Making implementation easy(er)

Schools are full of good intentions. But, when we lead change, we soon learn that these aren’t enough on their own to improve teaching. The school day is a welter of pressures: absent colleagues and cover lessons, incidents and phone calls, room changes and all-staff emails. Even the most robust plans for teacher development can be upset. Soon after taking our first steps, we may find that some teachers can’t make training, some colleagues are struggling to complete their observations, and some leaders think we’re pursuing the wrong priority. As long as we’re mired in such challenges, improving teaching remains difficult. So how can we overcome them?

At Steplab, we’ve been thinking about this question for several years. We’ve been lucky to learn from fantastic school leaders nationally and internationally. We seek to understand how they’ve helped their schools to improve – and to share the key parts of their approach with others. In the process, we’ve developed a number of resources which address different parts of this puzzle. For example, the Coaching Skills Builder is an answer to the question, “How can we help teachers coach effectively?” The Certificate in Coaching Leadership is an answer to the question, “How can we support leaders to make coaching work?”

Now, we’ve launched a new online programme, the Implementation Roadmap. It’s the capstone for these different projects. Or, better still, it’s the guidebook which knits them all together into a meaningful journey that overcomes the most common barriers to implementation. The roadmap collates and organises everything we’ve learned about leading change in schools, from working with hundreds of school leaders. It brings this together in a clear, structured, step-by-step programme, guiding you through the process of leading change.

We warmly invite you to try the Implementation Roadmap now. Here, we want to draw out a few key features which we hope you’ll find particularly useful.

First, and most importantly, the Implementation Roadmap is a step-by-step programme to change. Many users will have valuable experience of leading change (we’ll talk more about how we match the roadmap to your needs below). But whether you are a newly appointed leader in an unfamiliar school, or an experienced leader in a school that has used Steplab for several years, we will guide you every step of the way – from uniting leaders around a common purpose and understanding of teaching, through introducing change, to evaluating success and adopting refinements.

The ingredients of a successful change are universal: these include a shared understanding of the underlying goal, a clear focus for action, and support from leaders and colleagues. But each school will have some ingredients long established and others much needed. The Implementation Roadmap offers a responsive experience. The initial audit checks what’s in place in your school, and where you need to focus. The result is a roadmap tailored to your needs: it will encourage you to skip – or briefly revisit – aspects of implementation that are already in place, and help you focus on the changes your school needs most.

As you’d expect from a Steplab course, we’ve signposted the steps carefully. Each topic within the roadmap (such as ‘Identifying a professional development focus’) offers:

• 1.
  An explanation of what to do
• 2.
  A narrative of how it might work
• 3.
  Videos sharing the experience of school and trust leaders
• 4.
  Opportunities to check your understanding

In working through the course, we hope that this range of signposts will allow you to easily grasp the underlying principles and how they can be achieved.

There’s strong evidence that making commitments to others encourages action. If I’ve told a friend I’ll go to the gym – or, better still, agreed to meet them there – I’m much more likely to go. We know how many other pressures there are on professional development leaders, and how they can get in the way of making progress with big plans like this one. So, throughout the roadmap, we invite you to work with an accountability partner. You’ll commit to the action you’re planning and set a deadline for completing it. We hope that the feedback, support and encouragement your partner offers will make change far easier.

Implementation is often seen as the hardest part of school improvement. But it doesn’t have to be. With the right guidance, tools and support, it can become a structured, achievable and energising process. That’s exactly what the Implementation Roadmap is designed to do: transform a daunting challenge into a clear, step-by-step journey that’s easy to follow, effective in practice, and sustainable for the long term.

We hope the roadmap will be an invaluable companion in helping you deliver meaningful, lasting improvements to teaching and learning. If you’ve not yet explored it, we warmly invite you to begin today. And if you’ve already started, we’d love to hear how it’s helping in your school.

Contact us at [email protected] to share your feedback and insights.

If you’d like to learn more about Steplab and our Implementation Roadmap, why not sign up for our webinar?