1. Foreword
1. DeImplementation Strategies
1. Remove the practice completely
2. Reduce how frequently you do it
3. Re-engineer the practice to take less time
4. Replace it with something else that is more efficient or effective
2. Four Stages Process
1. Discover amenable de-implementation areas
2. Decide the best fit strategy (from the 4 Rs)
3. De-implement
4. 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
3. 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
4. Nothing replaces evidence-proven precision practice of teachers in every classroom
5. Data must inform instruction every minute of the day to be useful and warrant admin time
6. Opportunities to Actions
1. Room for Impact options
2. Remove: Stop Doing it completely
3. Reduce: Do it less frequently or with less people
4. Re-engineer: Do it more efficiently with fewer steps/actions
5. Replace: Substitute it with a more efficient/effective option/addition
7. Target areas such as:
1. Curriculum
2. Lesson Planning
3. Homework
4. Assessment
5. Behavior Management
6. MTSS
7. Wall displays
8. Staff meetings
9. Technology Interventions
8. Selected De-Implementation Area
1. Current Practice: Daily Homework from teachers
2. What are De-Implementation Options?
1. Can we remove it?
2. Can we reduce it?
3. Can we re-engineer it?
4. Can we replace it?
5. What will we do?
2. Introduction
1. Tendency to privilege addition
1. 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
2. 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
3. Schools and systems struggle to:
1. select appropriate initiatives to add to their context
2. localize or adapt new addition in a way that doesn’t dilute impact or even makes it counter-productive
3. implement with fidelity
4. monitor and evaluate with rigor
4. Five reasons why to de-implement
1. Substitute less effective practices with those that have more evidence and probability of impact
2. Substitute more expensive interventions with less expensive ones
3. Streamline practices that have become over-engineered
4. Dial down the use of a still needed process (do it with less frequency or be selective about who delivers/receives treatment)
5. Remove or stop doing things without any intention of finding different activities to fill the void.
5. Dan Jackson’s “Work Less, Teach More”
1. Create a Yes/No List
2. Service ourselves like our car/lawnmower
3. Stop doing that which does not relate to our personal mission statement
4. Allow time for shallow (email) and deep (planning, collaboration) work and
5. Choose to not be overworked
6. Arran and John, “The Lean Education Manifesto”
3. Methodology
1. Discover
1. Permit: Obtain mandate to de-implement and establish backhouse team
2. Prospect: Identify amenable focus areas for de-implementation
3. Postulate: Explain what sustains practices to be de-implemented
2. Decide
1. Propose: Select high level de-implementation strategies
2. Prepare: Develop explicit de-implementation action plan
3. Picture: Develop a success map and evaluation plan
3. De-Implement
1. Proceed: Execute de-implementation plan and collect evaluative data
4. Re-Decide
1. Propel: Make longer-term sustainability and scaling decisions
2. Appraise: Review evaluation data and decide where to next.
4. Chapter 1
1. Why De-Implement?
1. To save time and reduce your workload
1. As an end itself (i.e. for individual/collective well-being)
2. Positive organic washback
2. To save financial resources
1. Re-invest in higher probability interventions
2. As an end in itself
3. Explicitly reinvest your time and energy into the highest-impact activities
2. Why is De-Implementation hard?
1. Our brains are naturally pre-wired to process and respond to environmental cues in certain ways
1. Hardwired to have similar bias toward addition
2. We are more likely to explore options that involve adding new activities, initiatives, programs, resources, and time
3. We are less likely to consider the converse, that by subtracting we might achieve more
4. Fear of losses – abandoning an existing and engrained practice
1. Fear of losses is stronger than the attraction to gain (adopting new practices)
2. There is no such thing as unlearning
1. 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
2. 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.
3. Learn a new behavior
1. Make alterations to process steps in something you already do. Re-engineered.
2. An entirely new process. Replaced.
3. Creating a voice. Remove/reduce.
4. De-implementation is highly context specific.
3. Different levels of De-Implementation
1. L1: Individual. Action you can take on your own (instant)
2. L2: Local. Action that requires cooperative engagement (weeks).
3. L3: Whole School. Action requiring agreement/cooperation from leadership and can take a longer time. (months).
4. L4: Require permission from highest levels of school system and can take YEARS.
5. Trade-Offs
1. 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)