Scaling Up Teacher Networks Across and Within European Schools: The Case of eTwinning

The aim of this research is to look at the key elements that help sustain and scale up a European-wide teacher network called eTwinning. eTwinning, which has more than 250,000 European teachers as members in April 2014, has become an incubator for pedagogical innovation in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for cross-border school collaboration and for formal and informal teacher professional development. The chapter synthesises a series of studies on eTwinning - some of which are more qualitative case studies and others are based on social network analysis (SNA) - focusing on factors that contribute to the further development and mainstreaming of eTwinning. In particular, we look at the growth of the network and its reach among teacher population in Europe. Then, we move to observe deeper level collaboration through pedagogical projects and show how the network can be studied to understand its underlying structures. Finally, through case studies on eTwinning school teams, we also look at micro-level mechanisms for teacher collaboration within an institution to spread pedagogical innovation at the local level.