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"I cannot praise Making Room for Impact too highly. It took me 18 years as a headteacher to realize that the fewer things I asked colleagues to do, the better our school became. If you read this book—the follow up to Building to Impact—you won’t have to spend 18 years learning how and why to de-implement. The thing is, we can only use each hour of our lives once. That is why opportunity cost is the most important concept in the wider lives of people working in schools.
"Skilled mountaineers know that to reach the summit, you carry only what you need. Carrying more diminishes your chances of success and threatens your survival. In this book, Arran, John, and Dylan provide the practical guidance that school leaders so desperately need to lighten their packs, improve their efficiency of impact, and succeed in reaching the summit of helping all students learn."
"Making Room for Impact is a magnificent and unique book. It addresses a crucial almost completely neglected topic—how to get rid of or re-constitute things that no longer work!
"De-implementation, or the science and art of removing, reducing, re-engineering, or replacing existing practices, is a novel concept in education, but a very important one in a world in which the limits in constantly adding more to the workload of teachers and leaders are ever more apparent.
"Schools are crowded with many unnecessary and fruitless policies and practices. School leaders, teachers, and students are all overworked with futile reforms and innovations, mandatory requirements, and unproductive tasks. Schools must do less! In Making Room for Impact, Arran Hamilton, John Hattie, and Dylan Wiliam make compelling arguments for doing less and provide excellent guidance for schools to do less. This is a great read for educators!"
"Making Room for Impact is a refreshingly original, timely, and beautifully crafted book. I'm certain the brilliantly conceived toolkit will energize educators around the world, empowering them to make the changes they need in order to take their schools forward by breaking the cycle of forever doing more and more and more.
"Two ideas came me as I was reading this book. The first was that these are such good ideas, I wonder why it has taken so long for them to reach print. The second one is that any book that promises me a means of ‘getting off the hamster wheel’ has to be taken seriously, so much so that I wish this movement to de-implementation had been more fully developed when I was working full-time directing a large-scale education reform project in 50 secondary schools: a recipe for needing de-implementation if ever there was one.
"Written by an unbeatable team of authors on how to improve outcomes by decluttering, this book is surely of interest to school leaders and teachers everywhere."
"Unbearable workloads are a chief reason given for the teacher shortage experienced in many countries. Often teachers are exhorted to ‘work smarter, not harder’, but they rarely receive advice about how to do this. This new book, from a team of highly regarded educators and researchers, is unique in that it provides guidance on both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. It offers a process, based on principles, for removing, reducing, re-engineering, or replacing existing practices in order to concentrate on those practices likely to have most positive impact in terms of learning outcomes.
"This is a fascinating and compelling read from some of our most influential education specialists. The central purpose is to provide an evaluative framework for educators to use in determining areas of professional workload that take up considerable time without directly improving student outcomes. The process of de-implementing is explored in detail, advice about areas that might be contributing to workload are suggested, but ultimately, we are offered a powerful manual for change.
"Hamilton, Hattie, and Wiliam provide a comprehensive guide that will assist busy educators in determining what to stop, start, and continue in their efforts to improve schools. Their model is grounded in research and provides a practical and efficient methodology for de-implementation that is long overdue and needed in education."
"There's no end to the list of tasks teachers and schools could take on. So where can teachers find the space and time needed to make improvements, adopt better programmes, or simply go home earlier? This admirable book offers the clearest answer I've yet seen. The authors offer valuable guidance in why making room for impact matters, how we can pursue it, and precisely what steps we might choose to take. Even more importantly, they offer schools license to work towards doing less and doing differently—not just more and more. The examples of how this can be done, practical and provocati
"Kurt Vonnegut's immortal 'Cat's Cradle' featured the Bokonist mantra 'busy, busy, busy.' I've often thought the phrase works all too well as a description of schooling, where the mandatory and routine squeeze out the good. In Making Room for Impact, instead of giving school leaders yet another to-do list, the authors instead offer much-needed but far-too-rare guidance on how to focus in on what matters most and carefully de-implement the rest."
"In this profoundly important book, Hamilton, Hattie, and Wiliam reveal why so many well-intentioned educational reforms fail and, more importantly, what we can do about it. Before you start your next initiative, take the authors’ words to heart and de-implement first. With practical step-by-step advice, the process guides educators and leaders through the essential steps to declutter their agendas and focus on the essentials. The impressive evidence in these pages makes clear that the fragmentation associated with an abundance of initiatives is the enemy of learning.
"Educational improvement efforts are plagued by remnants of previous efforts that were also designed to change outcomes. These fragments, or perhaps even entire initiatives, prevent the knowledge we have now from taking hold. Implementation fails because there are too many other things that are not working but haven’t been abandoned. It’s as if we’re at a buffet, with a full plate, and instead of removing some items, we ask for another plate and pile it on.
"This book is brilliant. Every educator recognizes that we sometimes try something new and it doesn't work out...and every educator recognizes that stopping is not always easy! This book takes you, step by step, through the process of identifying a target for de-implementation, choosing a strategy, and implementing it. This book will be invaluable for administrators!"
"I don’t think I have ever read an educational book quite like this, simply because the focus is not on the latest new thing you should be trying, but a compelling argument on how to become more effective through doing less. By suggesting a range of powerful practical processes through which you can remove, reduce, re-engineer or replace what you do, this book really empowers the reader to be bold.
"One of the secrets of the highest-performing education systems is that they pursue fewer things at greater depth and avoid the mile-wide-inch deep implementation culture that often prevails elsewhere. But taking things away tends to be much harder in education than adding new things. Making Room for Impact shows it can be done and provides the research, tools, and guidance to make it happen."