Nienke Moolenaar
Nienke Moolenaar is a faculty member at the Department of Education at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
Nienke earned her PhD (cum laude - with honor) in June 2010 at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on research on social networks in elementary school teams. Her dissertation has been awarded the 2010 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in the category Educational Leadership and Strategy.
In her dissertation, titled 'Ties with potential: Nature, antecedents, and consequences of social networks in school teams', Nienke focused on how social relationships among teachers matter for schools, in terms of innovation, trust, shared decision-making, and ultimately, student achievement. She conducted her research in 61 elementary schools in The Netherlands. She also replicated her study in the US in five elementary schools in the greater San Diego, CA area. During this period, Nienke was in residence at the University of California, San Diego, where she collaborated with Prof. Dr. Alan Daly.
From 2012 to 2014, Nienke worked at the University of California, San Diego on research funded by a Rubicon Award from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Her work focuses on the co-evolution of social networks and educational change. Drawing on complexity theory and literature on dynamic systems, and using longitudinal network modeling and multilevel modeling, her work aims to understand how educators' social networks change during educational reform and how this network change supports and constrains school improvement in terms of teachers' instructional practice and student achievement.
Supervisors: Peter J.C. Sleegers and Sjoerd Karsten
Phone: +31 6 24 24 57 59
Address: P.O.Box 80140
3508 TC Utrecht
The Netherlands
Nienke earned her PhD (cum laude - with honor) in June 2010 at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on research on social networks in elementary school teams. Her dissertation has been awarded the 2010 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in the category Educational Leadership and Strategy.
In her dissertation, titled 'Ties with potential: Nature, antecedents, and consequences of social networks in school teams', Nienke focused on how social relationships among teachers matter for schools, in terms of innovation, trust, shared decision-making, and ultimately, student achievement. She conducted her research in 61 elementary schools in The Netherlands. She also replicated her study in the US in five elementary schools in the greater San Diego, CA area. During this period, Nienke was in residence at the University of California, San Diego, where she collaborated with Prof. Dr. Alan Daly.
From 2012 to 2014, Nienke worked at the University of California, San Diego on research funded by a Rubicon Award from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Her work focuses on the co-evolution of social networks and educational change. Drawing on complexity theory and literature on dynamic systems, and using longitudinal network modeling and multilevel modeling, her work aims to understand how educators' social networks change during educational reform and how this network change supports and constrains school improvement in terms of teachers' instructional practice and student achievement.
Supervisors: Peter J.C. Sleegers and Sjoerd Karsten
Phone: +31 6 24 24 57 59
Address: P.O.Box 80140
3508 TC Utrecht
The Netherlands
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Book chapters by Nienke Moolenaar
Purpose. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which teachers’ work related social networks are affected by teacher and school demographic characteristics.
Method. Survey data were collected among 316 educators from 13 elementary schools in a large educational system in the Netherlands. Using social network analysis, in particular multilevel p2 modeling, we analyzed the effect of teacher and school demographics on individual teachers’ probability of having relationships in a work discussion network.
Conclusions. Findings indicate that differences in having relationships were associated with differences in gender, grade level, working hours, formal position, and experience. We also found that educators tend to prefer relationships with educators with the same gender and from the same grade level. Moreover, years of shared experience as a school team appeared to affect the likelihood of teacher relationships around work related discussion.
Keywords: Professional learning community, Social Capital, Social Networks, Trust, Multilevel
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The key notion underlying most leadership research is that the behaviors or attributes of a leader, typically a person in a formal position, matter for a variety of outcomes. While offering valuable insights in the role of an individual leader in enhancing outcomes, this dominant view of leadership behavior and attributes underestimates the impact of social network position and ties.
Scholars that examine leadership are increasingly recognizing the importance of social processes and relational linkages involved in leading. Leadership in its broadest sense has often been conceptualized as a process of influence toward an outcome. Social relationships therefore may provide leaders with the necessary infrastructure to exert social influence in achieving individual and organizational goals. A social network perspective brings to the fore the dependencies of actors within a social system, shifting the perspective away from individual attributes toward a focus on relational linkages, thereby placing leadership directly in the role of a social undertaking. Leadership from a network perspective emphasizes that the organizational interdependence of action that is reflected by a network of ties ultimately moderates, influences, and even determines the direction, speed, and depth of a planned activity. Research on the intersection of social networks and leadership supplements our knowledge of leadership as a complex and dynamic social process.