DELIVER: Support staff, monitor progress, solve problems, and adapt strategies as the approach is used for the first time
‘Deliver’ is a vulnerable phase in which the new programme or practice is applied for the first time. As when trying anything new – be that learning to drive, or playing an instrument – we should expect it to be tricky at first; hence this phase is about continuous dynamic improvement:
- Motivating staff
- Identifying and solving problems
- Identifying successes to solve those problems
- Providing ongoing support to help embed new skills, knowledge and behaviours.
When delivery is framed in this way as a learning process, monitoring implementation becomes an essential tool in identifying, and acting on, implementation barriers and enablers. For the Bedlington team, this wasn’t just about monitoring fidelity (i.e. are the core practices around retrieval practice emerging in lessons?), but also how staff and pupils felt in terms of the feasibility and benefits of the approach.
The leadership team gave staff time to experiment with retrieval practice in their lessons and integrate it with their professional expertise. High-quality follow-on support was provided through lesson observations, feedback, highlighting good practice and instructional coaching, as a means of embedding and refining new skills (see here for more information on coaching).
The previous work in the Prepare phase to distill an initial set of core practices enabled productive conversations around where to be ‘tight’ and where to be ‘loose’ i.e. where there was scope for subject-specific adaptations (see Active Ingredients summary for more information).