Page 162 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 6
time spent on the four approaches did not change that much between year 1 and year 2. According to Desimone and Stukey (2014), a key factor in realizing the Theory of Change is the teacher’s fidelity of implementation (see also Snyder, Bolin, & Zumwalt, 1992), i.e. the extent to which a teacher follows the key principles of the reform. However, analysing the operationalization of the Comprehensive Approach through the lens of sensemaking to a certain extent diminishes the significance of the distinction between high-fidelity and low-fidelity teachers, because the discussion is not about right or wrong. Indeed, sensemaking focuses on action verbs such as create, imagine, and devise (Weick et al., 2005), and therefore allows a highly personal and selective process of assimilation and accommodation. We would like to argue that looking at the implementation of educational reform from the point of view of sensemaking and the Practicality Theory, is more open- minded, truer to reality, and more respectful of teachers. In light of these insights, how we analysed the data in this chapter only shows a limited side of the complex teaching reality. Future research could take these results as a starting point in analysing the breadth of the impact of new teaching models thereby keeping an open mind in teacher variation.
Regardless whether teachers assimilated or accommodated, making sense of the Comprehensive Approach led to a heightened sense of awareness and therefore a rethinking of the why, how, and what of the EFL literature curriculum. For most teachers, besides providing a relevant framework and adding to their pedagogical content knowledge, it especially provided a meta-language, such as terms, definitions, and frames of reference. This meta-language made what was perhaps already known become articulated more clearly and tightened up in terms of underlying mechanisms. These results are in line with Verloop’s (1991) interpretation of educational research, which should provide empirically and theoretically based insights and coherent frames of references, which can be relevant for teachers to gain a better understanding of their teaching practice and their students learning and well-being. This tells us that, although the initial practices of the teachers (i.e. before the intervention) could be considered somewhat intuitive, this does not mean that these views of literature education are any less valuable. We would suggest that these initial views need to be acknowledged at the start of PCK research and should be part of the foundation of any professional development programme and educational reform.
Due to the design of our a multiple case-study through a quasi-experimental design and the fact that the intervention focused on “helping teachers becoming
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