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

Posted on by Dr James Shea

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 · 6 Comments

Cognitive Science v Neuroscience: retrieval at the start of a lesson or not?

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It’s a simple premise: if you think memory is important to learning, then memory formation is, by this very argument, important as well. And memory formation comes before memory conditioning (e.g., retrieval practice). With the publication of a neuroscience paper on memory formation we now have convergence between cognitive science’s research in how memory works [in education] with neuroscience’s research in how memory works. Remembering knowledge over time and how to do something, after a gap of time, are very much vogue in education right now and rightly so. However, this article is about the publication of neuroscience research and what this neuroscience paper suggests about the way some in education will approach their lesson design as a consequence (a longer write up of these ideas can be found here).

Let’s get some caveats out the way. The research in this paper is about cells in the brain and formation of memory through the expression of genes. It’s not about the more social concept of mind, nor indeed does the paper suggest what teachers might do with this new knowledge of the brain. I’m not claiming that this paper proves anything about how we should teach, but I’m aware that it does bring criticality to the way that some think that memories are formed and need to be conditioned (especially within education) and so it is worth investigation. It’s such a simple premise: do you think memory is important to learning? If the answer is yes, then memory formation is just as important as memory conditioning, but more importantly comes first in the time line. And, you might ask yourself, how long is that time line?

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So what does this neuroscience paper say? Well it said that the formation and recall of memory works a bit like a body reacting to a vaccine. The first jab makes the body receptive to it and gets it ready for the booster. When the booster arrives a surge of gene expression takes place, the strength of which controls the number of cells ready to be recalled in case they are required (e.g. if an infection shows up then the body is ready to react). So there are three parts of the process. The initial activation is the first step – this is where memory is formed for the first time. The next part of the priming process is at a genetic level – a reformulation of the cell architecture which is effectively ‘readying architecture for gene expression’. Finally, a warm reactivation event in which expression of the arc gene happens across the reformulated architecture ready for future remembering. The reactivation event is the crucial event. We can speculate then, that when you teach you are laying down the first activation- a first pass of the schema* itself, but the gene expression at this point will be small. Indeed, over time, the effectiveness will wane as the potential memory cells have not had a second reactivation event (weak remembering (forgetting) is why teachers are using the conditioning approach of retrieval practice so much). When you do enter the reactivation window that is when you supercharge the memory cell formation. Further, should you need the schema to be ready for recall and to be produced on demand (e.g. an examination), you undertake a warm reactivation event yet again to prepare for the recall (retrieval) event itself. Instead of going straight into a full retrieval of memory cold, there should be a warm up process where you are getting the memory ready to access the schema in case it is required. Then you should ask for a full retrieval. It is very important to note the distinction between retrieval (accessing memory cells) and retrieval practice (conditioning a rote response to stimuli through the ‘testing effect’). Our work here is focused on the strong formation of memory and subsequent strong remembering, not on conditioning a response.

*Note discussions around the concept of schema

3 Stage Process of Priming

Stage 1 – teaching and re-teaching of new/schema through an activation phase (followed by a delay of some days to allow the biological reformulation of architecture). Update: Phase 1 trials suggest that a 3-7 days gap following activation is the optimum time span.

Stage 2 – warm reactivation of the schema leading to revisiting the schema from Stage 1 (this triggers the expression of the arc gene needed for memory formation)

Stage 3 – remembering of schema associated to Stage 2 alongside teaching of new schema

How does this affect teaching then? Well, currently, there is a lot of focus on retrieval practice, a psychological conditioning process – retrieving knowledge repeatedly with the view to making the recall stronger through something called the testing effect. Yet this paper is suggesting that there is a big elephant in the room. Memory formation needs to happen first. And memory formation takes much longer than you think. If you go straight for a retrieval quiz then that’s the equivalent of asking the schema to be recalled without having reformulated cells ready to express the arc genes. You are still in the activation phase. It’s not necessarily strengthening the memory formation. Cold questions and retrieval quizzes at the start of the lesson and very soon after the first learning don’t reflect what this neuroscience research says. What you should be doing is something else – controlling the priming event.

Controlling the priming event means knowing architecture has formed and is only available for a short window of time and that you can take advantage of this knowledge through a variety of pedagogies. Think about discussions and recaps of the topic – quite wide ranging discussions rather than small minutiae. Then, in the main part of the lesson, the small minutiae will more accurately be recalled and more importantly, the process of priming and the subsequent remembering (producing memory to face the challenge) will work more effectively. It is important to see the nuances here of some of the things we do in teaching. Retrieval at the start of a lesson of content that is not going to be used is reactivating the wrong (cells containing the) schema. In addition, that’s a different process altogether – that’s conditioning – (retrieval and retrieval practice are two different things). According to the science in this paper, you want to be ensuring that you actually work with the schema for which the cellular architecture was created as that will lead to expression of arc genes which are responsible for creating more memories. In some ways the paper informs us on the gaps between cognitive science and neuroscience.

The main gap is this – much of the work on what we do as teachers is once memory has been formed: reducing extraneous load, conditioning memory through revisiting and so forth. However, all of this practice is reliant on the idea that memory is formed in a one off event and that we begin the conditioning process immediately. What the science in this paper says is that is not how memory is formed. And this has implications for the way we as teachers approach learning. There is a period of time where memory is formed. It’s not instantaneous and nor is it the time for conditioning. Instead, it’s the time for supercharging memory formation. If memory is important to learning, then creating strong memories could, we speculate, lead to more efficient use of time by a teacher later on once memory has been formed. Less time spent conditioning memory would free up time for more learning of further knowldge to take place – but that’s something for our research study to consider.

The future could be, one could speculate – not starting the lesson with the conditioning process of retrieval practice, but starting the lesson with warm reactivation of the schema and with a teacher awareness of who is not meeting this learning for the second time (e.g. absences, barriers to learning) and how long it has been since the activation phase. In particular, you should not start the lesson with retrieval of schema which won’t be used in the lesson as this does not lead to expression of the arc gene necessary for memory formation. The lesson itself should contain both remembering and new learning together as the brain constructs the new knowledge (or skill) into gene expression and starts to get further architecture ready for the next warm reactivation event. When that happens, it will be ready to swing into action with both the original knowledge and the new knowledge constructed into a single schema. This stronger formation of memory will lead to better remembering and require less future retrieval practice (because we currently use conditioning to supplement weak memory formation). Retrieval should still form part of the lesson, but if incorporated into the main lesson following a warm reactivation event at the start of the lesson then it will be more effective. And lastly, remember, the schema used should be relevant to the lesson.

It is a potential change in the sequence of learning that we have come to see become quite mainstream. First, an activation event, then a gap of time to allow for reformulation of the cell architecture (Phase 1 trials suggest the optimum time for this gap to be 3-7 days), then either a warm reactivation event alone or warm reactivation and new knowledge together to start the architectural reformulation necessary for expression of the arc gene in the next warm reactivation event. In addition, less retrieval practice is necessary. This is because we currently use retrieval practice (interleaved or not) to condition a pupil into producing knowledge in response to a question – known as the testing effect. By making the original formation of memory stronger through the priming process (expression of the arc gene) remembering will be stronger. You are supercharging the formation of memory through creating more gene expression at cell level. We have worked up further thinking here on what the implications would be for interleaved retrieval pratice, Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, OFSTED inspections, NPQs and even SEND. All of these areas could be affected by this concept of supercharging memory formation.

There is lot of theorising there and I’m sure those with good knowledge of both science and education will be able to add more thoughts. This paper does not at any point inform us how to teach and it’s important to emphasise that point. There is a major caveat also which is that taking science and turning it into educational practice has lots of limitations in terms of ecological validity. However, it is an interesting paper and it does suggest a different, and scientific rather than theoretical, model of how memory is formed and how a priming event could be better than retrieval for the start of a lesson.

We have launched a two phase project to investigate the concept of priming and enhancing the formation of memory using these ideas. The active part of this project will run from September 2021 to July 2022 and we have completed Phase 1. Our thanks to everyone who participated. We are now working on the tool kit for Phase 2. We recruited 40 schools who are currently participating in Phase 2 of this research. If you are interested in being part of this research (we still have space for further schools in Phase 2) or any other research projects then drop me an email at james.shea@beds.ac.uk or you can find me on Twitter at @englishspecial.

Dr James Shea, Principal Lecturer in Teacher Education

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