Hook and lever hypothesis

The data from our 2016-2018 with the Upper Valley Teaching Place Collaborative in Vermont and New Hampshire has got me pretty excited. It started with the three years of Place-based Ecology Education (PBEE) teacher practice survey data reported in last year’s Summary Outline of Evaluation Findings. It was when we took a finer-grained look at the data, though, that we saw the exciting pattern.

Put simply, our data suggest that professional development is a great way to get PBEE going in a school, but the real action for making PBEE happen in a deep, ongoing way is at the school and team level. So, PD is the “hook,” but networks and culture are the “lever.” The main clue was that the teachers reporting the highest level of PBEE practice in the quantitative survey items tended to be the ones that responded to the open-ended question about what helped or hindered their practice with themes relating the importance of team mentality, time with colleagues, and/or a professional community.

We were able to include these findings in our article just published in the Education Sciences journal.

Does idea of the critical importance of teams and networks match with your data and/or experience?