ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we advance a theory of change through teacher professional development that is based on a notion of intentional network rewiring. We coupled social capital strategies (e.g., increasing tie quality) with known characteristics of teacher learning (e.g., teacher as knower and agent of change) to build professional development activities specifically aimed at improving teachers’ social capital. Here, we detail the shifts that were made in professional development emphases from human capital to social capital over 2 years in a project focused on constructing and delivering computer-supported complex systems curricula. We demonstrate improvements in teachers’ confidence levels from year 1 to year 2 that we hypothesize occurred because of our social capital campaign. Ultimately, we suggest that a sequence that entails more emphasis on the development of human capital in the first year and more emphasis on the development of social capital in the second year might be a prudent structure for teacher professional development.
