Over the recent holiday break, and as I often do, I immersed myself in reading. While many were non-fiction, several were educationally focussed. One of these being ‘The Pruning Principle’ by Dr Simon Breakspear and Michael Rosenbrock's (2024). This was a second read for me to ensure that the content was fresh for an ACELWA Book Club conversation that took place in late January. While reading the book, I found myself making connections to two other books I have read, Viviane Robinson's (2018) ‘Reduce Change to Increase Improvement (2018) and Peter DeWitt, Ed.D.'s (2022) De-implementation: Creating the Space to Focus on What Works’ , which ultimately lead to me revisiting these titles and then looking at work by Hattie, Dylan Wiliam and Doug Lemov. All this, when paired with conversations I have recently had with School leaders from New Zealand and Queensland during a Fogarty EDvance workshop at Dawson Park, highlighted that across contemporary educational research and leadership thinking, a clear and consistent message is emerging, that educational improvement has become saturated, overloaded, and fragmented due to the excessive accumulation of initiatives, strategies, and expectations.
This is not a critique of effort, far from it, in fact it is often the most committed schools and educators who experience this most sharply. Over time, well-intended additions such as programs, practices, meetings, reforms begin to layer on top of one another, stretching attention and diluting impact and several influential thinkers, some whom I have noted already, have approached this challenge from different angles, but they are responding to the same underlying problem.
Different language, shared logic
Peter DeWitt (2022), Viviane Robinson (2018), and Simon Breakspear & Michael Rosenbrock (2024) have all argued, in different ways, that doing more is not the path to better outcomes. On that DeWitt described the need for de-implementation, for deliberately stopping or reducing practices that no longer serve a school’s (or individuals) goals. Robinson showed that reducing change is often the very thing that increases improvement, while Breakspear and Rosenbrock used the metaphor of pruning to cut back strategically so what remains can grow stronger. While the language differed between these three works, the core logic however, remained the same. If I had to provide a simplified summary of these three works, I would suggest that Breakspear and Rosenbrock’s Pruning Principle could be seen as a leadership-facing articulation of the same core logic underpinning DeWitt’s work on de-implementation and Robinson’s argument to reduce change in order to increase improvement. All three emphasising the necessity of strategic subtraction to protect instructional focus, implementation quality, and organisational capacity.
After considering the three works, the table below outlines how I see these ideas aligning.
More recently, researchers such as Dylan Wiliam, Doug Lemov and John Hattie have also begun to emphasise similar ideas, warning against initiative overload, thin implementation, and the erosion of instructional coherence.
The question then becomes, so what does this mean for Dayton?
On the simplest level this thinking mirrors the broader work that we have undertaken at Dayton on instructional ecosystems and coherence across time. We are certainly not chasing novelty, rather we are tracing the through-line, and that through-line is clear. Improvement is less about what we add next, and more about what we are brave and disciplined enough to let go of.
At Dayton, our improvement journey is about two simultaneous things, things that to my way of thinking work together:
- Improving outcomes for students
- Building teacher capacity to increasingly high levels
Both require focus, both require depth, and both require us to be selective about where we invest our time, energy, and attention. To use Breakspear and Rosenbrock's analogy, we are about pruning to strengthen, not to diminish. This is not about doing less because something is not valued, rather it is about recognising that our work is valuable enough to protect from overload.
This includes:
- Simplifying where possible
- Letting go of practices that no longer serve our goals
- Strengthening what we know makes the biggest difference
When we do this well, we will create the conditions for high-quality practice to take root and flourish. And it is this way of thinking that is especially important when we engage in professional learning.
As we are all aware, and leaders are acutely attuned too, there is no shortage of professional learning available to schools, some of it excellent, some of it less so. The challenge therefore is not access, but rather alignment. Alignment being a concept that I have spoken of in great depth to staff and school leaders across the nation.
At Dayton, when we engage in professional learning, we are not searching for the next best thing. Instead, we ask a different question of ourselves as leaders and that of our staff. What insights can I take away that help us/me strengthen, refine, or let go of something so that what we already do at Dayton becomes even more effective? When we look at professional learning, we are looking for it to do one of three things; Affirm our current approach, sharpen an existing practice, or help us simplify or remove something that adds little value. All these outcomes support coherence, while none rely on novelty.
When schools continually add without subtracting, clarity erodes, this holds true for individual classroom teachers, teams, organisations and even at a system level. When school’s leadership teams are disciplined about focus, something different happens. Shared language strengthens, practice deepens, and collective efficacy grows, coherence develops over time.
This is the kind of improvement we are committed to at Dayton, improvement that lasts, not because it is new, but because it is sustained, and it is for this reason that we reiterate our key messaging at the start of every year, and every term.
As the new school year commences for teams across the nation, some of whom have already begun to plan for the year ahead, the start of the year provides a perfect opportunity for leadership teams to undertake an audit of practices and programs that exist across their teaching and learning ecosystems, to consider the direction they are wishing to move in and utilise the work of DeWitt, Robinson, and Breakspear & Rosenbrock to refine, sharpen and reaffirm the things that they will invest energy into to continue to make a difference in terms of increasing improvement for student outcomes.