This five-part series has been inspired by the recent book entitled Making Room for Impact: A de-implementation guide for educators from Professor John Hattie, Dr Arran Hamilton, and Professor Dylan Wiliam (Hamilton et al, 2024).
So far, we have explored why before any initiative is implemented in a school, the de-implementation of other programmes must be considered. We then considered the book’s proposed 4D implementation model: Discover, Decide, De-implement, Re-Decide (I have tweaked the language to make these four steps Discover, Design, Deliver, Double back).
Last week we focused on Discover. In this third part, I will consider “Design” – designing the initiative you hope will bring about the impact that you want for your students. There are a few steps to this which will form the substance of this article.
Implementing initiatives in school: A Headteacher Update Series
- Part 1: Why we must begin with de-implementation. Published April 30
- Part 2: Step one is discover: Published May 5
- Part 3: Step two is design: Published May 13
- Part 4: Step three is deliver: Due May 21
- Part 5: Step four is double-back: Due June 3
Explaining the educational challenge clearly
So you have decided on the educational challenge and put it to the test using the questions I outlined towards the end of my previous article. It is important to then be able to explain this clearly and specifically.
One way to put this is to describe your “theory of the present”. An excellent tool for this is known as the “Five Whys”, first developed by Sakichi Toyota (Ohno, 1988).
Quite simply, it begins with a summary sentence of the challenge that you have crafted as a team and then asks “Why did this occur?” five times, to get as close to the root issue as possible.
Here’s an example: Our students are doing well in individual subjects in their year 6 SATs, but performing below national average in their combined scores.
- Why did this occur? Because they did not achieve a pass mark on one of the papers, while passing well in the others.
- Why did this occur? Because they really struggled this year to develop their reasoning and problem-solving in maths and read at pace during a reading test.
- Why did this occur? Many students arrived in year 6 with weak basic knowledge in maths and low reading fluency scores in reading.
- Why did this occur? Some of these basic skills are not focused on fully enough throughout the curriculum in previous years. Although the curriculum is ambitious, sometimes it is too full and too much content is covered quickly rather than learned deeply.
- Why did this occur? It could be because at the time, when curriculums were being developed, ambitious to us implicitly meant lots of good quality content. What we are coming to see now is that although this was a good thing, it means students are struggling to move beyond surface knowledge and therefore are not grasping the basics effectively early enough in the primary school.
What has happened throughout this process is helpful on a number of levels. First, it identifies several issues that explain the educational challenge that has been agreed upon in increasing levels of depth. You will notice that the areas cut across learning, teaching, curriculum and assessment.
As you begin to formulate your goal-setting, planning and logic modelling for your implementation work, you can see straight away the areas across the school which may need to be considered (emphasising once again the need to identify one key educational challenge given the number of areas of responsibility this will actually touch).
Next, it is not aimed at blaming individuals and the activity itself can expose a whole range of reasons for the educational challenge. The focus of the whys is primarily about possible causes that transcend specific roles and is far more about seeing what sits beneath the surface to draw us into the problem.
If you asked each of your teams to do this task by themselves and then share their thinking with others, you may get as many different responses as you get people in the room. This is good and can help you build as clear a story as possible to enable you to capture your theory of the present from as many perspectives as possible at this stage.
And when you are able to do this, any goal-setting, planning and models you create will be resting on as “real” a story of what is actually going on as possible.
Designing your implementation plan
Goal-setting is essential, and often written about. But one layer that is sometimes neglected is outlining exactly what that goal looks like when it is achieved: clear success criteria that outlines several streams of achievement of the goal. We often include them in our lessons, but rarely do we consider them as valuable in our own planning.
A few things to consider is making sure that there are a range of ways you can measure the success of a project and not simply through student achievement data. For example, if you are implementing a new maths curriculum to be used by all teachers in the school, consider what success will look like based on the following things:
- Student achievement: 85% of students will achieve expected standard.
- Student work: Work will show fluency, reasoning, problem-solving and excellent response to feedback.
- Teaching and learning: Teachers will be able to teach using a mastery approach effectively evidenced by X, Y and Z in their questioning and in their workbooks.
- Curriculum: Curriculum-mapping, planning and resourcing showcases excellent progression and is of a high quality in all year groups.
By measuring success in a range of ways, it makes sure the picture you can build as you monitor and evaluate the plan is much richer and the discussions you can have with leaders can be more nuanced in the actions you develop with them.
Planning
The next step is to plan. There are many standard formats for development plans and implementation plans already available to schools and these are often scrutinised carefully by governing bodies and stakeholders alike.
In general, these planning documents are effective at mapping out the goals, success criteria and actions that need to take place, but less so, when, how and in what order they ought to be done.
One way to overcome this is by putting actions into a “sprint plan”. Instead of having a large list of items that need to be completed and then chugging away at them, you can chunk them into days, weeks and terms. A great benefit to school leaders is that in principle, the academic year is already grouped into six half-terms, which can be seen as “sprints”. Look at the example below, using the implementation of a maths curriculum used previously.
- Goal: Implement a new maths curriculum from nursery to year 6 to improve attainment for all students.
- Success criteria: As listed above
- Actions:
- Run launch training and provide log-ins and resources Conduct monitoring with all year groups.
- Evaluate the level of implementation at this point in the process, ensuring that there is a sharp focus on attainment.
- Develop training that is data-driven, using analysis conducted during autumn term.
- Review attainment data from the summer term and consider key areas of support for staff.
- Thorough evaluation and monitoring to look at next steps for the following academic year for all staff.
- Provide specific bar modelling training to teachers to support their understanding of a mastery approach to maths.
- Monitor and evaluate the quality of maths teaching and learning through learning walks and pupil voice.
- Develop further training for early career teachers to enhance their subject knowledge.
- Purchase practical resources to be used in maths lessons.
However, this model does not support the subject leader or senior team to think through when they will do key tasks, how they will do them effectively and see the progress that is being made. Instead, we should separate the success criteria, and the actions could be separated into “sprints”.
Autumn: Sprint 1 (actions)
- Complete curriculum mapping pre-launch.
- Complete review of resources before launch.
- Audit the curriculum and the practical resources needed for the year ahead.
- Develop launch training.
- Review attainment data from the autumn term and consider key areas of support for staff.
- Conduct simple, low-level monitoring.
The relevant success criteria for this phase are numbers 1 and 4 in the list above.
Spring: Sprint 2 (actions)
- Conduct monitoring with all year groups.
- Evaluate the level of implementation at this point in the process, ensuring that there is a sharp focus on attainment.
- Develop training that is data-driven, using analysis conducted during autumn term.
- Review attainment data from the spring term and consider key areas of support for staff.
The relevant success criteria for this phase are numbers 1, 2 and 3 in the list above.
Summer: Sprint 3 (actions)
- Conduct monitoring with all year groups.
- Evaluate the level of implementation at this point in the process, ensuring that there is a sharp focus on attainment.
- Develop training that is data-driven, using analysis conducted during autumn term.
- Review attainment data from the summer term and consider key areas of support for staff.
- Thorough evaluation and monitoring to look at next steps for the following academic year.
The relevant success criteria for this phase are numbers 1, 2 and 3 in the list above.
The strengths of this template and approach is that leaders can keep the goal always present, but work on key actions one at a time, thinking carefully about what needs to be done and when, in light of all of the other activities that leaders will do on a daily basis.
Success criteria can be streamlined to be considered in smaller steps rather than all in one go; actions can then be aimed at achieving these criteria in small steps.
This process also ensures that the thinking being done by senior and middle leaders is iterative and focused on collecting data, analysing it carefully, and using this to inform the next steps to ensure that the goal is achieved.
Although this may seem like a simple tweak to a template format, the process forces leaders to think carefully about smaller steps in their development planning. This means that governors or stakeholders are able to focus on the small gains and successes rooted in a theory of the present, rather than on ticking boxes on a development plan, which can sometimes be the case.
Logic models
There is another element to consider beyond your theory of the present, shown most fully in the goal-setting, success criteria and mapping out the actions you will take sequentially in small chunks.
When designing your implementation initiative, you also need to think about the design features, active ingredients and elements that will make the project work. This is sometimes known as a program logic model.
Being able to form your challenge, goal and success criteria into a coherent model enables you to think clearly about all of the moving parts of the project. This in turn will help you to make the implicit explicit to all involved about the parameters of the project. A good quality program logic model will help you answer key questions like the ones below:
- What is our education challenge?
- What will we do about it?
- What resources do we need to deploy?
- What assumptions are we making?
- What are the outputs of this work?
- What are the measurable outcomes we hope to achieve?
- How will we collect data and measure whether we have been successful?
Program logic model: An example
Education challenge: Students are performing well in individual subjects but achieving below national average combined scores in their SATs.
Inputs & activities
- Question level analysis to unpick the issues that arose in the tests.
- External curriculum review in the core subjects to understand the levels of progression in key skills.
- Extended staff training and support to improve subject knowledge and teaching in these key areas.
- Intervention programmes to support those who are falling behind launched, embedded and monitored.
- Review of assessment systems to make sure that they are picking up the issues.
Outputs
- Data analysis and test review.
- Systematic curriculum development plan linked to the review.
- Improved staff knowledge and quality of teaching in core areas.
- Improved quality of intervention programmes being developed.
- Assessments that identify issues arising.
Outcomes/impact
- Improved progression across the curriculum in basic skills.
- Improved quality of teaching in basic skills.
- Assessments that identify gaps clearly and support teachers to take action.
- Interventions that support students to make rapid progress if they are behind.
Rationale
- Students in our school are struggling to secure strong outcomes across reading, writing and maths and this is becoming a data trend of concern. It is clear that students are performing well in some areas, particularly in maths, but this is not consistent enough.
Assumptions
- The current curriculums across all three subjects need improvement rather than change.
- Teachers do not have strong enough knowledge in teaching basic skills accurately and therefore need further training.
- Our current intervention programmes are not securing the impact that we want them to achieve.
- Our assessments do not identify the basic skills in a way that enables teachers to adapt their teaching accordingly.
It is important to remember that this is not a development plan; it is a tool that sits beside this to map all of the moving parts that form the overall project.
It enables leaders to be aware of all the resources that could be used, the activities that staff are likely to be engaging in and so on.
Without this, there is a risk that the actions shown in the development plan, and the cycle of actions spread across the academic year and beyond may not be resourced properly. Furthermore, it could be that certain assumptions are not explored correctly, possibly risking the failure of the entire project.
Final thoughts
We have explicitly addressed the step of designing the implementation project that you have in mind. The first step was to look closely at the educational challenge to uncover what may have led to this being the case. The hope is that by doing this, a raft of priority areas can be identified and explicitly addressed in your goal-setting, success criteria and action-planning.
It is then important to consider when and how the actions will take place to ensure that success is matched up with the other regular items that may take place as part of the school calendar. This supports leaders to prioritise their time effectively and also see the process as iterative rather than a tick-list of actions.
We then move on to think about why logic modelling is important, to ensure the parameters of the project are correctly mapped and nothing is missed in the design stage. This final element can become a steadying anchor to ensure the full parameters of elements to the project are made explicit.
- Robbie Burns is an experienced school leader and currently an acting head of school. You can find more of his writing on his blog https://howthenshouldweteach.wordpress.com. All views are his own. Read his previous articles for Headteacher Update via www.headteacher-update.com/authors/robbie-burns
Further information & resources
- Hamilton, Reeves, Clinton & Hattie: Building to Impact: The 5D Implementation Playbook for Educators, Corwin Press, 2022.
- Hamilton, Hattie & Wiliam: Making Room for Impact: A de-implementation guide for educators, Corwin Press, 2024.
- Ohno: Toyota Production System: Beyond large-scale production, Productivity Press, 1988.