The Unraveling of a Systems Change Initiative to Improve Instruction: an Investigation into Differences in Sensemaking Across Levels

Across international contexts, many decisions that influence the interactions between teachers and students are made at levels across educational systems. Change initiatives regularly begin at the top of the system and trickle down, resulting in a role across levels not only for educators to engage in sensemaking but to also act as sensegivers. From a three-year case study of one urban district in the midwestern United States, we analyzed a robust dataset of observations, interviews, and artifacts of district leaders, principals, instructional coaches, and teachers to understand why the district’s attempt to significantly change instructional practices in a subset of schools identified as underperforming did not achieve widespread acceptance. Our findings suggest that despite general agreement across levels about the importance of improving instruction and changing the instructional cultures of those schools, the ways in which educators make sense of change and then give sense to change to others is critically important not only to launch change but to systematize operations.