Recently while working with teachers on curriculum implementation, I’ve been thinking a lot about why the phrases “implementation with fidelity” and “implementation with integrity” have always confused or annoyed me at best and enraged me at worst.
- Confused: “To whom or what do you want to me to be faithful?”
- Annoyed: “Who decides if I have integrity?”
- Enraged: “Where are my students in all of this?”
In the discourse at large, fidelity and integrity are usually talked about as individual traits: soldiers, leaders, or politicians are lauded for their integrity, partners demonstrate fidelity to one another, and people exhibit faith in a higher power or in moral values. When translated to educational discourse, conversations about fidelity and integrity feel condescending and misguided to me because they define successful curriculum implementation as an individual, moral relationship to the curriculum itself or to the curriculum designers, rather than to the students and community who teachers serve.
Fidelity to whom?
Implementation “with fidelity” generally means using an evidence-based practice or teaching the curriculum as it was written or intended to be taught by the researchers or curriculum designers. As Doris Santoro (2016) argues, “the term fidelity is deployed to morally manipulate and discipline public schoolteachers to follow the dictates of corporate interests” (p. 264). Santoro reminds us that the opposite of fidelity suggests wrongdoing, unfaithfulness, and breaking norms or agreements, and it is usually associated with religions or ideologies (p. 265). Asking educators to implement curriculum with fidelity sets up an impossible binary: If I resist the push to center curricular materials and external authorities mean I choose to become an educational infidel?
Curriculum implementation with integrity is intended to be “more flexible” and to allow teachers to adapt to the needs of their students—an important adjustment, to be sure. However, this approach still places the curriculum designers, materials, and resources at the center, and it still emphasizes an individual educator’s moral qualities. In this model, an educator’s integrity is judged on the basis of adherence to the essence of the curriculum designer’s interpretations of and priorities for learning content, standards, and empirical understandings of “what works” in education.
In my gut, I’m resisting the idea that educators should be faithful above all to something as disembodied as a “curriculum” or someone as distant as a curriculum designer. Who wrote it? Where are they? What is it? Can my students and I see, touch, or talk to the curriculum? Or the curriculum creators? No, we can’t. So why should I be faithful first and foremost to them, to it?
Curriculum as community conversation
Certainly, quality curriculum designed by professional educators (both teachers and consultants employed by educational organizations) rooted in research-based pedagogies and disciplinary knowledge is essential for every school and every student’s success. But has research actually validated that every instructional move and resource within a curriculum is the most effective way to teach each concept or skill for all students? To my knowledge, that sort of itemized causal research is simply not part of either the curriculum development process or the evaluation process that organizations like EdReports and the Knowledge Matters Campaign use to evaluate the curriculum teachers are supposed to be faithful to. Since this research focused on differentiation and responsiveness simply does not exist, that means the twin phrases of implementation with fidelity and implementation with integrity both under-emphasize the most important focus of our moral obligations: the unique identities, interests, and needs our students and communities.
So should we, instead, invite students and teachers to be in conversation with the curriculum and curriculum developers? Could we, as Arthur Applebee’s research from the 1990s suggests, work with and beyond past curriculum traditions to create a new, contextualized curriculum that serves the needs of a local community—while remaining rooted in research-based pedagogy?
I believe we can. We can reframe the “curriculum implementation with…” formula away from a teacher’s individual, moral relationship to content or materials and toward human relationships in the real-live locus of learning: the community. Below, I’ll explore how concept of curriculum implementation with community could provide a roadmap for centering the unique humans, relationships, and places in a community—rather than centering distant curriculum designers or abstract educational aims. In addition, this approach has the potential to position teachers, students, and communities as contributors to research on curriculum’s effectiveness, not just foot soldiers in an externally-imposed agenda.
To be sure, research-based instructional practices and qualified curriculum designers will always play an essential role in the curriculum implementation. But they must do so in service of students and communities, not the other way around.
Choosing culturally sustaining curriculum processes
This focus on community as an essential part of curriculum work also supports culturally sustaining pedagogies which center young peoples’ cultural and linguistic assets to achieve academic success, competence in both dominant and home cultures, and the ability to critique and create in all levels of our social world. For educators who are committed to assed-based pedagogies, creating a curriculum implementation process that centers young people, their families, and their communities is the natural way forward. We cannot buy or script our way to creating curriculum that sustains young people’s cultural identities.
Therefore, the shift from implementation with fidelity or integrity to implementation with community is more than a linguistic subtlety. It’s a key refocusing of priorities that emphasizes the human, collaborative nature of the work of creating, implementing, and assessing new curriculum with the goal of sustaining students’ individual and cultural assets. In my experience, educational leaders who guide curriculum implementation processes focused on fidelity or integrity begin with the new curricular program that has been chosen to be adopted and they continue to center all implementation efforts on understanding and adhering to the vision, materials, and lessons provided by the curriculum developers. The data they consult focuses on the deficits in student learning, and if and when students or teachers are consulted in the process, they are positioned as reactors who must respond using the language and terms of the curriculum. As such, the curriculum designers define the terms and limits of the conversation about what and how students should learn.
On the other hand, curriculum implementation with community begins with, engages, and continually returns to the humans and their specific needs, interests, and spaces in the community. This is not a new concept (again, see Arthur Applebee’s Curriculum as Conversation and the voluminous work of Gloria Ladson-Billings, Gholdy Muhammad successful implementation of any new curriculum or educational initiative has alway taken place within a specific social and cultural context that requires rich collaboration between teachers, administrators, students, and families in the community. This curriculum conversation involves responding to and building on previous traditions in teaching and learning as well as embracing new and progressive theories and practices.
Implementation with community in action
In short, discussions about curriculum have always been moral conversations that ask teachers and communities to wade through the muck and glory of the many contrasting and complementary values, beliefs, theories, and research findings that exist in their racially, linguistically, culturally, economically, and otherwise diverse communities. Since no one person, company, curriculum, or approach represents the entire truth about education, the shift to implementation with community embrace a process-orientated alternative for educators who find materials-centric implementation work to be stifling, inadequate, and contrary to culturally sustaining pedagogies. This approach is about embracing and leveraging the creative mess of teaching and learning in community with our fellow humans.
So what could it look like in practice? I think it could look many different ways in many different communities. First and foremost, it involves educators, students, and community members coming together to discuss their needs, goals, and how they can create curriculum that response to and sustains the unique humans in their classrooms. It is a process that I envision would be inclusively led by educators, since the work of creating curriculum does require rich pedagogical content knowledge and familiarity with research about curriculum implementation processes and program evaluation. The challenge for educators leading processes that aspire to center community will be to meaningfully incorporate students and community members throughout the process.
This is a process that I’m currently entrenched in with members of my school community, even as we develop a stronger sense of what curriculum implementation with community might mean, and even as ELA barrels toward implementing a highly defined (many would say scripted) curriculum chosen by our district. When our district announced in February that ELA teachers would be asked to fully implement a new curriculum after piloting one unit last year, I started thinking about ways to support teachers in owning their curriculum implementation process, despite the fact that neither educators not students and community members had a consistent, significant voice in choice of curriculum materials or the process for implementation at the district level.
The idea for implementation with community was born out of my frustration with the focus on fidelity and integrity in the early stages of the curriculum process and in the district’s previous process with middle school ELA curriculum work. There had been little professional learning offered to teachers to prepare for the middle school curriculum or the pilot unit at the high school level, and I did not want to let another spring and summer pass with teachers left in a reactive position, left to their own devices scrambling in isolation to prepare for fall.
To get started, I drafted the ideas below to serve as guiding questions throughout the process and then pitched them to the ELA teachers. They were enthusiastic and excited about working together, and we quickly began meeting to make plans since time was short and fall would come too soon. Maybe in future posts I’ll describe the work we did this spring and our ongoing summer work, but for now, I’ll share the guiding questions and action steps that we’ve sketched out.
Phase 1: Create a shared vision
Guiding Questions
- How can we bring varied stakeholders together to analyze our current reality and create a shared vision for future literacy learning at our school?
- What do students, families, teachers, and district leaders want in literacy learning experiences?
- What does current data (qualitative & quantitative) and research suggest about our strengths and growth areas?
- How can we work together to define what we will commit to as individuals and PLCs, and where teachers can make student-centered decisions in their classrooms?
- What additional learning do we need in order to implement this vision?
Action steps
- Department “summit” to discuss past and future priorities
- Surveys, interviews, and focus groups with students and community members
- Visiting established community and student groups for feedback
- Surveys from educators both in and outside the English department
- Analysis of grade achievement data and standardized test data
- Curriculum implementation meetings to analyze survey results and plan for future learning
- Reading and research in targeted areas
- Attend a workshop with an expert on curriculum violence
Phase 2: Curriculum design/re-design/renovation
Guiding Questions
- What connections and tensions do we see between our shared vision and our required curriculum materials?
- What additions and adaptations can we design to meet our shared vision?
- How can we apply new learning to our curriculum adaptations?
- How can we get feedback from stakeholders on our renovated curriculum plans?
Action Steps
- Develop a unit analysis template that incorporates teacher and student priorities that teachers can use while previewing new curriculum units
- Reading new texts with an eye to collective vision priorities
- Brainstorming adaptations based on additional research and reading
- Planning in PLCs to apply vision to curriculum adaptations
- Gather and apply feedback from students, communities, and district leaders on planned renovations to curriculum
Phase 3: Focused innovation in teaching & learning
Guiding Questions
- How can we use our shared vision to implement our redesigned curriculum?
- What decisions will students make to drive their learning?
- How will we collect formative data as we teach?
- How can we create protocols and routines and analyze formative data?
- What instructional decisions will we make as individuals, as PLCs, and as a building?
Action Steps
- Teach and learn with students
- Decide on common formative assessments within PLCs
- Vertical alignment meetings to discuss progress across grades
- Inviting students and community members to PLCs for feedback focus groups
- Reflective analysis of adaptations
Phase 4: Community-based program evaluation
Guiding Questions
- How can we bring varied stakeholders together to analyze our new current reality, after this stage of implementation?
- How can we evaluate student work within and across classrooms (and eventually buildings)?
- How can we evaluate student and family experiences?
- How can we evaluate teacher experiences?
- What can we refine our vision for literacy learning at North, based on our collective evaluations?
- What next steps should we plan together?
Action Steps (Note: these are the same as in Phase 1!)
- Department “summit” to discuss past and future priorities
- Surveys, interviews, and focus groups with students and community members
- Visiting established community and student groups for feedback
- Surveys from educators both in and outside the English department
- Analysis of grade achievement data and standardized test data
- Curriculum implementation meetings to analyze survey results and plan for future learning
- Reading and research in targeted area
Onward with community
The guiding questions and action steps above are ambitious, to be sure, and our short timeline means that everything is abbreviated and smaller in scale than we might like. Our four phases will also be overlapping, since starting this process in March means that we have not had the time to plan, digest new curriculum requirements, and complete the community-based research we would have wanted before beginning to teach in the fall. It is a daunting task, and the hardest work will be done by the teachers and students. I hope that my role will be to support a process of ongoing reflection and inclusive perspective-gathering that keeps local teachers, students, and community members at the center of the work.
It is sure to be messy and exhausting, but it’s a start. And most importantly, the simple act of planning our own process rooted in our teaching and learning community has given teachers energy and agency to sustain the work. I hope that framing curriculum implementation around community will allow teachers and students to reclaim a sense of empowerment and purpose that surpasses the narrow vision of implementation with fidelity and integrity.
Kate Lechtenberg, PhD 