Research School Network: Implementing curriculum change Part 5: the mechanics of implementing effective curriculum change

Good implementation is generally quite rare and can, quite often, be an afterthought, especially when we spend an inordinate amount of time planning a new approach or a major curriculum change. In this blog, the final part in a five part series on curriculum, we look at how effective implementation can make for longer term success.

There is a growing evidence base about ways to implement effectively, although making changes in any school can be messy and difficult to do. Schools are fluid, dynamic institutions and with any given set of teachers and students you have lots of variables; there’s a lot of moving parts and this can dilute the effectiveness of your planned approach. For example, how do you get staff to faithfully adopt your approach? How do you provide ongoing support? What do you do about changing your approach if it’s not having the impact you expected? Have you even thought about evaluating the impact of your changes, longer term? These are just some of the questions that spring to mind.

Using the Implementation Guidance Report from the EEF can be a good starting point for planning effective implementation. I really like this question, which is derived from the report:

Are there opportunities to make fewer, but more strategic, implementation decisions and pursue these with greater effort?

To coin the phrase less is definitely more; how things are done is often as important as what is being done.

So why is implementation so important? Take this example from the US: healthcare workers’ failure to wash hands was a major cause of death costing the government billions of dollars each year. It sounds like an obvious issue, certainly one that you’d expect a profession like medicine to have grappled with and resolved. The challenge wasn’t a lack of knowledge – people knew that hand washing was important. The challenge wasn’t understanding how to do it – people knew how to wash their hands. The challenge was getting people to do it consistently. To do this, researchers created a simple checklist for surgical teams to follow and then trialed this in health care sector. Outcomes from the initial trial showed a 66% reduction in infection rates, saving approximately 1500 lives in 18 months. The difference was made by the how – how to make the behaviours associated with hand washing easier and therefore more attractive.

If we explore the roots of effective implementation, we can simplify it into a series of stages relating to thinking about, preparing for, delivering, and sustaining change. The model below, taken from the Implementation Guidance Report is used widely within the Research School network as a foundation for any work we do on initiating change in schools.

As Marcus Jones, explains in the fourth blog of this series: ​‘what are the crucial concepts, the big ideas, the meaty meanings that will best support pupil understanding in your subject?’ How will you then effectively enact these changes and implement your curriculum plans within your subject? This is a key question we can all think more deeply about. There is a large body of evidence on what influences changes in behaviour, in this case, how do we encourage changes in student and teacher behaviours and ultimately impact this change in the classroom. The EAST model, developed by The Behavioural Insight Team, is an effective framework to begin to do this, to encourage or change behaviours. The four simple principles; Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely (EAST) can be applied to evaluate the effectiveness of a new strategy or to evaluate the perceived impact of a curriculum change.

A Logic model (see diagram below) can also act as a good graphical tool to use when thinking about implementing a new strategy. The implementation guidance report offers a theory of change model that you might also find useful when planning a new approach in your setting. The process of mapping out a plan makes you think more deeply about the critical aspects of your decision making and ultimately, what the impact of those decisions will be.

The logic model in-effect turns traditional planning on its head, identifying the ​‘situation’ you want to change or develop first as expected, however you then extrapolate out to think about the end ​‘Goal’. From this you can then define your short, medium and long terms expectations or outcomes. Only after planning these stages can the logistics or mechanics of how your changes take place be thought about.

Remember, good implementation might mean we have to take a long, hard look at everything we do, be more critical and if appropriate stop doing things that aren’t working, or aren’t working as well as other things. This can have a positive effect, not only on selecting the most successful approaches available (consulting the evidence of course) but may also have an added benefit of reducing teacher work load and that can never be a bad thing!

Stephen Foreman,
Research-lead, Huntington Research School