De-Implementation: Creating Capacity for What Matters in Literacy

Written by: Katie Sojewicz, Vice President of Professional Learning

Most literacy improvement efforts are built on addition. A new curriculum, a new screener, a new intervention, a new block of professional learning. Each addition might make sense on its own. But put together, they leave educators and leaders carrying more than any system could reasonably support, and have students receiving instruction shaped by competing messages.

De-implementation offers a different question: not “what should we add?” but “what should we stop, shrink, or swap out so that the most important work can actually succeed?” In his book De-Implementation: Creating the Space to Focus on What Works (2022), Peter DeWitt describes educators as buried under old practices, new ideas, and recommended initiatives, and argues that leaders need a deliberate process to decide what to keep, what to modify, and what to let go of.

For literacy leaders, one of the most practical places to begin is also one of the most overlooked: the curriculum and materials already on the shelf.

Three Moves: Replace, Reduce, Remove

De-implementation is often defined as “get rid of things.” In practice, it takes more than one form. For literacy teams, it helps to think in three moves:

Naming the three moves matters because the right one is rarely obvious, and leaders who treat everything as a removal often face resistance. Many practices need a replacement ready to go before they can be removed. Others only need to be dialed back.

Deciding which move fits is not a task for one person with a spreadsheet.

“Teachers, staff, and school leaders need to spend time engaging in discussions about what practices successfully help impact student learning and carefully decide which practices, on the part of both students and adults, need to stay and which ones need to go.” (De-Implementation, Creating the Space to Focus on What Works, Peter DeWitt, 2022.)

That emphasis on shared discussion is the difference between de-implementation that sticks and a directive that gets quietly ignored.

Why Materials Are a Strong Place to Start

Teachers cannot be expected to set aside practices that are built into the resources they are handed each morning. If a core program’s teacher’s guide still includes cueing-based prompts, a teacher following it faithfully could use them, regardless of what professional learning has said. When training and materials point in different directions, the gap is not a teacher problem. It is a system problem leadership can fix.

It is also worth reviewing the materials directly rather than relying on descriptions. A publisher’s “aligned to the science of reading” label is not a substitute for reading the lessons.

A materials audit is also a good example of what DeWitt calls formal de-implementation, which involves a team, shared criteria, and a transparent process, as opposed to the informal decisions an individual teacher might make on their own.

What to Examine, and Which Move Might Fit

Looking across your system, consider each layer:

These are starting points, not verdicts. Your own review of the actual lessons should drive the decision.

Do This, Not That

Reviewing alignment

• Do this: Read the lessons and teacher’s guides page by page, and decide as a team whether each issue calls for replacement, reduction, or removal.
• Not that: Rely on a program’s label, or have one person quietly pull materials without explanation.

Text selection

• Do this: Use decodable texts matched to students’ current phonics knowledge for early reading practice.
• Not that: Use leveled libraries as the primary tool for placement and daily instruction.

Assessment

• Do this: Use direct measures of phonemic awareness and decoding to pinpoint skill gaps.
• Not that: Let running records alone determine a student’s needs.

Comprehension

• Do this: Build comprehension through coherent, knowledge-building content.
• Not that: Keep stand-alone “skill of the week” worksheets because they have always been there.

Writing

• Do this: Teach writing explicitly, with modeling, guided practice, and feedback tied to what students are reading and learning.
• Not that: Assign writing prompts without instruction, or keep grammar worksheets disconnected from students’ own writing.

Oral language

• Do this: Plan oral language development, including vocabulary, sentence structure, and structured discussion, as part of daily instruction.
• Not that: Assume oral language will develop on its own, or let it be the first thing cut when the schedule gets tight.

Intervention

• Do this: Confirm Tier 2 and Tier 3 materials build from and intensify core instruction.
• Not that: Choose intervention materials that conflict with the core instruction.

What This Looks Like in Practice

1. Gather everything. Collect core, intervention, supplemental, and assessment materials from every tier in one place.
2. Set criteria first. Agree on what “effective and aligned” means before judging any material. Without clear criteria and transparency, decisions stall or feel arbitrary.
3. Review the pages. Assign a team to flag specific lessons, prompts, and activities.
4. Sort by move. For each item, decide: keep, replace, reduce, or remove.
5. Communicate the why. Explain the reasoning to staff, with specific guidance on what changes and what does not.
6. Pair every removal with a path forward. A gap without a replacement tends to be filled by old habits.
7. Monitor what is actually happening. Walkthroughs and coaching conversations should look for the new practices and for the absence of the old ones.

You Don’t Have to Start From Scratch

If you are using the guidance in this blog, you do not have to build an audit from nothing. The Reading League’s Curriculum Evaluation Guidelines (CEGs) provide research-based criteria for evaluating a literacy curriculum. They identify aligned practices and “red flag” practices, and the reviewer workbook gives your team a structure for finding where, or whether, each one shows up in the materials.

For specific K-5 programs, the Curriculum Navigation Reports (CNRs) go a step further. Expert review teams have already applied the CEGs to widely used programs and written up what they found, so your team can start from that review.

A Question for Leaders

What can you intentionally streamline or remove to create the capacity needed for your literacy priorities, and how will you build shared understanding around why these changes matter? When everything is a priority, nothing receives the attention it needs. Strong leaders remove barriers and make intentional choices to create the capacity to do the most important work well.

Final Thoughts

Strong literacy systems are defined as much by what they leave out as by what they include. Materials carry practice into classrooms, whether or not anyone is thinking about them. Reviewing them with a team and being willing to replace, reduce, or remove what no longer serves students is how de-implementation becomes concrete and sustainable.

Source

DeWitt, P. M. (2022). De-implementation: Creating the space to focus on what works. Corwin.