The biggest threat to the success of a professional development programme – or any school improvement intervention – is so obvious it gets missed.
Teachers are busy and schools are complicated.
So what actually happens never matches what you intend to happen.
New leaders of professional development are sometimes surprised by this.
Experienced leaders aren’t surprised: they know teachers are busy and don’t always follow plans.
But because this is obvious, it’s rarely voiced: everyone knows teachers are busy, why discuss it? Because it’s rarely voiced, it gets overlooked.
In practice, this means we focus too much on preparing professional development plans: goals, timetables, sessions, resources. We focus too little on tracking teachers’ reactions and adapting our plans. Then the intent of a professional development programme meets reality and it turns out that our programme relies on something like:
- The presence of a teaching assistant
- A teacher doing loads of photocopying
- Year 6 teachers building on a programme begun by Year 5 teachers (but without having had the training Year 5 teachers had)
All real examples, and in each one, the programme breaks, because the photocopying doesn’t get done, or no one can replace the teaching assistant, or the Year 5 teachers just breathe a sigh of relief their bit is over and bury the resources in a cupboard, rather than passing everything on to the Year 6 teachers.
“All professional development providers are aware of these things – or at least they should be.”
We’re not short of promising ideas for professional development, like picking clear goals, or using behaviour change mechanisms to help teachers improve. But I’m fascinated by the space where promising ideas meet harsh reality: busy teachers, broken photocopiers, failed logins, confused students… It’s where professional development – or any initiative – stands or falls.
As part of our systematic review of professional development, we examined studies of the implementation of professional development programmes. I think we can get something useful from them – something more than ‘reality treats even well-laid plans harshly,’
I’m just worried about useful I can make these insights. On our draft, one reviewer commented: “I’m not sure what this adds. All professional development providers are aware of these things – or at least they should be.” This is what I mean: it’s so obvious it gets missed.
So, a challenge for you. Think about the most recent initiative or intervention your school introduced:
- Did it meet all its goals? Some? A few?
- What barriers arose?
- What unexpected barriers arose?
If your answers to any of these question suggest an implementation gap, I’d encourage you to keep reading – even if this seems obvious! If you answered no barriers and complete success, I’d encourage you to double check…
Being realistic about fidelity
Let’s consider how significant a threat reality poses to an idea, good or otherwise. Imagine a new policy, the centrepiece of the school/trust/government’s improvement agenda this year. Maybe it’s something simple but powerful, like using exit tickets consistently, or building a few powerful student habits. Maybe it’s something more ambitious, like cultivating student-centered scaffolding across cognitive and affective domains.
Are teachers going to do it? Pick any three teachers you know at random:
- Mo thinks the new policy is a good thing. It fits his teaching style. He pursues it straight away.
- James is an NQT (sorry, an ECT) and does everything he’s told. But he’s so busy he forgets. When he wakes up in the middle of the night, it gnaws at him.
- Linda has been teaching for years, and has a carefully calibrated sense of how important an initiative is. She reckons it’ll blow over. She ignores it, and no one notices.
If I ask, realistically, what proportion of teachers are going to follow a given policy, I’ll get a range of answers. But anyone who says ‘everyone’ is either:
- In one of the five most effective schools in the country
- Forgetful of teachers’ realities
- Optimistic to the point of naivety
When reality hits professional development programmes
Unsurprisingly then, our systematic review found that what happens in schools diverges substantially from what professional development providers intend. For example:
- “Pupil observations were carried out in most, although not all, of the schools visited (McNally et al., 2014, p.30).”
- The programme started with 46 schools. “Of the 39 schools that attended and completed the training programme, 21 submitted an action plan that was judged to be compliant (Culliney et al., 2019, p.34).”
- “Good fidelity was defined as the nursery being rated… as being very or partially engaged in all of the core components of the intervention… A third (n=18) of the 54 settings randomly allocated to the intervention group achieved a good fidelity rating (Robinson-Smith et al., 2018, p.57).”
No implementation review claimed ‘Everyone pursued the programme wholeheartedly.’ Schools and teachers adapted everything they were asked to do: some changed who came to training, some changed what the training was about, some picked their favourite ideas and ignored the rest. Some just stopped coming.
Mo does as he’s asked. James tries to do as he’s asked, but mixes things up. Linda does things her own way. Park High follows the programme faithfully. Hawthorn Community tries, but everyone’s too busy. Southwood does its own thing. It’s obvious.
If it’s so obvious, why is it overlooked?
Given it’s so obvious, why don’t we see professional development providers acknowledging and preparing for this? They might say saying something like:
- ‘We know how busy schools are, so we make training as short as possible’
- ‘We know that implementation can be uneven, so we save additional coaching support for schools which seem to be struggling’
- ‘We expect some teachers to be sceptical about our approach, so we offer them alternative ways to pursue the programme’s goals’
I’ve read scores of evaluations of professional development programmes. These aren’t brief summaries: the authors must be paid by the word, because some of them reach 150 pages. I have never seen a sentence like this. I’m sure some teacher educators do this, but I never see professional development providers talk about doing it. (Perhaps this is yet another reason why programmes don’t scale.)
I think it’s so obvious that everyone forgets. I’ve seen the sausage made. Most professional development programmes are created by smart, motivated, hardworking people. But there are too few of them, the deadlines are too short, and at some point (pretty early on) the priority becomes churning out materials and pleasing the DfE. Not identifying weak points, not stress testing the programme, not building in second chances. Not planning for reality. Programmes jump from being a good idea – or at least, an idea – in a single school (or a meeting room), to a national roll out.
Taking the inside view
I also think we fall into the ‘inside view.’ Daniel Kahneman described beautifully how this influenced his work writing a textbook. The writers guessed how long the book would take, based on their skill and motivation (the inside view): two years. Then they stopped to take the outside view: how long do similar projects take? An experienced colleague answered: seven years minimum. Some never finish. The group’s reaction to this bombshell? We “carried on as if nothing had happened (2011, p.247).” The book was eventually finished – eight years later. It was no longer wanted, and was never used.
How likely is it one hundred randomly-selected teachers will pursue your programme wholeheartedly, unflinchingly, unfailingly?
The outside view: do you expect teachers to do everything you ask them to do? Come on! Think about how Mo, James and Linda – or any three teachers you’ve ever met.
The inside view: instead of asking ‘will teachers do everything we ask them?’ we substitute another question. We ask ‘Are we confident our programme is worthwhile and well-designed?’ The inside view: of course! (Could we live with ourselves otherwise?) Our answer elides the two questions: ‘Our programme is well-designed and worthwhile… of course teachers will do everything we ask them to do.’ We take a naïve view of humans – not a realistic one.
So what: how can we encourage fidelity?
Where do my arguments lead us? Probably nowhere (either because you think your plan is great, or because you think everything I’ve said is obvious). But if not, maybe, just maybe, when we want teachers to change we could:
- Predict how many teachers won’t do something. Realistically, what proportion of teachers will actually do this? Think about real teachers, not abstractions. What will James do? What will Linda do?
- Check teacher responses early. You don’t have to wait until the initiative has failed to gather data. A good guess now is more useful than certainty next term. Exit tickets are more useful than exams in telling us how things are going and what’s needed next. So ask teachers at the end of a professional development session or a half term. Did it make sense? Do you plan to do it? They may plan to do it and not do it. But if it doesn’t make sense, or they plan not to do it, you can respond immediately.
- Reality proof it (in general) by paring down what you ask for. Make training short. Make suggested changes easy. That doesn’t mean avoid challenge or meaningful material. It means that teachers are busy people and change is hard. They’re more likely to attend a half-hour session than an hour. They’re more likely to pursue a single, powerful habit, than a laundry list of ideas. They’re more likely to make a change if you make that change easy for them.
- Reality-proof it (specifically) by identifying the weak links in the programme. Does it rely on teachers adapting resources? Photocopying? The presence of a TA? Do students need to use a website – or anything invented since the abacus? You could consider ‘red teaming’: invite an outside view by asking teachers/colleagues to spot potential barriers. “Linda, be honest, are you going to do this?” Then how can you overcome these barriers? Can you reduce the need to adapt resources? What should schools do if there isn’t a TA? Can you simplify the technology needed?
Conclusion
There’s an echo here of this idea of a realistic view of student behaviour.
- The idealistic view: people do good things because they decide and want to do good things.
- The realistic view: concurs that people may do good things because they want to – but recognises that they also do good things when they’re easy, convenient, supported, manageable, common and habitual.
Teachers want to be better, but if ‘being better’ means following a poorly-designed programme that demands an hour’s extra photocopying a week, they’re not going to do it. (Mo might, James won’t but will feel guilty about not doing it, Linda won’t even consider it – and she’ll be right.)
The realistic view encourages us to reality proof our professional development – or anything we ask of teachers. We will never achieve complete fidelity – we need to plan around reality.
If you enjoyed this, you might appreciate
The systematic review of professional development (with Sam Sims, Alison O’Mara-Eves, Sarah Cottingham and other colleagues) goes into much more detail on effective implementation.
This post on mechanisms of behaviour change in professional development: what they are, how we defined them, what they do.
This post on the three questions we need to answer if we want professional development to work.
This post on how plans are just a necessary fiction, and how to make change stick.
There’s a useful guide to red teaming here.
You might also be interested in using School Surveys to find out more about what’s really happening in your school/trust.
References
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. London: Penguin.