From Strategies to Principles: My Journey Through Deimplementation

The Biggest Change Was Learning What to Remove

When people ask what has had the greatest impact on my teaching over the past few years, they often expect me to mention a specific instructional strategy. They anticipate something about retrieval practice, explicit instruction, Rosenshine principles, Cognitive Load Theory, or perhaps mini-whiteboards and cold call. All of those have dramatically altered the way I teach, but none of them represent the biggest difference I have experienced. The most significant change was learning to remove things before adding new ones and importance of deimplementation.

That sounds almost too simple, but it fundamentally altered the way I think about improving my instruction. Like many teachers, I spent years believing that becoming a better teacher meant continually accumulating new ideas. Every meeting introduced another strategy. Every book offered another model. Every district initiative asked us to add something else onto an already overflowing plate. Improvement became synonymous with addition. What I have only recently discovered was that meaningful and measurable improvement often begins with subtraction.

The idea of “replace, don’t add” completely changed my thinking. Every time I encountered a practice that was more consistent with what cognitive science tells us about learning, I stopped asking, “How can I fit this into everything I’m already doing?” Instead, I began asking, “What can this replace that’s not working?” That single question has reduced my workload while simultaneously improving student learning. Rather than carrying around an ever-growing toolbox of disconnected strategies, I slowly built a instructional model grounded in a small number of evidence-informed principles.

When Engagement Became a Poor Proxy for Learning

Looking back, I realize this deimplementation benefited me just as much as it benefited my students. For years, I adamantly believed my job was to make every lesson engaging, memorable, collaborative, authentic, differentiated, technology-rich, and fun. I spent countless hours creating elaborate activities because I assumed that if students were busy and enjoying themselves, meaningful learning was actually happening. In reality, I had confused engagement with learning. Many of the instructional decisions I made were based on poor proxies for learning rather than on an understanding of how working memory, attention, and remembering actually work.

The result was sadly quite predictable. I worked harder than I needed to, my planning became increasingly complicated, and I was constantly chasing the next “silver bullet” idea that promised to motivate and engage students more than ever before. It was mentally and physically exhausting. Ironically, much of that effort produced very little learning. The more I learned about cognitive science, the more I realized that effective instruction is frequently much simpler than I had imagined. Students did not need me to design increasingly elaborate and extraneous load filling activities. They needed me to present new information clearly and simply, provide frequent opportunities for practice, regularly revisit previously learned knowledge, and continuously check for understanding and learning. As I began replacing ineffective practices with more explicit instruction, retrieval practice, purposeful questioning, and assessment for learning, my teaching became both sharper and more effective. My unnecessarily large workload decreased, my lessons became more coherent and sticky, and my mental and physical health improved dramatically because I was no longer trying to reinvent my instruction every night.

The Emotional Side of Deimplementation

That journey, however, was not nearly as straightforward as it sounds. Nothing in teaching is. One of the most challenging parts of deimplementation was the emotional toll that accompanied it. As I learned more about how people learn, I found myself looking back at years of teaching with an uncomfortable but unavoidable sense of regret. I would remember lessons students seemed to enjoy because of the “activity” but that facilitated very little learning. I thought about projects that consumed weeks of instructional time yet left students with fragile  understandings often plagued with misconceptions. There were times when I genuinely thought how I could have taught that way for so long and not done anything differently.

Over time, I came to realize those emotions were misguided. I cannot apply knowledge I do not yet possess. None of us know what we do not know until we know it. This perspective helped move my feeling from guilt to responsibility. I could not change what I had done in previous years of teaching, but I could make better decisions moving forward for the benefit of my students. The occasional feeling of regret never disappears entirely, but it now serves as a reminder that continual improvement matters because our instructional decisions genuinely affect students’ opportunities to learn and their opportunities long after they leave our classroom.

Implementation Depends on Deimplementation

One lesson I experienced early was that successful implementation depends on disciplined deimplementation. When I first began studying cognitive science, I resisted as best as I could the temptation to overhaul everything about my teaching at once. Instead, I focused on embedding a limited number of evidence-informed practices. Intentional systems for retrieval practice and explicit instruction became the heart of my teaching methods during this initial phase. Only after those routines became effective did I begin incorporating additional concepts like Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory, Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, Ausubel’s Assimilation Theory, and other evidence-informed theories of instruction to what I was already doing.

Two Questions That Changed My Teaching

Those experiences led me to two questions that now form the foundation of every teaching decision I make: What problem will this solve? and What new problems might this create? Those questions have become my supreme filter for all my implementation and deimplementation processes. What is important is they force me to think beyond whether a practice just sounds innovative or engaging and instead evaluate whether it addresses an instructional problem I am experiencing without creating avoidable problems of its own.

Principles Before Practices

Perhaps the most important light bulb moment throughout this process was understanding that I did not simply need better strategies and to deimplement those and replace them with better strategies. I needed better principles. Evidence-informed principles. Throughout most of my, I would justify my teaching practices because students had fun, they promoted collaboration, gave students lots of choice and control, increased high energy engagement, or they kept everyone busy which would be attractive to a passing administration who may peek in the room. Looking back, I now see those as weak proxies for learning which were not based on the principles of how we learn and cognitive science rather than true evidence of learning itself. As my understanding of memory, cognitive load, and knowledge acquisition grew, I realized that many of my classroom practices rested on assumptions that were never particularly well-supported scientific principles. In other words, my strategies weren’t highly effective at helping students learn because they were based on weak principles of learning.

Changing my teaching therefore required more than simply replacing one strategy with another. It required replacing the beliefs that justified using those strategies in the first place. That distinction has shaped every instructional decision I have made since. Today, I do not ask myself, “What strategy should I use?” Instead, I ask, “What principle should guide this decision?” Programs, frameworks, and packaged solutions come and go as they always do, but my principles can and should endure. When I understand why a practice works and the principles behind it, I can adapt it to almost any classroom context. When I understand only what the practice is, teaching can quickly becomes a set of strategies to choose from instead of foundational principles serving as an instructional North Star.

From Strategies to Principles

For me, that change, from strategies to principles, is what my deimplementation experience has mostly been about. While essential, it is not simply removing the ineffective practices. It is replacing unproven assumptions about learning with better ones which have been proven true for decades based in the science of how humans learn. Today, I no longer begin with, “What strategy should I use?” I begin with, “What principle should guide this decision?” Because when our principles change, our practices inevitably follow.