Posted on by Dr James Shea

Fidelity – why too much of it might be driving teachers out of the profession

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The term fidelity has very much become a contemporary educational buzz word. It can be found in documents from the DfE’s ITT Market Review of Teacher Education to MAT central policies. It’s expected in the delivery of training for the Early Career Framework (ECF) and it is central to many NPQ leadership qualifications. It stems from a central tenet – that the implementation of policy, materials and processes needs to happen as it was intended. I will be clear here that this blog pertains to teaching and learning issues, not issues regarding safeguarding. Safeguarding is an important area and it is intrinsic to good safeguarding that we all follow processes correctly and reliably. This blog refers to communities of practice and how teaching and learning takes place.

We have already seen early rumblings of discontent around fidelity. ECF tutors delivering materials to Early Career Teachers (ECTs) going off-script was very much banned. ECTs should be taught the slides as they were written by the in-house slide authors goes the decree. However, Teacher Tapp’s report into the ECF makes for uncomfortable reading with 65% of primary and 49% of secondary ECTs saying the training doesn’t meet individual teachers’ needs. A clue to the solution for all this is in a little reported statistic that only 6% of ECTs felt that their conversations and interactions with mentors needed to change. Conversations and interactions good – rigidity of scripts and materials not so good.

Lave and Wenger (1991) are well known for their ideas about communities of practice (CoP). It’s quite a straightforward premise – schools, MATs, universities and so forth are communities of practice. The identity of the organisation is made up of interactions between members – called ‘legitimate peripheral participation’. During each participation, each member learns from the other and they also reaffirm their sense of identity within the organisation. Every time a teacher talks to another teacher in the CoP this happens. And your level of mastery within the organisation also counts. Those who have been in the organisation for a long time not only are masters, but are responsible for actions which are more central to the functioning of the community. Further, those who are masters broker the principles and ideas of the community to newcomers and thus ensure the community’s identity is reproduced within the interactions of the newcomers There’s an exchange followed by a reaffirmation (or rejection) of the identity that those in the community hold. It goes further, every time you adapt a resource or produce a resource for the community you undertake a form of reification for the CoP. Imagine, the school is embracing a knowledge rich approach and you produce a booklet which reflects this value within its design. What if the school then buys in another curriculum that replaces your booklet? What if the values that you embedded into your booklet are now not present and yet you are asked to show fidelity to this new ‘master’ author who you have never met and whose work you feel is inferior to your own in delivering good quality teaching to your pupils? You can quickly see how such situations can become quite toxic for those who are used to having interactions within a community. Should you have too many toxic interactions or no interactions at all then you begin to feel disaffected and wish to leave the community.

There are times when new entrants to the community bring new ideas. They may be a senior leader or a regular teacher, but bring challenge to the established ideas of the CoP. Occasional challenge to the CoP’s way of doing things from those within the CoP, whether teacher or senior leader, can be sometimes helpful and is seen, in sociological terms, as an important part of the process of keeping an CoP up to date. Allowing some autonomy and debate is a healthy part of a functioning CoP.

Yet, fidelity is useful. Reification of the principles of an organisation through actions and artefacts is part of the identity of a CoP and the collective vision of a school and its leadership. However, as Wenger warns – too much reification is not so helpful. Too much fidelity can achieve the opposite effect.

Achieving a balance of levels in participation and reification of the CoP is what leaders need to set out to achieve. Excess reification can be an issue. An example would be non-negotiables. ‘All lessons must start with five questions retrieving information from a lesson a year ago, 6 months ago, one month ago and last lesson regardless of the lesson’ (my italics) would be a good example of where adaptation has been removed. Even more, the retrieval might be handed to teachers in workbooks or pre-written slides with an instruction not to adapt. There are a number of issues with that non-negotiable not least from schema theory as well as whether the retrieval of that knowledge (for study purposes) is best placed during valuable teacher time at the start of a lesson on another area of schema. An experienced and knowledgeable teacher should be trusted with the freedom to adapt and, further, also to broker that adaptation to other members of the community.

The downside of removing teacher control is highlighted in a brand new study by Collie and Carol (2023). As teacher control is reduced, teacher workload begins to have a pernicious effect on teachers’ desire to stay in the profession. Their study of 400 teachers demonstrated that there are three profiles: teachers with job control, teachers with some job control and some with vastly reduced job control. They found, “Teachers in the maladaptive and midway profiles also reported greater emotional exhaustion and intentions to quit. The reverse was true for teachers in adaptive profiles – they reported the lowest levels of emotional exhaustion and were least likely to want to quit their job” (Collie and Carol writing in Teacher Magazine).

We should also consider that the majority of teachers will hold a L7 qualification in teacher education in the form of a PGCE or PGDE and some will have taken that further and completed an MA. The QAA L7 descriptors set out carefully what such qualified people are able to do: “demonstrate self-direction and originality…act autonomously in planning and implementing tasks…initiative…decision-making in complex and unpredictable situations…” (QAA, 2014).

The problem comes when you prevent such a deeply qualified person from undertaking any of those things in the name of fidelity. Such qualities are valued across the country in sectors other than teaching and so if we don’t take advantage of those qualities, if we don’t enable teachers to participate in their institution and become part of the institution and help broker newcomers to the institution, then they are more likely to leave that school, that MAT and perhaps our profession. The world of work outside of teaching will happily consume potential employees with that level of qualifications, knowledge and skill set in today’s competitive market.

I am fortunate that I work with a wide range of schools and trusts who really value their staff and involve them in the fabric of the school and MAT community. These trusts and their schools are excellent placements for trainees teachers and I am proud to work with them. But they have got the balance of fidelity right – they work hard as a community to decide what they want fidelity to and they allow staff to adapt learning and teaching using their expert knowledge evidenced by their time earned qualifications (which are a proxy for the above characteristics). It’s important we celebrate those trusts and schools as well as point out the weaknesses in insisting on too much fidelity. The cost is considerable if we consider the loss of those excellent and well qualified teachers who end up leaving our MATs and schools; our university teacher education departments and SCITTs; and without whom the teaching profession would be very much worse off.

You can follow Dr James Shea on twitter at @englishspecial

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Working memory of teachers – how anxiety affects quality of teaching

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We all recall our first foray into teaching as a beginning teacher. Trying to manage the technology of SIMs for the register, meeting and greeting pupils at the door, remembering which childen have specific needs, checking for uniform, managing resources – it seemed to be there were so many things to remember and undertake. And then if you had behavioural issues as well – it could easily all overwhelm you. As experienced teachers, we know that behaviour, interruptions to our classrooms, faulty equipment and so forth, can intervene and make the basic job of teaching and adaptation exceptionally hard. But have you thought about looking at this from the perspective of cognitive science? In particular the focus on working memory?

Working memory has limitations. That’s readily established. It depends on a number of contextual factors, but regardless of those variables, it’s limited. Load it up too much with extraneous load and it stops the basic intrinsic task from being undertaken so easily. We think about this all the time for our pupils, but have we thought about it from the lens of a teacher?

There’s an interesting 2019 paper from Angelidis et al., on how acute cognitive performance anxiety increases threat-interference and impairs working memory performance. It starts from a readily established academic position that we all know about: if you stress about a situational context it affects your ability to do the task. Whether it’s public speaking or playing sport – anxiety can impair the execution. What the paper then goes on to do is to measure working memory using an established psychological test. They then cultivated stress through an established psychological method (ironically, for us as teachers, the stress is created by asking participants to perform a mathematical task whilst receiving scripted negative feedback. Maths anxiety really does need more focus!). What they discovered was that loading up the stress impaired working memory. Now to be clear, the paper acknowledges that it is established academically that some stress is helpful. Too little stress and you underperform. In particular, the focus is on anxiety, not just stress. The paper concludes anxiety is counter-productive to working memory.

Starting from this premise then, you begin to reflect on what teachers use working memory for and what things might impair this capacity. This is in no way comprehensive, but let us look at some basics.

Teachers use working memory to:

1.       Teach – the things we said at the start: managing resources, organising the lesson, asking questions, developing answers and so forth.

2.       To adapt. I separate this out because it relies on constant monitoring of students, how well they are undertaking a task and then intervening and adapting. It happens constantly and continuously as a teacher ensures that adaptation takes place and a feedback rich environment is present.

3.       Recall subject knowledge from long-term memory and apply it to the lesson.

4.       Monitor and manage behaviour. Again, there is a constant focus on behaviour as the teacher scans and ensures attention (and I use that term academically, e.g. attentional control) is maximised throughout the lesson. Very quickly we can see how too much overload, anxiety-related or simple overload could overwhelm working memory here.

5.       Follow non-negotiables. There will be tasks that always have to be followed regardless of the flow of lessons and we note that this is quite the debate in educational circles where they can be seen as unnecessary or interfere with a teacher’s ability to undertake other tasks.

6.       Ensure Ofsted compliance is being followed. I don’t know any teacher who doesn’t think about Ofsted and how they might ‘view’ the things that happen in the classroom. Writing, reading, marking – and if the school is expecting an Ofsted inspection there could be anxiety pushed onto teachers from SLT.

7.       Adult on adult bullying in the school workplace. Hierarchical, horizontal – it doesn’t matter. We all know it exists and is driving teachers from the profession. Half of the stories from that Facebook group for teachers that have left or are leaving the profession cite adult on adult bullying as the cause. That this stress can then impair teacher working memory and thus ability to teach shows that we have to be very careful in this area.

7.       Thinking about the observer’s thoughts before, during and after an observation. Anxiety about an observation can affect the very thing the observer is trying to observe.

8.       Non-teaching things. Let’s be honest here. Teachers are human. They think about divorce, children, bills, cancer, family, relationships, physical and mental health and so forth. These things could be very much related to anxiety and providing what the paper calls ‘threat-interference’ to their working memory capacity.

Quite quickly, we can all see that there are multitudes of stresses and anxiety-inducing factors that could reduce the capacity of a teacher’s working memory. There are also key pinch points in the year where anxiety and stress are high – parents’ evenings or during mock exam marking season for example. All these sources of stress would then have a direct impact on the positive things that we would like teachers to spend that working memory on. But not all stress is bad remember. Reviewing children’s access to learning and introducing adaptation is a healthy stress – it requires careful monitoring and intervention. Creating a feedback rich environment is helpful, but stressful. In a good way. Thinking hard about questions and questioning takes working memory capacity. Recalling subject knowledge really does need working memory capacity and focus and is eminently helpful for the lesson. But if you are trying to cope with poor behaviour then recalling subject knowledge becomes more challenging. If you have anxiety about poor behaviour, even when the behaviour isn’t present, it still affects working memory.

If we are to keep teachers in the profession then we have to focus on the working memory of teachers, not just pupils. We need to think about tackling things like poor behaviour. We need to question ourselves about the helpfulness and accuracy of observations as well as reflect on the impact of the anxiety produced in teachers by Ofsted and even things like non-negotiables. We should be focused on ensuring that things like providing support for teachers going through challenging times with family and health are readily available. Doing things such as these can free up capacity in working memory for the things that really matter in the lesson – the teaching and the adaptation. It’s time to focus on the working memory of teachers, not just pupils.

Dr James Shea https://twitter.com/englishspecial

As part of our ongoing work we periodically undertake research into areas of neuroscience and cognitive science and their application to teaching. If you are interested in being contacted in the future with a view to being a participant, please email james.shea@beds.ac.uk to be placed on a register of interested participants. If a suitable project becomes available in the future you will be contacted and offered an ethically vetted process to give consent to participate.

Posted on by Dr James Shea

Time to forget Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve?

Over the last decade, the conversation around cognitive science and psychology in education has grown ever louder, to the point at which these discourses have come to be seen as one of the dominant theories in contemporary education. Much of the discussion focuses on pedagogy including the role of memory and remembering, with theories of learning and teaching being based on the retrieval of information in the long term. Although the ability to remember information accurately is undoubtedly an important aspect of learning, forgetting is an important issue to consider when thinking about learning and seems to be not as widely discussed within education.

This blog will discuss the seminal work by Ebbinghaus and explore its role in the educational conversation and the many iterations of the forgetting curve which have emerged through teachers applying this to pedagogy.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Ebbinghaus was an experimental psychologist who was interested in finding a mathematical relationship between the elapsed time post learning and forgetting. He conducted a number of experiments in the early 1880s in order to establish this.

In his experiments, Ebbinghaus attempted to learn a row of thirteen nonsense syllables until he was able to freely recall each one in the correct order. After a preset time interval, he would relearn the syllables, given the fact he had forgotten them, until he could once again freely recall each one in the correct order.  

It is important to recognise that Ebbinghaus’ view on forgetting was not a measure of how many syllables that could be recalled after a specific amount of time but the amount of time, or repetitions, it took to relearn the same list of syllables after forgetting. A measure he called savings. Savings can be presented as a decimal or a percentage and is calculated as follows:

If it took someone initially 10 minutes to learn the syllables but it only took them 8 minutes to relearn after a set time then the saving is 2 minutes. Savings is the 2/10 = 0.2

If the relearning took the same amount of time, then the savings would be 0 and if there was perfect recall without relearning, the saving would be 1 or 100%.

The original experimental results have been successfully replicated a number of times, but I am going to use data from the study by Murre and Dros in 2015 (paper can be found here) to discuss the forgetting curve due to the fidelity of their experiment. In their paper, Murre and Dros replicated Ebbinghaus’ experimental procedure and calculated savings using time. The resulting forgetting curve on a linear time scale is shown below:

The curve shows a general exponential decrease in savings. What is interesting is the higher than expected result for 1 day. Ebbinghaus also found this but he was able to fit the data point to the curve generated from his ‘forgetting equation’ so he overlooked this at the time. However, he did replicate, along with other subsequent researchers, this result after the publication of his work. This decrease or ‘slowing’ of forgetting from these experiments is thought to be due to the role of sleep in memory consolidation.

Interestingly, Murre and Dros recorded the number of correct responses (correct syllable in the correct position) during the relearning phases of their experiments. What this showed is that the proportion of correct answers after 20 minutes was marginally above 0.3 and this only decreased slightly at the longer time intervals.

Should we forget the curve?

From a position of experimental psychology the work of Ebbinghaus needs to be studied and remembered as it paved the way for psychology to have robust methods and rigour in the design of experiments that are still used today. The fact that the results of Ebbinghaus have been replicated a number of times is testament to this.

In terms of the educational conversation, it is useful to ask if we actually need a mathematical model (the graph with numbers) to tell us that learners forget. It is clear that what the Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve does show is that:

1. a high proportion of information that is learnt is rapidly forgotten 

2. the longer you leave before relearning something, the longer it will take you to relearn

I think I would be hard pushed to find a teacher that genuinely would disagree with these statements, with or without knowledge of the curve. The question we ask then, what use does awareness of Ebbinghaus’ curve brings to a teacher beyond the knowledge that forgetting takes place over a period of time after the point of learning?

Certainly, the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the curve is not helpful. Making claims like “you only remember x% of information after y time” is clearly untrue if you are using Ebbinghaus as your evidence base. Applying ideas like this to education is widely problematic and can result in unhelpful numbered things about forgetting, models like the infamous learning pyramid.

Additionally, there is a danger with using a mathematical model rather than just having good awareness that forgetting takes place and that there are well researched methods to remedy this. For example, we might say we forget 50% of something we have learned within an hour. This sounds plausible and whilst you might worry about all the different permutations, that’s the least of the problems. Using that premise, I could simply say, well I’ll double the information learned at the start and then they won’t forget what I intended them to learn. And of course, the teacher in you will say that’s nonsense.

Being focused on forgetting is a good thing, but it is important to think critically in our application of science just like Ebbinghaus himself was.