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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Transposable habitus not disposable habitus

We discuss epistemology frequently here at the university and one thing we look at is whether knowledge is disposable or transposable. If you prioritise knowledge, you want to learn it. You make a conscious effort to recall it. If you don’t value the knowledge, you might comply with holding the knowledge within a context, but then throw it away once you leave the context. Quite simply, it becomes disposable knowledge.

I coined disposable knowledge in my book on technology-led learning. The premise is quite simple and still holds – some knowledge is disposable. E.g., if I want to do something on the computer, I don’t attend a ten week course on Microsoft Word. I google or YouTube some direct instruction, I learn just enough temporarily to undertake the task and then I throw this learning away. I deprioritise it and forget it. Why? Because if I really need it again, I’ll look up the direct instruction again. I perceive that it has little value for me in future unknown situations and therefore it does not get added to my store of highly valued transposable knowledge. There is also no escaping that some knowledge can become more disposable as time passes. Scientific and technological advancement can transfer knowledge from the science domain to the history domain. We once used to learn more about metallurgy than we do now!

We can now go further, if you are in a professional context where direct instructional coaching is used to ensure you have fidelity to a particular approach, unless you believe in the evidence behind this ‘knowledge’ then it again becomes liable to being disposed. For knowledge to be retained in the long term it has to be valued to prevent itself being disposed of. Perhaps even worse, it becomes defunct knowledge: knowledge we have, but deliberately desist in using.

Transposable knowledge, habits and skills combined equates to habitus, that term coined by Pierre Bourdieu – whose work has attracted more attention since Ofsted embraced the idea of cultural capital. These ideas all explore a central theme, the unknown future. We build up cultural capital and a transposable habitus that enables us to be successful in different, unknown future areas of our lives. We accept, always, that there are limitations to these concepts of Bourdieu, but this concept of transposable habitus does have a place in education.

We now turn to our teachers and teacher education – where we find trainees are building knowledge, habits and skills for future unknown schools – their transposable habitus which will equip them for a career in teaching and education. However, if they are in a school with a very fixed way of teaching and, even more, if it is a way of teaching that the trainee doesn’t believe in or feels is not evidenced, then it becomes a disposable way of teaching. No matter how much you use instructional coaching or practice based teacher development unless the trainee teacher sees the value in the knowledge being learned they will dispose of it. Instead of moving from one school to the next with a large transposable habitus, they throw portions of it away and enter their next school with a much smaller amount of transposable habitus about teaching. We are fortunate in that our partner schools and mentors understand this and help the trainees explore different ideas about teaching beyond that in their room, department or school. Even more, the mentors are aware of the contextual limitations of an approach and embrace this limitation rather than hide it. If the mentor doesn’t use a projector, they understand that another school might be passionate about dual coding and so ensure the trainee explores this approach as well as not using a projector. Group work is another example. A good mentor explores both teacher-led and student-led work with their trainee regardless of their personal opinions.

One assessment on our course is that the trainee has to design a sequence of learning (a scheme or unit of work) and accompany it with an essay written at Masters level justifying their designed sequence of learning. They will cite both subject-specific pedagogy, such as the teaching of inference, and they will cite non-subject specific theories of learning: such as cognitive science, constructivism and behaviourism. They will also draw on theories of knowledge and assessment – it’s a complex task. They can draw on their school placements, the pre-existing planning they have seen and their wider reading for this assessment and it helps them crystallise their professional and autonomous ideas about teaching their subject. The planned learning that makes it into this assessment is the planned learning that they believe in. We are, through this assessment, trying to create in the trainee, transposable habitus that they can take to any school in England.

In designing this sequence of learning they can draw in the ideas, teaching and planning they have undertaken in their school placements. They hold these ideas up to the robust criticality of writing at L7 and justify their personal choices. They begin to make evidence informed decisions about their design of a curriculum. This habitus is transposable. They will hold their future planning up to such standards.

When a recently qualified teacher arrives at your school to begin their early career you have to be careful not to be too judgemental. What if much of what they learned was not valued by them and thus not transposable? What if the ideas they have learned to value aren’t valued at your school? They could have a miserable first year which could end with them leaving the profession. They might write their training and first job off as evidence that they were not cut out for teaching and we might lose an otherwise excellent practitioner. This debate also shows the need for entrenching teacher autonomy. If we want to keep teachers in the profession then we need to think about how to utilise and develop transposable habitus.

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Posted on by Dr James Shea

Proof – the final frontier for teachers

Is it time to return to the cult of the teacher?

It’s the first thing you get told when you come into teaching: what works with one class doesn’t necessarily work with another.

A trainee teacher might lament after a lesson (that did not go so well) where they had repeated the plan from another class and their sage mentor would say – it might have worked quite well with 9x, but 9y are a different class.

This is not about learning styles, which has been substantially criticised. This is about knowing the individuals in your classes. A good teacher is always thinking about ‘maximum learning’. Don’t mistake this for, ‘entertainment’, ‘engagement’ or any other glib insult. We are not ‘making our subject interesting’ – our subject is interesting. But we are fine tuning the lesson to the unique community of learners that have been assembled to experience the subject with us in the form of lessons.

If we are really honest this is one of the biggest issues with the accountability system. A school’s results and standards of teaching don’t go up and down so dramatically as measured from year to year as the data likes to report. What happens is that one cohort is very different to another in terms of collated outcomes. A senior manager prays that a specific cohort goes through the system out of sync with the ofsted inspection cycle of a school. God help any school if ofsted turns up shortly after their one dodgy cohort’s variable results. This is really an amplified version of what Becky Allen refers to as ‘noise’ – the variables that can affect outcomes and attempts to measure progress using what is actually non-comparable data. A school could be comparing one good cohort with one not so good cohort and be deemed terrible or amazing depending on which came first. I’m afraid Progress 8 has done nothing to prevent this from happening as others have already said. The off-rolling we have seen is a direct result of people trying to manage this ‘noise’ and its impact on accountability measures. Indeed, having read Becky Allen’s blogs on closing the gap you begin to think the issue with the RCTs of the EEF is that they need to make stronger their awareness of ‘noise’ and how schools cater for this when exploring ideas that emerge from the RCTs. Rather than use the RCTs as eternal proof that setting, technology or any other intervention ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t work’, one should see the output from these RCTs as a source of information and evidence that could be useful when looking at one’s own specific cohorts (and remember, every year group is different).

All too often, we end up looking for the silver bullet. We try to remove the very thing which makes us human from the school system – our variability. Once all variability is removed then we can finally say that our resource or pedagogy is proven to work with all. Yet the inherent variables and other influential attributes all mean we cannot prove that something ‘works’ for everyone and every school.  That’s why social science can never lose its subjectivity or its lack of ability to resolutely prove things in the way that medicine likes to do. It’s therefore why you can’t ‘prove’ anything in education. But you can get the next best thing: a teacher.

A teacher, through forming a deep relationship with a class, can use their knowledge, intuition and teaching to maximise the outcomes for the individuals in that class. Those outcomes will be many, varied and not always measured or be measurable. Those outcomes will be assessment outcomes, aspirations, values, passions, inspiration, personal growth and so forth. Some will be quantified and some will be qualitative. The teacher will subjectively work out which methods, from their vast list of methods and evidence, are best for this group of individuals. It’s an amazing feat of human engineering and it’s a time-honoured ability: to be a truly amazing teacher for a class. And it’s the closest thing we will get to proving something works in education. You want a silver bullet? There it is: the teacher.