Modeling Innovation Diffusion in an Online Tutoring Network

Professional development for schools and institutions is often ineffective, and costly (Gates Foundation, 2014). When teachers are permitted to choose their own professional development, their satisfaction and adoption of new pedagogies increases. Due to the nature of personal preferences and a focus on individualized professional development to increase teacher learning, multiple pedagogies will likely be adopted into these teacher networks. A new pedagogical practice may enter a network due to the preference of only a small number of teachers, yet spread quickly due to network structures. Providers of professional development, often school districts or other governing agencies, capitalize on the influential ability of a few teachers. Approximately half of research on professional development study programs that utilize a cascade model of teacher training (Popova et. al. 2016). Some of these programs employ a “train the trainer” approach, where a teacher leader is guided through the professional development as a learner by an expert, then trained on how to guide other teachers through the same experience (Borko et al. 2017). In other programs, teachers are selected by the administration to attend conferences or workshops and are asked to report back on their experience (Day, 1999). While research has found that cascade models promote the transfer of skills rather than values (Solomon & Tresman, 1999), they are often still the chosen form of professional development due to time and monetary constraints. To the extent that practice can be changed by treating only a few teachers, through a cascade model of professional development, it may make more sense to focus on identifying the most central figures in a professional social network, rather than expose all teachers to a required professional development. Alternatively, if practices can be transmitted across different vectors (e.g. via assigning students to teachers), then this too could inform the design of educational intervention at scale. In this project, we explore how adoption of a digital whiteboard spreads across two distinct types of network: a chatroom graph and a tutoring session Figure 1: Examples of the whiteboard tool.