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Implementing initiatives in school: Step one is discover

School improvement Senior leadership Middle leadership
Implementation is a core part of school improvement. In this five-part series, Robbie Burns considers a four-step model of implementation as proposed in the book Making Room for Impact. This time he considers step one – agreeing where change is needed
Four Ds: Drawing upon a large body of evidence, Professor John Hattie and his colleagues have developed a four-step model for thinking both about the de-implementation of existing initiatives and how we implement new, more impactful ones (see Hamilton et al, 2024) - Adobe Stock

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: Due May 14
  • Part 4: Step three is deliver: Due May 21
  • Part 5: Step four is double-back: Due June 3

 

In the first article of this series, we explored why before any initiative is implemented in a school, the de-implementation of other programmes must be considered.

I was inspired by the book 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).

The general principle for the need to “reduce, remove or re-engineer” – to quote Prof Hattie and his colleagues – before we replace or implement new initiatives is that in order to achieve higher levels of student achievement, room must be made for impact.

This sometimes means dismantling good things that are not quite right for the context, to find the very best things for students, staff and the community of your school to thrive.

But once we have “de-implemented” to make the relevant room that is needed, we are ready to launch a new strategy, a new programme, a new teaching approach. What steps should we take to make this happen?

Hamilton et al (2024) proposed a 4D implementation model – Discover, Decide, De-implement, Re-Decide.

In this series I have tweaked the language to make these four steps: Discover, Design, Deliver, Double back. The rest of this article will look at step one – Discover – and how we lay the groundwork for making good decisions for the initiatives we implement.

 

Deciding the priority challenge: Three lenses

Within the wider work of school leadership, there are always many challenges to work through, often on a daily basis. But within the context of implementation, what is meant by the priority challenge is being able to explore the environment in order to identify an agenda that is considered worthy of concerted and sustained collective action from a staff team above and beyond the normal status quo of the running of the school. It’s the main goal, the big focus for a period of time, to improve outcomes for students.

When you do this, there are three lenses to look through and be conscious of as you approach the issue: your philosophy, your values, and your methodology.

 

1, Your philosophy

As a leader or leadership team, you need to decide whether you are approaching the priority challenge by looking for problems, opportunities, or current levels of adherence to an agreed standard. This will frame the rest of the implementation work you are doing.

  • Problem-driven inquiry: This involves focusing critically on aspects of school life that need fixing or improving (Pritchett et al, 2013). Examples might include too much inconsistency in marking and feedback across classes or Pupil Premium students performing well below national average compared to other students.
  • Opportunity-driven inquiry: This involves focusing on the things that are going well in the school and considering what the next big thing will be to make things even better (Cooperrider et al, 2014). Examples might include where reading attainment is superb but if you introduce more opportunities for independent reading and develop the library then it will enhance home reading. Or behaviour is exceptional, but it would be great to develop student leadership so older students can deepen the way they model excellent character to younger students.
  • Standards-driven inquiry: This involves using expectations that are already marked out in policies or standards. Examples include school codes of conduct or teaching principles adopted by a school or the agreed teaching standards. For example, data from lesson observations might showcase that teachers are very good at explaining concepts clearly, but there is inconsistency in the way they check for understanding. Or in some subjects, such as maths and English, teachers are providing high-quality feedback to support students to address misconceptions, but in subjects like history and science, teachers are struggling to move learning forward.

A common misconception is to incorrectly categorise the philosophical stance we are taking. For example, some leaders may see the lack of adherence to an agreed standard as a “problem”, when the issue is more about fidelity to an approach. Or they may completely ignore opportunities in favour of problems being fixed at a surface level, when working on things that may be strengthened further through increasing their capacity could actually improve student outcomes in a far richer way.

One suggestion is to take a hybrid approach. Beginning with an opportunities-driven approach, you can build buy-in among your colleagues to enable them to drive change in an area that is already performing well.

After this, the team can pivot to consider where the problems are, and how these can be overcome or even mitigated by the opportunities that you explore. Finally, in light of the opportunities and the problems, you can move to a standards-driven approach which tries to identify the expectations for all staff based on evidence and policy.

 

2, Your vision, values and mission

Without your vision, values and mission underpinning everything else, the leadership team is prone to implement everything, eventually doing nothing well. They may spend time considering developing something in their school that is “working down the road” in another successful school, or on nicely marketed curriculums with great branding.

They may buy-in time from advisors and consultants and produce lots of reports telling them what to change and improve every few months. As Professor Dylan Wiliam (2018) quips: “Everything works somewhere but nothing works everywhere.”

Within the implementation process, like everything else in school leadership, the vision, values and mission of your organisation that you hold to as a team are essential because they should be your frame of reference for all of the work you do.

The vision for your students, staff and school community should be the guiding light before any improvement process, since the programme you are implementing should further that aim and not steer things in a different direction.

But there is a danger here. Good leadership does require good strategy and a singleness of mind towards a vision for the school, but it is important to not ignore evidence or research which may contradict an approach that is being taken, or to search only for data that supports the way we are doing things.

It is far better, and humbler, to acknowledge that there may be other approaches that could be successful, but for our community and our students, we are choosing this vision and doing things in this way. Of course, this assumes that the vision and strategy is the right one and is based firmly on solid, quality values. But as long as there is humility in the midst of this, the values you outline should stand the test of the implementation process.

 

3, Your methodology

Once you have made clear the philosophy to take towards your implementation, re-asserted the vision, values and mission of the organisation, you should then consider the methods you will take as you analyse the data that is drawn out from the monitoring that you are doing. There are three possible approaches:

 

Ideas-driven approach: You begin with your hunches, your general ideas about what the improvement foci could be, and then collect data to either affirm your beliefs or contradict them. Examples could include:

  • We think that SEND students are not receiving enough support to achieve their personal targets. Is this the case?
  • Learners are generally more passive in lessons than active. Is this true?

Data-driven approach: You keep your hunches and general ideas to one side and look explicitly at the data that is presented to you to form your foci. In general, this means looking closely at what you are seeing and considering whether any patterns or ideas emerge from this, rather than from your own sets of assumptions. Examples could include:

  • It seems from the data that boys do not perform as well as girls in key stage 1 and lower key stage 2. Is this something we should explore?
  • There has been a big rise in one and two-day suspensions across the term and many of the students are SEND. Should we be concerned?

Reason-driven approach: Begins with seeing problems, details or events that cannot be readily explained through currently held strategic approaches or beliefs. This approach then invites the educator into finding the best possible explanations, knowing they could be wrong. They need to use both their current assumptions and the data together, side-by-side, to be able to find a balanced understanding of the situation so they can move forward meaningfully. Here’s an example:

“I’ve noticed that our year 5 and 6 students are still struggling to grasp the basic elements of writing independently, such as sentence structure, capital letters and full stops. My explanation is that the quality of teaching of these elements is not very effective across our English curriculum in other year groups and this needs to be strengthened further through training and support for staff.

“I ask students more about this and they show me clearly that they fully understand basic elements of writing, but they often find the number of other things they need to think about and remember overwhelms them and they forget.

“I also speak to teachers. They make clear to me that they fully understand what’s needed and teach basic elements explicitly. However, they feel the English curriculum is too full. Therefore, although the problem I noticed was a valid one, the story to explain it wasn’t: what actually needs to be done is that more time needs to be given within the curriculum to enable teachers to have the space and the time to go over and over and over key content to ensure it is fully embedded before they move on.”

Ideas-driven, data-driven and reason-driven approaches are all worth considering, and just like the analysis of your implementation philosophy, it is probably worth having a hybrid of approaches from the above list as you begin your work.

What is key is that you are aware of the methods you are taking to ensure you are not missing any possible blindspots, like in the example above on the teaching of the basic elements of writing.

 

The many, the few, the one

You have thought-through your philosophy, your values, your methods and you have identified several areas of possible focus for school improvement. The issue is then which ones you should choose, and how many.

Research based on analysis of more than 2,000 school plans, along with three years of student achievement data, suggests that the right number of initiatives is no more than six (Reeves, 2013).

Despite this being consistent across other sectors (Leinwand & Mainardi, 2011), many reported that there were too many initiatives in their organisation, and it was often perceived to be wasted time.

Hamilton et al (2022) advocate that although the rule of six is a good starting point, often these six areas of school improvement can mushroom into many, many more. The six initiatives quickly duplicate, and you are then having to manage 12 projects. Therefore, they advocate finding one thing that will probably end up being six things, as they write: “It’s probably better to start with 1 priority because 1 educational challenge multiplied by 6 is easier to manage than 6 education challenges that multiply into 36 initiatives.” (p33, Hamilton et al, 2022)

Even when you do this, it is still difficult to find the one challenge you will focus on. Therefore, once you have a list of several possible challenges, it is then worth rigorously testing how important they really are. Some good questions for you to consider could be stated in the following way:

  1. If we did nothing about this challenge, what is the worst that could happen?
  2. What is the likelihood of this worst-case scenario happening?
  3. If this challenge is not addressed, will it really matter and have an impact on student attainment?
  4. How much should we care about this? Do we care about other things more than this?

Although these questions feel pessimistic, they are helpful, because they enable us to frame the challenge in light of the other challenges we may bring to the conversation.

Implementation requires a huge amount of effort beyond the everyday work of leadership, and it is therefore imperative to test each of the challenges carefully.

The questions above strike to the heart of our motivations and encourage us to dig deep into our beliefs that may lurk beneath them.

Question 1 unpicks the level of importance in light of all the work going on within the organisation. Questions 2 and 3 help us to reflect on the level of educational risk. Question 4 helps us to consider our level of motivation to improve the issue at hand.

Going through this process with each of our ideas enable us to find a deeper layer of purpose that will be needed when the going gets tough: it will also help us motivate our teams to continue to keep improving the challenge we eventually decide on.

Using these questions as a leadership team enables us hone-in on important assumptions as we discover the best possible area for us to tackle.

 

Final thoughts

This article has attempted to unpick the way that we think about the decisions we make, providing quality tools, lenses and approaches to support our thinking. Once you have de-implemented and decided on the educational challenge you want to focus on, it is then time to design the work you are going to do – which will be the focus of article three.

 

Further information & resources

  • Cooperrider, Whitney & Sobczak: Appreciative inquiry: A positive revolution in change, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014.
  • 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.
  • Leinwand & Mainardi: Stop chasing too many priorities, Harvard Business Review, 2011: https://hbr.org/2011/04/stop-chasing-too-many-prioriti  
  • Pritchett, Samji & Hammer: It’s all about MeE: Using structured experiential learning (“e”) to crawl the design space, CGD Working Paper, Center for Global Development, 2013: www.cgdev.org/publication/its-all-about-mee 
  • Reeves: Finding Your Leadership Focus: What matters most for student results, Columbia University Teachers College Press, 2013.
  • Wiliam: Creating the Schools Our Children Need: Why what we're doing now won't help much (and what we can do instead), Learning Sciences International, 2018.