Going to a conference or an in-service often inspired me, yet putting the new ideas or methods to use when I got back to my own classroom was never as easy as I hoped, nor as simple as the presenter’s words seemed to apply. Over time I realized that learning curves are much longer than I recognized.
I saw others’ hopes dashed too. Sometimes, a few days after a training session, a colleague would announce, “That doesn’t work. I tried it.” I do not question my colleague’s honesty. I believe each of them did try the ideas—at least they tried some portion of the idea in whatever way they understood it after an initial introduction. The idea of academic freedom was sometimes advanced here, as in, “It’s my classroom and I am not going to do this anymore.”
This leads me to a word I have recently learned to use in a new way. The word is fidelity. This word is probably familiar to you; fidelity means, according to Webster’s, loyalty, faithful devotion to duty, or accurate reproduction of sounds or images. How does fidelity fit into education? Fidelity means learning a strategy or method so well that we can accurately use it in the way it was designed to be used.
Fidelity is important in any professional, trained and reliable profession. Doctors and nurses follow protocols because these are shown to cause better patient outcomes. Teachers too are being asked to use research-based methods, in order to cause better student outcomes.
These days schools are researching programs, interventions and protocols in order to select approaches that will help every child to succeed. Effort and thought go into these selections, and approaches which are chosen show great promise. Still, choosing is only the first step. If we as educators cannot accurately implement the methodology—with fidelity—the choosing is for naught.
There are at least three steps to fidelity as we implement new methods: investigation, initiation and full implementation.
Investigation- Whatever team is charged with selection of new approaches will do the research. However, each staff member will also need to find out the reasons for the choice, and the details that make up the method. Gaps in knowledge will always result in gaps in performance. Furthermore, even after the new method becomes commonplace, each new staff member, whether permanent, like newly-hired teachers, or temporary like student teachers and volunteers, will also need to be brought to an understand of the purpose, the procedures and the payoffs of the planned approach.
Initiation – This is the ramping-up phase. Start with the assumption that none of us will be very comfortable or skilled the first few times we try the new approach. Lots of co-planning and debriefing after the first several attempts will move people forward to growing effectiveness, and get us past the discomfort. We should beware of adapting before we have followed the recipe numerous times. Too-early adapting is usually the route to corrupting the original plan. I don’t want my surgeon improvising either, not until she has logged in dozens of by-the-book renditions to be sure her skills are in place.
Full implementation – At this point every participant—all teachers, aides, volunteers and teachers-in-training—have learned about the method or research-based-initiative. They all know what to do, how to do it, and they are actually doing it. Until this is true, no one can say if the idea will work, because it remains a mirage unless all are doing it accurately, in other words, with fidelity.
After fidelity is achieved, then creativity, adaptation and academic freedom properly kick in. Teachers begin to see ways to link the new skills to others, to enrich or build upon this new foundation. But until we can practice our craft with fidelity, the freedom to ignore the protocol would be the freedom to fail our students.
