Kaitlin Torphy, Ph.D. is the Lead Researcher and Founder of the Teachers in Social Media Project at Michigan State University (www.TeachersInSocialMedia.org).
This project considers the intersection of cloud to class, nature of resources within virtual resource pools, and implications for equity as educational spaces grow increasingly connected. Dr. Torphy conceptualizes the emergence of a teacherpreneurial guild in which teachers turn to one another for instructional content and resources. She has expertise in teachers’ engagement across virtual platforms, teachers’ physical and virtual social networks, and education policy reform. Dr. Torphy was a co-PI and presenter for an American Education Research Association conference convened in October 2018 at Michigan State University on social media and education. She has published work on charter school impacts, curricular reform, teachers’ social networks, and presented work regarding teachers’ engagement within social media at the national and international level. Her other work examines diffusion of sustainable practices across social networks within The Nature Conservancy. Dr. Torphy earned a Ph.D. in education policy, a specialization in the economics of education from Michigan State University in 2014 and is a Teach for America alumni and former Chicago Public Schools teacher.
<p>Related events are noted via text labels, and the threshold of 50 daily visitors is show... more <p>Related events are noted via text labels, and the threshold of 50 daily visitors is shown in green.</p
In this paper we analyze the relationship between charter school authorizers and student achievem... more In this paper we analyze the relationship between charter school authorizers and student achievement. We perform this analysis using a 10-year panel dataset from Minnesota, a state that permits four distinct types of authorizers—local school boards, postsecondary institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the Minnesota Department of Education. The results of the analysis indicate that there is no statistically significant relationship between
This paper discusses the challenges and lessons learned from conducting observations to measure t... more This paper discusses the challenges and lessons learned from conducting observations to measure the quality of classroom practice for a large-scale study of elementary teachers&#39; mathematics instruction. Specifically, this paper shares our process for obtaining valid data for quality of elementary mathematics instruction; what we learned can inform similar efforts by large, interdisciplinary teams, as well as by instructional coaches and evaluators. Considerations for selecting and testing the viability of a classroom observation instrument, as well as the importance of conducting inter-rater reliability throughout the data collection process, are discussed.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine early career teachers’ Socialized Knowledge Commu... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine early career teachers’ Socialized Knowledge Communities (SKCs) as they relate to the pursuit of mathematics knowledge and teaching. The authors investigate Pinterest, a living data archive, as an opportunity to view teachers’ sense-making and construction of instructional resources. Through this lens, the authors examine how teachers form and share mathematical meaning individually and collectively through professional collaboration. Design/methodology/approach This work characterizes teachers’ curation of mathematical resources both in the kinds of mathematics teachers are choosing and the quality therein. Finally, the authors examine through epistemic network analysis how teachers are sense-making through a statistical approach to identifying their organization of mathematics curation by typology and cognitive process demand. Findings Results show that sampled teachers predominantly curate instructional resources that require student...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This chapter welcomes the reader to the study of social media in education. It begins with a desc... more This chapter welcomes the reader to the study of social media in education. It begins with a description of the background, ranging from general use of social media in today's society to the importance of social media in education. The study of social media in education will inevitably draw on interdisciplinary concepts and networks of relationships among ideas and people. Furthermore, social media can help researchers and educators cross current boundaries, such as the organizational boundary of the school, and the domains of teachers and leaders. Social media also reveals boundaries that have been reinforced or are emergent with social media, such as intergenerational and cross-cultural boundaries, and standard boundaries of chronology. The contributors themselves come from interdisciplinary backgrounds (all focused on education, but from computer science, technology, sociology, policy, psychology, etc.), and they consider their own agency in shaping the field of study of soci...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This is a dialogue between a curmudgeon and a millennial regarding the import of social media for... more This is a dialogue between a curmudgeon and a millennial regarding the import of social media for education and for educational research. The dialogue emerged out of conversations the authors have had with policy makers, researchers, and practitioners over the last three years regarding the impact of social media on education (see teachersinsocialmedia.org). It was presented in the context of Kenneth Frank's research group meeting January 4, 2018. The topics covered include a broad understanding about what social media are and how they relate to teaching and curriculum; understanding about social media as a data artifact; a discussion about how social media platforms shape the interactions of participants; the quality of resources available on social media; why teachers engage in using social media; the lack of research on social media; and how social media may give teachers more power relative to the status quo. We invite you to follow along as these topics emerge in the authen...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background/Context All organizations face turnover in their workforce; however, in schools high t... more Background/Context All organizations face turnover in their workforce; however, in schools high turnover can interfere with the effectiveness and efficiency of the school. While past research has examined school-related factors linked to teacher turnover, few studies have examined how external contextual factors are related to teacher turnover. This study examines the role of two external contextual factors in teacher turnover: economic downturns and changes in state curricular policy (the Michigan Merit Curriculum [MMC]). Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study asks the extent to which the economic crisis of 2009 and the implementation of the MMC are related to school-level teacher turnover rates and whether those relationships vary by school locale and within the school year. Population/Participants/Subjects The data include full-time high school teachers in the state of Michigan aggregated to the school level. Research Design Using eight years of statewide l...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background/Context Teachers face many different problems in teaching. Traditionally, research exa... more Background/Context Teachers face many different problems in teaching. Traditionally, research examines the complexity of teaching students and content by focusing on a teacher's physical space and influencing factors therein. While established conceptions of curricular enactment suggest that instructional materials shape both the intended and enacted curriculum, the materials themselves are traditionally conceived of as those that the district officially adopts (e.g., textbooks) or creates (e.g., curricular pacing guides). Yet, in 21st-century schools, a new era of information and technology presides. Facilitated by the cloud, teachers’ professional learning and interactions meld with a global network of colleagues, extending to community of practices online and curating instructional resources therein. In particular, the use of social media to broaden and deepen teachers’ access to instructional resources is a potentially transformative and yet disruptive phenomenon that has im...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Context Individuals’ curation within social media provides a window into their sensemaking and co... more Context Individuals’ curation within social media provides a window into their sensemaking and conceptions of what is worth knowing. Within education, a majority of teachers use social media for professional purposes to access and share instructional resources. Purpose This work examines Pinterest.com and the intersection of influence across virtual and physical spheres as teachers choose and curate instructional resources. Setting: The study is conducted on 19 schools over five districts in three Midwestern states. Participants The sample consists of 108 elementary teachers in total: 34 early career teachers and 74 colleagues. Research Design This is a longitudinal observational study designed to repeatedly measure and track teachers’ online resource-seeking behavior over 52 weeks in the 2015–2016 school year. Data Collection and Analysis Resource curation data were collected for each teacher, as well as early career teachers’ egocentric school network and online network data. Usin...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Thanks to advancements in communication and online social media, there has been a surge of useful... more Thanks to advancements in communication and online social media, there has been a surge of useful online educational resources across the Internet. In addition to supplementing educational materials, these resources could be used in varying education research and potentially advance the quality of education. Nevertheless, conducting such research projects requires using big data techniques and approaches to find meaningful resources and harnessing them in an effective way. In this chapter, we present a roadmap for how to incorporate online social media in education research projects. The roadmap consists of three major components: project initialization, data collection, and data utilization. Furthermore, we present some learned lessons, tips, and tricks, as well as case studies from the Teachers in Social Media project ( www.teachersinsocialmedia.com /). We believe this chapter can be used as a practical reference point for many researchers whose concern is connecting data to their...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Social media and other virtual resource pools (VRPs) have emerged as spaces wherein teachers can ... more Social media and other virtual resource pools (VRPs) have emerged as spaces wherein teachers can connect with other educators and acquire curriculum materials. Though teachers actively engage online, seeking and accessing alternative curriculum materials, little is known about how these efforts may impact culturally relevant education for students with diverse languages, literacies, and cultural practices in the classrooms. Situated in Ladson-Billings's work on culturally relevant pedagogy, this chapter outlines a framework for selecting and evaluating culturally relevant curriculum materials and applies it in a prominent virtual space: Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT). We find that there is a lack of opportunity for deep engagement in culturally relevant education as evidenced in resources found on TpT. This finding suggests unique challenges as well as opportunities for educators and researchers to leverage resources and knowledge from the cloud to the classroom. We conclude with a...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This chapter examines teacher candidates’ reflections on engagement with and in social media as i... more This chapter examines teacher candidates’ reflections on engagement with and in social media as it relates to their professional preparation and understandings of teaching within 21st- century classrooms. Extending earlier work, we present the notion of a Fifth Estate within the digital age, redefining network influence. As power and influence are negotiated across executive, judicial, and legislative enterprises, media—the Fourth Estate—and networks of influence among individuals within the Fifth Estate present a new form of educational professionalism. Here, educators, researchers, and the community may engage directly in virtual space. This chapter focuses in particular on the ways that candidates’ reflections on the ways in which they seek support from the Fifth Estate are shaped by their visions of teaching and learning, their trust in the teaching professionals who share information in the Fifth Estate, their efficacy to evaluate resources, and their autonomy to select and mod...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This article conceptualizes the enactment of virtual instructional resources. We propose a framew... more This article conceptualizes the enactment of virtual instructional resources. We propose a framework that combines traditional concepts of curricular enactment (e.g., the designated, intended, and enacted curriculum) with concepts more salient to the implementation of virtual instructional resources. More specifically, we develop a model that considers the purpose of virtual instruction resources (core or supplemental), the social organizational contexts (e.g., district administrators, teacher professional communities, individual teachers) that shape the enactment of virtual instruction resources, and the process—from creation to enactment—through which virtual instructional resources impact classrooms. We first offer a brief overview of the greater specification of desirable instructional practices and greater centralization, because it is our assertion that virtual instructional resource enactment can best be understood in the context of other important changes and contexts in edu...
<p>Related events are noted via text labels, and the threshold of 50 daily visitors is show... more <p>Related events are noted via text labels, and the threshold of 50 daily visitors is shown in green.</p
In this paper we analyze the relationship between charter school authorizers and student achievem... more In this paper we analyze the relationship between charter school authorizers and student achievement. We perform this analysis using a 10-year panel dataset from Minnesota, a state that permits four distinct types of authorizers—local school boards, postsecondary institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the Minnesota Department of Education. The results of the analysis indicate that there is no statistically significant relationship between
This paper discusses the challenges and lessons learned from conducting observations to measure t... more This paper discusses the challenges and lessons learned from conducting observations to measure the quality of classroom practice for a large-scale study of elementary teachers&#39; mathematics instruction. Specifically, this paper shares our process for obtaining valid data for quality of elementary mathematics instruction; what we learned can inform similar efforts by large, interdisciplinary teams, as well as by instructional coaches and evaluators. Considerations for selecting and testing the viability of a classroom observation instrument, as well as the importance of conducting inter-rater reliability throughout the data collection process, are discussed.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine early career teachers’ Socialized Knowledge Commu... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine early career teachers’ Socialized Knowledge Communities (SKCs) as they relate to the pursuit of mathematics knowledge and teaching. The authors investigate Pinterest, a living data archive, as an opportunity to view teachers’ sense-making and construction of instructional resources. Through this lens, the authors examine how teachers form and share mathematical meaning individually and collectively through professional collaboration. Design/methodology/approach This work characterizes teachers’ curation of mathematical resources both in the kinds of mathematics teachers are choosing and the quality therein. Finally, the authors examine through epistemic network analysis how teachers are sense-making through a statistical approach to identifying their organization of mathematics curation by typology and cognitive process demand. Findings Results show that sampled teachers predominantly curate instructional resources that require student...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This chapter welcomes the reader to the study of social media in education. It begins with a desc... more This chapter welcomes the reader to the study of social media in education. It begins with a description of the background, ranging from general use of social media in today's society to the importance of social media in education. The study of social media in education will inevitably draw on interdisciplinary concepts and networks of relationships among ideas and people. Furthermore, social media can help researchers and educators cross current boundaries, such as the organizational boundary of the school, and the domains of teachers and leaders. Social media also reveals boundaries that have been reinforced or are emergent with social media, such as intergenerational and cross-cultural boundaries, and standard boundaries of chronology. The contributors themselves come from interdisciplinary backgrounds (all focused on education, but from computer science, technology, sociology, policy, psychology, etc.), and they consider their own agency in shaping the field of study of soci...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This is a dialogue between a curmudgeon and a millennial regarding the import of social media for... more This is a dialogue between a curmudgeon and a millennial regarding the import of social media for education and for educational research. The dialogue emerged out of conversations the authors have had with policy makers, researchers, and practitioners over the last three years regarding the impact of social media on education (see teachersinsocialmedia.org). It was presented in the context of Kenneth Frank's research group meeting January 4, 2018. The topics covered include a broad understanding about what social media are and how they relate to teaching and curriculum; understanding about social media as a data artifact; a discussion about how social media platforms shape the interactions of participants; the quality of resources available on social media; why teachers engage in using social media; the lack of research on social media; and how social media may give teachers more power relative to the status quo. We invite you to follow along as these topics emerge in the authen...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background/Context All organizations face turnover in their workforce; however, in schools high t... more Background/Context All organizations face turnover in their workforce; however, in schools high turnover can interfere with the effectiveness and efficiency of the school. While past research has examined school-related factors linked to teacher turnover, few studies have examined how external contextual factors are related to teacher turnover. This study examines the role of two external contextual factors in teacher turnover: economic downturns and changes in state curricular policy (the Michigan Merit Curriculum [MMC]). Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study asks the extent to which the economic crisis of 2009 and the implementation of the MMC are related to school-level teacher turnover rates and whether those relationships vary by school locale and within the school year. Population/Participants/Subjects The data include full-time high school teachers in the state of Michigan aggregated to the school level. Research Design Using eight years of statewide l...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background/Context Teachers face many different problems in teaching. Traditionally, research exa... more Background/Context Teachers face many different problems in teaching. Traditionally, research examines the complexity of teaching students and content by focusing on a teacher's physical space and influencing factors therein. While established conceptions of curricular enactment suggest that instructional materials shape both the intended and enacted curriculum, the materials themselves are traditionally conceived of as those that the district officially adopts (e.g., textbooks) or creates (e.g., curricular pacing guides). Yet, in 21st-century schools, a new era of information and technology presides. Facilitated by the cloud, teachers’ professional learning and interactions meld with a global network of colleagues, extending to community of practices online and curating instructional resources therein. In particular, the use of social media to broaden and deepen teachers’ access to instructional resources is a potentially transformative and yet disruptive phenomenon that has im...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Context Individuals’ curation within social media provides a window into their sensemaking and co... more Context Individuals’ curation within social media provides a window into their sensemaking and conceptions of what is worth knowing. Within education, a majority of teachers use social media for professional purposes to access and share instructional resources. Purpose This work examines Pinterest.com and the intersection of influence across virtual and physical spheres as teachers choose and curate instructional resources. Setting: The study is conducted on 19 schools over five districts in three Midwestern states. Participants The sample consists of 108 elementary teachers in total: 34 early career teachers and 74 colleagues. Research Design This is a longitudinal observational study designed to repeatedly measure and track teachers’ online resource-seeking behavior over 52 weeks in the 2015–2016 school year. Data Collection and Analysis Resource curation data were collected for each teacher, as well as early career teachers’ egocentric school network and online network data. Usin...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Thanks to advancements in communication and online social media, there has been a surge of useful... more Thanks to advancements in communication and online social media, there has been a surge of useful online educational resources across the Internet. In addition to supplementing educational materials, these resources could be used in varying education research and potentially advance the quality of education. Nevertheless, conducting such research projects requires using big data techniques and approaches to find meaningful resources and harnessing them in an effective way. In this chapter, we present a roadmap for how to incorporate online social media in education research projects. The roadmap consists of three major components: project initialization, data collection, and data utilization. Furthermore, we present some learned lessons, tips, and tricks, as well as case studies from the Teachers in Social Media project ( www.teachersinsocialmedia.com /). We believe this chapter can be used as a practical reference point for many researchers whose concern is connecting data to their...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Social media and other virtual resource pools (VRPs) have emerged as spaces wherein teachers can ... more Social media and other virtual resource pools (VRPs) have emerged as spaces wherein teachers can connect with other educators and acquire curriculum materials. Though teachers actively engage online, seeking and accessing alternative curriculum materials, little is known about how these efforts may impact culturally relevant education for students with diverse languages, literacies, and cultural practices in the classrooms. Situated in Ladson-Billings's work on culturally relevant pedagogy, this chapter outlines a framework for selecting and evaluating culturally relevant curriculum materials and applies it in a prominent virtual space: Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT). We find that there is a lack of opportunity for deep engagement in culturally relevant education as evidenced in resources found on TpT. This finding suggests unique challenges as well as opportunities for educators and researchers to leverage resources and knowledge from the cloud to the classroom. We conclude with a...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This chapter examines teacher candidates’ reflections on engagement with and in social media as i... more This chapter examines teacher candidates’ reflections on engagement with and in social media as it relates to their professional preparation and understandings of teaching within 21st- century classrooms. Extending earlier work, we present the notion of a Fifth Estate within the digital age, redefining network influence. As power and influence are negotiated across executive, judicial, and legislative enterprises, media—the Fourth Estate—and networks of influence among individuals within the Fifth Estate present a new form of educational professionalism. Here, educators, researchers, and the community may engage directly in virtual space. This chapter focuses in particular on the ways that candidates’ reflections on the ways in which they seek support from the Fifth Estate are shaped by their visions of teaching and learning, their trust in the teaching professionals who share information in the Fifth Estate, their efficacy to evaluate resources, and their autonomy to select and mod...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This article conceptualizes the enactment of virtual instructional resources. We propose a framew... more This article conceptualizes the enactment of virtual instructional resources. We propose a framework that combines traditional concepts of curricular enactment (e.g., the designated, intended, and enacted curriculum) with concepts more salient to the implementation of virtual instructional resources. More specifically, we develop a model that considers the purpose of virtual instruction resources (core or supplemental), the social organizational contexts (e.g., district administrators, teacher professional communities, individual teachers) that shape the enactment of virtual instruction resources, and the process—from creation to enactment—through which virtual instructional resources impact classrooms. We first offer a brief overview of the greater specification of desirable instructional practices and greater centralization, because it is our assertion that virtual instructional resource enactment can best be understood in the context of other important changes and contexts in edu...
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