Description:
In recent years, teachers around the world have been increasingly confronted withvarious expectations concerning the improvement of their classroom practices andschool activities. One factor widely acknowledged to facilitate school and classroomimprovement is a strong collaborative culture among teachers. As such, teachers areexpected to work in teacher teams, to collaborate closely with colleagues, to coconstructclassroom practices, and thus to strengthen trust relationships within theteam. A growing number of researchers has analyzed how teachers address theseexpectations. They suggest that there is a link between teachers’ embeddedness incollaboration networks and teachers’ trust relationships. The present study seeks to contribute to the research literature by presenting results of Social Network Analyses(SNA) and exponential random graph models (ERGMs) on teacher collaboration in ninesecondary schools in Germany (N¼366 teachers). We investigate how the involvementof teachers in co-constructive collaboration in schools, measured by the amountof team teaching (TT), relates to teachers’ trust levels. Results of our analyses suggestthat a high amount of TT is not necessarily related to a higher degree of trust amongteachers at the school level. However, a high involvement of teachers in TT is relatedpositively to their being perceived as trustworthy. Furthermore, the emergence of trustrelations in teacher networks depends on general network characteristics, such ashomophily, reciprocity and transitivity.