An investigation of secondary school english teachers' curriculum fidelity

Fidelity of the curriculum is the practice of the curriculum by the program practitioners without changing the original. When changes related to programs are made, looking at only the program's results is not enough and it may not always give the correct results. Therefore, the implementation phase should be focused and whether these implementations are executed in terms of fidelity should be monitored and evaluated. In this study, fidelity of the teachers working at the 7th grade and factors affecting fidelity were examined. In this qualitative study, an embedded multiple case design was used. The participants were composed of 10 secondary school English teachers working at 10 public schools in 2018-2019 academic year. Teachers were studied for 14 weeks. The data collection tools consisted of semi-structured interview forms, structured classroom observation forms developed by the researcher and documents (students' notebooks, curriculum, etc.). The data were analyzed by content analysis method using MAXQDA12 program. According to the findings, teachers' fidelity of the curriculum differs and this is affected by the facilities of the school, participant characteristics (number of students, level, response), the course materials, program's features and the teacher's characteristics. It is considered this research will reveal the problem on this issue, develop solutions, inform the individuals working fidelity and increase the awareness of teachers. Although there are more studies on this issue abroad, there are limited numbers in Turkey. Therefore, it can be worked on developing scales on the fidelity and examining the elements effecting curriculum fidelity in detail.