Senior Leaders’ Think-Piece Webinar 2: Making Room for Impact: A De-implementation Guide for Educators

Led by Dylan Wiliam, UCL Institute of Education

We are delighted to welcome the infamous Dylan Wiliam, to lead one of our Think-Piece webinars, exploring themes from his latest book ‘Making Room for Impact: A De-implementation Guide for Educators’.

Overview

It is perhaps obvious that if teachers are working as hard as they can, then adding something else is only possible if we first take something away. The problem is that most of what teachers do has a positive impact on pupils, so creating room for any innovation involves stopping teachers doing good things to give them time to do even better things. Deimplementation can also be used to help teachers gain a better work-life balance by taking things off teachers’ plates, and putting nothing back.

Deimplementation can be done in many ways. We can remove things that aren’t contributing much to pupil learning, we can reduce how much we do or the number of people involved, we can re-engineer processes to make them more efficient and we can replace time-consuming activities with more efficient alternatives. The problem is that schools are extremely complex, and removing things that may not seem important can have severe unintended consequences. That is why de-implementation has to be done carefully, anticipating problems, and understanding the complexities of how schools work

In this presentation, participants will learn about a four-step process for de-implementation. The process begins with discovering where there may be opportunities for deimplementation, deciding which areas are likely to be the best targets for deimplementation, carrying out the deimplementation plan, and then reviewing the impact of the deimplementation process. For each of the four steps, participants will also learn about a number of practical strategies that can be used in any school.