November 18, 2023 by mguhlin

MyNotes: Making Room for Impact

This past month, I bought a book, Making Room for Impact. I immediately was engaged in the first few chapters. My quick take? The first few chapters is where the gold is for edtech directors. Of course, Curriculum Supers, Executive Directors, and Principals will want to read the rest of the book for detailed how-to on de-implementation focused on student learning. For tech directors and CTOs, the later chapters are worth skimming and referring back to for more details, but unnecessary.

Making Room for Impact book at Amazon

The Best Chart

The book has rich visuals, charts, and I’m tempted to take photos and post them here. However, that probably wouldn’t go over well with Corwin Press. The book is worth buying for the first few chapters and the detailed visuals alone. However, here is a snapshot of my hand-drawn notes:

Miguel’s representation of a chart from Making Room for Impact

If you’re familiar with Stop Doing Lists, and similar ideas, these all find their way to differing degrees into the book.

Listen to the Authors Discuss This

You can watch Corwin’s video where the authors discuss the book:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcFys58yePo\]

For fun, here’s an AI-generated summary using Summarize.tech:

In this section of a webinar about educational improvement, the presenters discuss the importance of deimplementation, a process in which ineffective education programs or initiatives are removed or replaced with higher value ones. They argue that deimplementation is essential to creating space for more impactful initiatives and should be a crucial component of any educational improvement strategy.

The presenters then move on to discuss the different types of deimplementation activities that can be undertaken to reduce teacher workload and burnout, and the importance of choosing new practices carefully and considering their impact on student learning. They also discuss the challenges of the deimplementation process, including the cognitive bias of addition, the difficulty of unlearning or deleting learned or practiced behaviors, and the importance of recognizing and re-engineering regulations and restrictions in order to reduce burden and maintain impact.

The presenters emphasize the importance of an explicit deimplementation process and the need for constant review and pivoting in order to ensure that deimplementation leads to increased efficiency and impact in education.

The chart below is kinda cool:

Source: On Smoking, Corwin Press video linked above

Applying this to education, and edtech in particular, was what caught my imagination. How many technology operations processes/procedures are in place in districts that could be simplified? I’ll have to cover that in a future blog entry.

For now, here are my notes.

My Notes

Foreword
DeImplementation Strategies
Remove the practice completely
Reduce how frequently you do it
Re-engineer the practice to take less time
Replace it with something else that is more efficient or effective
Four Stages Process
Discover amenable de-implementation areas
Decide the best fit strategy (from the 4 Rs)
De-implement
Re-decide where you can confirm that you did what you set out to do and where you then iteratively decide what do to next
No purchase of a program, updating policy, increasing funding, or getting latest tech will increase student’s growth and achievement nor will they build teachers’ capacity to know how to teach all students
Nothing replaces evidence-proven precision practice of teachers in every classroom
Data must inform instruction every minute of the day to be useful and warrant admin time
Opportunities to Actions
Room for Impact options
Remove: Stop Doing it completely
Reduce: Do it less frequently or with less people
Re-engineer: Do it more efficiently with fewer steps/actions
Replace: Substitute it with a more efficient/effective option/addition
Target areas such as:
Curriculum
Lesson Planning
Homework
Assessment
Behavior Management
MTSS
Wall displays
Staff meetings
Technology Interventions
Selected De-Implementation Area
Current Practice: Daily Homework from teachers
What are De-Implementation Options?
Can we remove it?
Can we reduce it?
Can we re-engineer it?
Can we replace it?
What will we do?
Introduction
Tendency to privilege addition
Implicit assumption is that improvement is best unlocked by inserting new policies/programs/activities or widgets. Improvement by moving forward, by adding, more is leading
Recent research (Klotz, 2021) suggests humans may be hardwired to solve problems and to innovate by attaching and inserting new ingredients rather than deleting or simplifying
Schools and systems struggle to:
select appropriate initiatives to add to their context
localize or adapt new addition in a way that doesn’t dilute impact or even makes it counter-productive
implement with fidelity
monitor and evaluate with rigor
Five reasons why to de-implement
Substitute less effective practices with those that have more evidence and probability of impact
Substitute more expensive interventions with less expensive ones
Streamline practices that have become over-engineered
Dial down the use of a still needed process (do it with less frequency or be selective about who delivers/receives treatment)
Remove or stop doing things without any intention of finding different activities to fill the void.
Dan Jackson’s “Work Less, Teach More”
Create a Yes/No List
Service ourselves like our car/lawnmower
Stop doing that which does not relate to our personal mission statement
Allow time for shallow (email) and deep (planning, collaboration) work and
Choose to not be overworked
Arran and John, “The Lean Education Manifesto”
Methodology
Discover
Permit: Obtain mandate to de-implement and establish backhouse team
Prospect: Identify amenable focus areas for de-implementation
Postulate: Explain what sustains practices to be de-implemented
Decide
Propose: Select high level de-implementation strategies
Prepare: Develop explicit de-implementation action plan
Picture: Develop a success map and evaluation plan
De-Implement
Proceed: Execute de-implementation plan and collect evaluative data
Re-Decide
Propel: Make longer-term sustainability and scaling decisions
Appraise: Review evaluation data and decide where to next.
Chapter 1
Why De-Implement?
To save time and reduce your workload
As an end itself (i.e. for individual/collective well-being)
Positive organic washback
To save financial resources
Re-invest in higher probability interventions
As an end in itself
Explicitly reinvest your time and energy into the highest-impact activities
Why is De-Implementation hard?
Our brains are naturally pre-wired to process and respond to environmental cues in certain ways
Hardwired to have similar bias toward addition
We are more likely to explore options that involve adding new activities, initiatives, programs, resources, and time
We are less likely to consider the converse, that by subtracting we might achieve more
Fear of losses - abandoning an existing and engrained practice
Fear of losses is stronger than the attraction to gain (adopting new practices)
There is no such thing as unlearning
The salience of the info stored in our brains may diminish if you access the memory infrequently. It remains (in some form) forever unless our brains become physically damaged
Instead of deleting old ideas/memories, we need to write a new piece of mental code (i.e. learn a new behavior) as an alternative to the existing pathway, then learn to select this rather than the earlier response.
Learn a new behavior
Make alterations to process steps in something you already do. Re-engineered.
An entirely new process. Replaced.
Creating a voice. Remove/reduce.
De-implementation is highly context specific.
Different levels of De-Implementation
L1: Individual. Action you can take on your own (instant)
L2: Local. Action that requires cooperative engagement (weeks).
L3: Whole School. Action requiring agreement/cooperation from leadership and can take a longer time. (months).
L4: Require permission from highest levels of school system and can take YEARS.
Trade-Offs
Amount of time or other resources saved vs The Ease of de-implementation with the level of stakeholder perception or belief that the quality of service and outcomes has diminished.

Quotes

“If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.” (Pannett et al, 2013)
“Work contracts to fit in the time we give it” (C. Barber, 2014)

There is so much MORE available in this book, and the diagrams/illustrations are incredible. If you are going to attempt change in your school or organization, you definitely need to check this book out to avoid pitfalls and potholes that will de-rail you and what you want to do. I’ve seen those firsthand, at all levels, so I definitely encourage you to consider it.

Be sure to check my follow-up blog entry for technology directors.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure