Dr Thomas Cowhitt

  • Lecturer in Educational Change and Collaborative Improvement (School of Education)

email: Thomas.Cowhitt@glasgow.ac.uk

11 Eldon Street, Glasgow, Glasgow City, Scotland, United Kingdom, G3 6NH

Import to contacts

ORCID iDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4104-6155

Biography

I am a Lecturer in Educational Change and Collaborative Improvement with the School of Education. My research focuses on practitioner-led school improvement. Specifically, my research involves forming close partnerships with classroom teachers and school administrators as they pursue or develop their own improvements to teaching and learning. I am primarily interested in exploring how practitioners engage with regional and national educational systems and their methods for scaling up their own school improvement initiatives beyond their own schools.

At the University of Glasgow, I am part of the Education Leadership and Policy (ELP) Research and Teaching Group (RTG). We are a diverse group of researchers. However, our expertise is in comparative and international education, educational improvement and system change, governance and public policy, educational leadership, childhood practice, and labour market and socio-economic impacts of education.

Beyond my role with the School of Education here in Glasgow, I have active affiliations with the University of Nottingham and the University of Cambridge. I am currently working on a Leverhulme Trust funded project with PI Toby Greany at the School of Education in Nottingham. The project is called Equity and Quality in Local Learning Systems (EQuaLLS). We are examining the impact of large-scale academisation and the fragmentation of local learning landscapes in England on continuing professional development and learning (CPDL) opportunities for teachers. I am also a Methods Fellow with the Cambridge Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Cambridge, where I lead workshops in web-based and open-source Social Network Analysis tools. This work includes developing and leading online training modules in RStudio and the R programming language for statistical computing and graphics.

Prior to joining the School of Education, I was a secondary school teacher in the Midwest region of the United States. I have a deep interest in improving educational opportunities for young people. When I was a classroom practitioner, I was involved in the development and rollout of a 1:1 technology initiative for a school district and was successful in obtaining several teaching grants for integrating technology into the curriculum. My research continues to explore practitioner-led technology integration and the development of 21C/future skills in schools.

Publications

List by: Type | Date

Jump to: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2020
Number of items: 7.

2024

Cowhitt, T. , Brown, J. T. and Antonio, L. A. (2024) The emergence and evolution of ambiguous ideas: an innovative application of social network analysis to support systematic literature reviews. Scientometrics, (doi: 10.1007/s11192-024-05144-7) (Early Online Publication)

2023

Greany, T., Cowhitt, T. and Downey, C. (2023) Do informal networks become formalised over time? Analysing school networks and multi-academy trust membership in England using ego-centric analysis. Journal of Educational Change, (doi: 10.1007/s10833-023-09485-7) (Early Online Publication)

Greany, T., Noyes, A., Gripton, C., Cowhitt, T. and Hudson, G. (2023) Local learning landscapes: exploring coherence, equity and quality in teacher professional development in England. Documentation. University of Nottingham.

Cowhitt, T. , Greany, T. and Downey, C. (2023) Storytelling with networks: realizing the explanatory potential of network diagrams through the integration of qualitative data. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 22, pp. 1-15. (doi: 10.1177/16094069231189369)

2022

Kotsiou, A., Fajardo-Tovar, D. D., Cowhitt, T. , Major, L. and Wegerif, R. (2022) A scoping review of Future Skills frameworks. Irish Educational Studies, 41(1), pp. 171-186. (doi: 10.1080/03323315.2021.2022522)

2020

Cowhitt, T. , Butler, T. and Wilson, E. (2020) Using social network analysis to complete literature reviews: a new systematic approach for independent researchers to detect and interpret prominent research programs within large collections of relevant literature. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 23(5), pp. 483-496. (doi: 10.1080/13645579.2019.1704356)

Cowhitt, T. and Cutts, A. (2020) Using network analysis to compare bibliographic database journal coverage. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 32(3), pp. 195-210. (doi: 10.1080/1941126X.2020.1790952)

This list was generated on Sat Oct 12 16:46:57 2024 BST.
Number of items: 7.

Articles

Cowhitt, T. , Brown, J. T. and Antonio, L. A. (2024) The emergence and evolution of ambiguous ideas: an innovative application of social network analysis to support systematic literature reviews. Scientometrics, (doi: 10.1007/s11192-024-05144-7) (Early Online Publication)

Greany, T., Cowhitt, T. and Downey, C. (2023) Do informal networks become formalised over time? Analysing school networks and multi-academy trust membership in England using ego-centric analysis. Journal of Educational Change, (doi: 10.1007/s10833-023-09485-7) (Early Online Publication)

Cowhitt, T. , Greany, T. and Downey, C. (2023) Storytelling with networks: realizing the explanatory potential of network diagrams through the integration of qualitative data. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 22, pp. 1-15. (doi: 10.1177/16094069231189369)

Kotsiou, A., Fajardo-Tovar, D. D., Cowhitt, T. , Major, L. and Wegerif, R. (2022) A scoping review of Future Skills frameworks. Irish Educational Studies, 41(1), pp. 171-186. (doi: 10.1080/03323315.2021.2022522)

Cowhitt, T. , Butler, T. and Wilson, E. (2020) Using social network analysis to complete literature reviews: a new systematic approach for independent researchers to detect and interpret prominent research programs within large collections of relevant literature. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 23(5), pp. 483-496. (doi: 10.1080/13645579.2019.1704356)

Cowhitt, T. and Cutts, A. (2020) Using network analysis to compare bibliographic database journal coverage. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 32(3), pp. 195-210. (doi: 10.1080/1941126X.2020.1790952)

Research Reports or Papers

Greany, T., Noyes, A., Gripton, C., Cowhitt, T. and Hudson, G. (2023) Local learning landscapes: exploring coherence, equity and quality in teacher professional development in England. Documentation. University of Nottingham.

This list was generated on Sat Oct 12 16:46:57 2024 BST.

Supervision

  • Orr, Alastair
    Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland: An investigation of multi-agency leadership from an educational perspective

Teaching

I am currently the course leader for Research Application, a Yr 2 core course in the Education MSc: Online Distance Learning post-graduate taught course. I am also a co-developer for a new elective called Educational Change for Collaborative Improvement that will first run in the Spring of 2023 as an elective for the Education, Public Policy & Equity MSc programme.