.

JILL ANDERSON: You just mentioned some challenges. But are there other big challenges schools face in developing effective social networks?

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: The biggest challenge, by far, is the trade-off that we feel exists between making time available to teachers and leaders to develop these relationships. And by develop, I mean form the actual relationships with other people as well as deepen and strengthen those relationships-- the trade-off we feel between that and delivering instruction.

It is certainly true, one could imagine in making the argument, that if school starts at 8 o'clock and ends at 3 o'clock, if we counted the number of hours students are receiving instruction, if that's an important factor in learning outcomes. And it is. One might imagine, well, the more hours students spend receiving instruction, the better off things will be. But if every hour from 8:00 to 3:00 every single day is teachers' time devoted to instruction, that means zero time to develop the kinds of relationships where they might learn new ways to do the instruction that they're doing, where they might develop norms. And by norms, I mean expectations around what they should be doing in their classrooms or not. It's less time for teachers to say to each other, you know what, I have a really gritty problem that I'm trying to untangle in my class. Is there someone who can help me?

And we certainly have plenty of schools that have Professional Learning Communities, or PLCs, in place. But this same trade-off that I'm talking about often plays out in those situations. So schools have demands on their time to do certain things with data to meet a certain administrative needs. 
And so rather than having this time that's organized in a way for teachers to build relationships, it gets traded off. The time that teachers need to do that get traded off against things that seem so much more pressing. Same thing for principals. Principals are arguably even more isolated than their teachers are.

JILL ANDERSON: And so you have a whole culture that's essentially isolated because there's only so many hours in the school day. I mean, how do you go about convincing folks? Do you feel like that is part of your work?

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: I think it's hard because people in policy positions rightly are looking for gains that they can see and in the near term. And there's always a trade-off between what you gain in the short term and what you gain in the long term. So I'm thinking also, for example, about teachers who are connected to other teachers in their building in such a way where they are able to learn from each other in ways that make it feel for them as if they've got the kind of professional growth-- because they're learning new things from each other-- that they wouldn't have-- meaning the sense of professional growth that they wouldn't have if they were more isolated from other teachers.

And that sense of professional growth is one thing that plays an important role in teachers wanting to stay in a school, stay in the profession. So while it might take longer, meaning the good thing you get out of the development of these relationships-- the test score might come right away. The kind of reduced turnover that you might get, the increased professional learning-- it might take longer, but we have to think more carefully about trading off the short-run and the long-run outcomes that we're interested in, which is hard for policymakers because they do need near-term results.

JILL ANDERSON: What are some strategies that work to strengthen social networks within a school, knowing that there is such a limited time?

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: One of the things that I often use as an example when I'm thinking about, how do you strengthen social relationships, the first thing is being aware of who are the sets of people that are interacting naturally already. There are certainly tools available to map out a social network. But you can also do that much more easily, especially if you're not working in isolation. Let's say, if I'm a school leader, if I rely on my school leadership team, including teacher leaders, and have conversations about the sets of people who are interacting, I could probably get very close to constructing the kind of patterns I might construct if I tried to do a more formal social network survey and use some software application.

And so one, having a sense of what the relationships are. And then two, seizing the opportunities to connect people who otherwise would not be connected, especially if what you're trying to do is strengthen certain kinds of norms, spread certain kinds of information around. So if you and your school leadership team discover there's this whole pocket of people over here who are almost totally disconnected from everyone else, and what you're hoping to do is strengthen your culture, seize the opportunity to bring those people together. How do you do that? Shared or common tasks. When people have something they need and want to work on together, it brings them into closer interaction. Identifying points of similarity-- we were talking before about birds of a feather. And oftentimes, when we're thinking about similarity, we stick to what people call observable similarities, like, oh, these people are all women, or these people are all in the sixth grade. But it's these deeper-level similarities that are often the better points of connection for people. So who would know from looking at me that I love old school Star Trek episodes? I will watch First Generation, Next Generation, all the generations to come. But you don't know that without knowing the people better. And so finding ways for people to interact around those deep-level rather than surface-level similarities is really important.

JILL ANDERSON: How do you go about changing social relationships within a school that lead to more innovation, change, and better outcomes?

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: This is another reason relationships are complicated is because there's different outcomes that we want. And sometimes, those two outcomes can be in tension. So for example, let's say what we're trying to do is to create more innovation. And in fact, one of the papers that I have looking at persistently underperforming school and what it took to change outcomes for that school looks at this tension that exists between these four factors that are really important in terms of how teachers are learning from one another.

One is how diverse the teachers are. And I don't just mean demographic diversity. I mean what people who are organizational researchers call functional diversity, differences in people's expertise and knowledge. There's this idea of diversity, but there's also this idea of cohesion, people feeling really strongly attached to one another. Those are two important things that come into play when we're talking about change in teacher communities. 
But also, two other important things are basically this socialization, how much people understand the roles that they have in their organization and what they're expected to do, but also this propensity for innovation, this sense that we're supposed to do something different around here, to raise questions, to ask things anew. The hard thing is those things are often in tension. It turns out, what we know from the research is that really cohesive groups tend to be less diverse because it's easier to get along with people you understand right away. So you want diversity, and you want cohesion, but it has to be this very careful balance.

Same thing with socialization and a propensity for innovation. You want people to come up with these amazing new ideas. But it turns out, when people are very highly socialized, they're very clear about what's expected of them, they feel less of a propensity to try new things. And so how you balance so carefully, these four factors ends up playing a really important role. And so if you want something like changing, relying on a teacher community to change the way outcomes happen, student outcomes, but also organizational outcomes, doing better as a school, trying to balance these four factors is super important.

If you're just talking about if we want new ideas, putting people into spaces with people with very different expertise and knowledge, that functional diversity is a great way to generate new ideas. It's not always easy, though, to go from that to then getting people to agree on which idea to do and all move in the same direction to implement that one idea because what it takes to agree and move in one direction-- relationally speaking, what it takes-- is different than what it took to come up with the great ideas to begin with.

JILL ANDERSON: You mentioned the diversity factor. And we know school are majority white female educators. I know there's a lot of efforts to change that. But we also know the diversity in students is changing as the time goes on. So I am wondering about, how do they overcome this? When you see a school that is diverse, how have they done this and succeeded? Because these schools exist. It's not like there's no examples of this anywhere, right?

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: When we're talking about diversity, there's lots of different ways that diversity plays out. But the example that I was giving was really about diversity in the sets of ideas people bring to their work. So ostensibly, you could have a school where all the teachers are white women. But when we start talking about that deep-level diversity, like surface-level versus what you can't actually see, it could turn out, they could have very different functional expertise.

And in the story of the school that I'm going to tell you, where you're like, how do schools figure out how to leverage this diversity, this is the story of a school that was identified by the state for school turnaround. They were going to have to close down if they couldn't get their act together, like most turnaround schools. They'd been persistently underperforming for a very long time with students who were largely students of color, who were largely from low-income backgrounds.

The odds, unfortunately, for most turnaround schools are stacked against them, meaning the odds that they will change are not as great as the odds that they will stay the same. And this particular school was able to change, did come off the state's turnaround list, changed its culture in many ways. And this is a school much like the one that we're probably imagining, where most of the teachers were white women. There were a very small number of Black women of color. But most of the students were students who were from low-income backgrounds, were students of color, and their school changed. 
Before things started to change, the teachers had a very close-knit community, that cohesion factor we were talking about, which is great for feeling highly attached to people. It's also great for everybody being very clear on expectations. Here's what a person in our community is supposed to do.

But once they figured out that some teachers in their community actually had different ideas about how instruction could work, had different ideas about what could be expected from the students, those teachers always had those ideas, but their community norms were so strong, you don't go against the other teachers in your community who say, oh, you can only teach the kids like this because they can only learn so much. Or you can only do these kinds of practices because that's all. You won't speak out. 
And so once the teacher community figured out how to create spaces where people were less silenced in their differences of opinion, their differences in expertise, that functional diversity, it brought to the fore new ways to do things. But they had the benefit of having these relationships. So before, we were talking about the thing that you need to come up with new ideas isn't always the thing you need to agree on them and spread them around. But if you can generate the diversity that exists in most communities and then use that along with the cohesion that exists, you get the benefit of coming up with the new ideas and then being able to fall back on the sets of relationships that it takes to agree on a set of ideas and move them forward.

JILL ANDERSON: Just to wrap up, how do we really bring this home and get folks in schools and in communities to put their effort and energy into these relationships and developing them and in building that network?

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: I would say, challenge each change maker. Sometimes that's a teacher in their classroom. Sometimes that's a principal in their school. Sometimes that's an administrative and district. Challenge each change maker to ask themselves the question, how much bang do I want to get from my buck and for how long? And what I mean by that is, whatever great idea you think you have to make things better in your context, in your classroom, in your school, in your district-- how much you're going to get out of that, the bang for the buck you invest. What you get out of it will be so much greater if you can leverage relationships in the right way. So if you've got a philosophy where you are satisfied with getting just as much as you might need for a certain amount of time, or if you're someone who wants to maximize the amount you're going to get out of any particular initiative over the long run, have to think in very deliberate ways about the role that relationships are playing.

JILL ANDERSON: Thank you, Ebony.

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL: Thank you, Jill.

JILL ANDERSON: Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she co-leads the Education Leadership Organizations and Entrepreneurship program. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.