Facilitating social learning in teacher education: Development of a questionnaire for practise

Participating in networks for learning and knowledge sharing has become an important part of teachers’ lifelong professional development. Teachers develop networks within and outside schools that help them to learn, solve problems, and innovate. Access to such networks supports teachers to deal with the increasing complexity of their work. To support professional development in teacher networks or teacher learning groups (TLGs) we developed a questionnaire based on the Dimensions of Social Learning (DSL) Framework of Vrieling, Van den Beemt, and De Laat (2016). A two-phase research design was applied to construct and validate the questionnaire. The first phase (a case study) resulted in observation criteria for assessing the social configuration in TLGs. The second phase (a score validation study) resulted in a 31-item questionnaire for measuring such configuration. This questionnaire met initial standards of reliability and validity. Two additional research activities (i.e., complementary score validation and a confirmatory factor analysis) are planned to optimize questionnaire quality.