Designing the Implementation Roadmap

Designing the Implementation Roadmap took the Steplab team into uncharted territory. We have led school improvement efforts and supported school and trust leaders to lead their own improvements for many years. Along the way, we learned a great deal about the biggest hurdles leaders are likely to face. For example:

• 1.
  We supported Annika, who worked relentlessly to improve professional development (PD) in her school. But PD never felt like a priority for the leadership team. Indeed, it often seemed as though senior leaders weren’t even on the same page about what makes great teaching. As a result, PD wasn’t prioritised in the school calendar, and teachers received conflicting messages about how to improve.
• 2.
  We spoke to Mark, who rapidly rolled out coaching across his school. Teachers were diligent about observing one another, but the feedback they exchanged was rarely precise enough to drive real improvement. Without a shared knowledge of how learning happens, even motivated coaching pairs couldn’t support each other to improve their practice.
• 3.
  We helped Shamima, who was responsible for PD — but also curriculum, exams and safeguarding. Each term, she set out determined to improve teaching, but her focus quickly eroded as other pressures mounted.

In working with leaders like these, we learned a lot about how schools could make implementation work, what PD leads needed to do, and the support they required. What we hadn’t yet done was synthesise our understanding and codify the exact route we’d recommend any school should take. In this post, we’ll describe the process of developing the roadmap, and what we've learned along the way.

We began with a few core resources. One was the wider evidence around implementation, such as the Education Endowment Foundation's (EEF) Implementation Toolkit. Our approach aligns with their most important findings. To give a few examples:

• 1.
  We adopt the four phases of implementation suggested by the EEF: Explore, Prepare, Deliver and Sustain.
• 2.
  The EEF highlights the importance of engaging and uniting everyone involved in an implementation effort, while still providing direction. Modules on Uniting and Upskilling Leaders and Preparing to Launch Change support PD leads to secure unity around planned changes.
• 3.
  The EEF recommends treating implementation as a process of “ongoing learning and improvement.” The roadmap features two modules (Monitor and Improve and Check Progress) which support leaders to identify what has improved, celebrate successes and refine practice.

Another source for the Implementation Roadmap was the range of webinars and support we’d developed over the years at Steplab to help leaders tackle specific hurdles. What we now needed to do was bring these together into a coherent journey that would work for school leaders.

Our work began with Steplab's Education Team spending long days together naming each of the steps and support a leader might require. We organised them, explored different possible journeys and tried to account for the contingencies a leader might encounter. The photo below shows our first draft of a process — but it left us with many questions about how to make the journey as clear and navigable as possible.

As our thinking evolved, and as we learned from schools and trusts, we reached the final model, shown here. This takes leaders on what we hope will be a powerful journey to overcome each implementation hurdle.

• 1.
  The school audit assesses a school's context and PD starting point to provide each school with a bespoke route through the Implementation Roadmap. From here, leaders explore Steplab together and ensure they are united around a shared vision for effective PD.
• 2.
  Next, leaders upskill themselves to generate a shared knowledge of how learning happens. This enables them to visit lessons and look for the same things. They collectively diagnose the school’s PD focus and use this to design a PD curriculum — a vision for what they want to see happening in classrooms across the school.
• 3.
  Leaders then select their approach for delivering PD and the training and systems needed. Will they run a programme of group PD and lesson drop-ins, an instructional coaching programme, or both?
• 4.
  Once leaders and coaches are trained, and they’ve prepared for coaching or drop-ins, they run repeated cycles of group PD and drop-ins, or group PD and coaching. They continuously monitor and improve PD, making small tweaks to ensure it remains high-quality and focused on the right things.
• 5.
  Finally, leaders step back and check progress: has the PD focus been embedded into lessons, and is the school ready to move on, or is more training required?

We then began making this journey legible. Our goal was to make each step clear: to share the actions needed, the rationale, and how best to achieve success in a succinct package that would work for busy leaders. Leaders will take a few days or perhaps weeks to work through each module, understanding the problem, assessing possible solutions and putting them into practice.

Each module includes:

• 1.
  An introduction to the challenge and the key ideas
• 2.
  A model showing how the challenge can be tackled
• 3.
  Practical examples from Steplab schools and trusts explaining their approach (our favourite part: leaders offering invaluable candid advice)
• 4.
  Resources to help you dig deeper into the issue and possible solutions
• 5.
  Suggested next steps
• 6.
  A link to an in-school accountability partner who will offer feedback and support to keep you on track

So each module offers both a chance to learn and guidance to take practical action to overcome an implementation challenge in your school.

While developing the content, we worked closely with Steplab’s technical team. We wanted the roadmap to be easy and intuitive to use. As ever, our tech team delivered. The result is a clean, crisp course on a responsive platform. The initial audit, for example, is a smooth and easy-to-use tool. The checks for understanding within each module are quick ways for you to test yourself and for us to provide feedback.

We’re particularly excited about our new accountability partner tool. We know Shamima’s experience, described in the introduction, is not uncommon. Leaders are busy, and the path to making professional development work rarely runs smoothly. As leaders work through the roadmap, they share their thinking and plans for each module and set a deadline for themselves. Their partner then checks in with them at the deadline. We believe that sharing thoughts and plans — and inviting another leader to offer encouragement and support — will make the process of leading change easier and more enjoyable.

At Steplab, we’re constantly learning from the schools in our community. That’s why, when users complete a module, we invite them to share their successes and suggest improvements. By learning from school leaders, we hope to share even more great examples of effective implementation — and to iterate the roadmap, making it even better for you.

The roadmap reflects our understanding of the challenges of implementation. In building it, we synthesised wisdom from a range of sources: the EEF’s implementation guidance, our practical experience helping leaders drive change, and the advice of schools making Steplab work for them. The result is a uniquely clear codification of effective implementation, in a format that is genuinely usable.

We’d love to hear what you think. Contact us at [email protected] to share your feedback and insights.

If you’d like to learn more about how the Implementation Roadmap and Steplab can deliver improvements to teaching and learning in your school, why not book a spot on one of our daily demos?