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The purpose of this paper is to look across six first-year principals to investigate their engagement with and sensemaking of specific messages of instructional leadership around teacher evaluation.

This research project, a cross-case study, was carried out using in-depth qualitative observations and interviews of six first-year principals over one school year. Sensemaking theory was used to analyze both how and the mechanisms through which principals understood their roles as teacher evaluators.

The results demonstrate that first, principals received a variety of messages about how to conduct teacher evaluations, and second, that connections to specific individuals influenced their associations to specific messages they received about instructional leadership and how they enacted teacher evaluation practices on their campuses.

This is an in-depth qualitative analysis, and therefore is not generalizable to all first-year principals, school districts, or principal preparation programs. However, it adds to the field’s understanding of the meso level of policy implementation, highlighting the process of individuals’ sensemaking and the importance of their informal connections in the associations they make to messages about instructional leadership.

This research adds to the field of principal preparation and induction as it highlights what is important for first-year principals as they build their professional identities. Further, it highlights the variability in principals’ understanding and enactment of teacher evaluation policies, an important feature as this practice is coming to the fore both in current practice and research.

This study adds to an understanding of institutional theory by looking at the interaction between the organizational levels, and further explicates individual actors’ agency within a socio-organizational context. The findings also add to a dearth of empirical studies on the routine of teacher evaluation from the principal perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework describing teachers’ affective and cognitive thought processes, as well as the sensemaking and decision making ongoing within them, during the various stages of the appropriation of an educational innovation.

The Rubicon model of action phases, borrowed from psychology, is first used as a lens to understand teachers’ will. The model is subsequently adapted to reconcile it with existing literature on teacher beliefs, teacher sensemaking, and teachers’ resistance.

The proposed framework shows that teachers’ appropriation of an educational innovation is multi-layered and multi-dimensional. This contradicts appropriation as simply a procedural implementation of research recommendations, culminating in only success or failure.

The paper sensitises policymakers, school leaders, and teacher educators to the complexity of the appropriation process. The proposed framework serves as a starting point for school and reform leaders, to re-examine their school’s implementation of an educational innovation from a more human relations perspective.

School principals make sense of multiple messages, policies, and contexts within their school environments. The purpose of this paper is to examine specifically how school leaders make sense of hiring and subjective evaluation of on‐the‐job teacher performance.

This qualitative study drew from 42 interviews with 21 principals from a mid‐sized Florida school district. Two rounds of semi‐structured interviews (one to two hours each) were conducted with the informants over two summers (2005‐2006). The multi‐year study allows the authors to assess the consistency across principal participants.

Principals' personal beliefs, background, and experiences were found to shape their conceptions and preferences for teacher characteristics. School type (e.g. elementary, secondary, levels of poverty) also influenced principals' perceptions of and preferences for specific applicant and teacher characteristics. Principals in the sample, however, showed surprising consistency towards certain characteristics (caring, subject matter knowledge, strong teaching skills) and job fit (person‐job). Sampled principals reported that each vacancy is different and is highly dependent on the position, team, and individuals. Regardless of the position or school setting, federal, state, and district mandates strongly influenced how principals made sense of the hiring process and on‐the‐job performance.

The findings underscore the complexity of the human resource functions in education and raise important questions of how school leaders reconcile personal preferences and building‐level needs with demands from the district, state, and federal levels.

The authors' findings offer important insight into the complex conceptualizations that principals hold and the balances that must be struck in the face of policy and hiring constraints. How principals make sense of teacher quality, however, has not been examined. This study contributes to the extant research and makes a theoretical contribution to studies using a cognitive frame to understand school leadership.

This paper investigates how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship and academia in an entrepreneurship training programme.

By employing a sensemaking approach, the paper inductively analyses materials from a business idea development camp organised for academic teachers.

In collective sensemaking during the camp, non-academic facilitators strongly influenced the reflection-in-experience via normative ideas of entrepreneurship and their othering of entrepreneurship from academic work. In their post-camp individual essays, the academic teachers reflect-on-experience and draw parallels between entrepreneurship and academic work constructing sameness.

Longitudinal research is needed in identity work and sensemaking among academic teachers in relation to entrepreneurship.

Universities need to offer arenas for teachers and other faculty to support identity work and sensemaking.

This study generates new understanding of how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship in training when interacting with others. It underscores the importance of time needed for reflection-on-action.

When school leaders advance strategic plans focused on improving educational equity through data-driven decision making, how do policies-as-practiced unfold in the daily work of science teachers? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This ethnographic study examines how data-centric accountability and improvement efforts surface as practices for 36 science teachers in three secondary schools. For two years, researchers were embedded in schools alongside teachers moving through daily classroom practice, meetings with colleagues and leaders, data-centric meetings, and professional development days.

Bundled initiatives created consequences for science educators including missed opportunities to capitalize on student-generated ideas, to foster science sensemaking, and to pursue meaningful and equitable science learning. Problematic policy-practice intersections arose, in part, because of school leaders’ framing of district and school initiatives in ways that undermined equity in science education.

From the perspective of science education, this paper raises an alarming problem for equitable science teaching. Lessons learned from missteps seen in this study have practical implications for others attempting similar work. The paper suggests alternatives for supporting meaningful and equitable science education.

Seeing leaders’ framing of policy initiatives, their bundling of performance goals, equity and accountability efforts, and their instructional coaching activities from the point of view of teachers affords unique insight into how leadership activities mediate policies in schools.

Instructional coaches are pivotal to articulating the agenda of system-wide reform, yet their role remains largely unexamined. Their approach with educators is contextually situated within the schooling system in which they work to reflect the historical and sociocultural system influences. Given the downward trend in New Zealand's international test scores for mathematics, it is timely to review the role of instructional coaches.

In this paper, the authors draw on qualitative data derived from interviews with experienced coaches to investigate how they brokered the vision and pedagogy of a system-level reform in mathematics. Using a sensemaking lens we specifically examined the collective stories they employed as explanatory tools.

The analysis revealed that coaches drew on factors from school and classroom contexts of professional development practice and from collective beliefs about effective practice, alongside the project materials incorporated in the design of the project. System-level stories of reading reform influenced coaches' leadership of professional practice in implementing the New Zealand Numeracy Development Project, a progressively scaled-up professional learning and development initiative designed to improve teacher knowledge and pedagogy.

This paper highlights the critical importance of coaches' knowledge and expertise, the complexity of the implementation process and the coherence of the infrastructure that supports them in instructional reform.

Federal and state policymakers in the USA have sought to better differentiate the performance of K-12 teachers by enacting more rigorous evaluation policies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether these policies are working as intended and explore whether district stressors such as funding, enrollment, and governance are associated with outcomes.

The authors examined teacher evaluation ratings from 687 districts in Michigan to identify the relationship between district stressors and two outcomes of interest to policymakers: frequency of high ratings and variation of ratings within districts. A qualitative index of variation was used to measure variation of the categorical rating variable.

About 97 percent of teachers in Michigan are rated effective or highly effective, and variation measures indicate overwhelming use of only two ratings. Charter school districts have fewer teachers rated highly than traditional districts, and districts with higher fund balances have more teachers rated highly. Districts with increasing fund balances have higher variation.

The findings suggest that district stressors presumably unrelated to teacher performance may influence teacher evaluation ratings. State teacher evaluation reforms that give districts considerable discretion in designing their teacher evaluation models may not be sufficient for differentiating the performance of teachers.

This research is important as policymakers refine state systems of support for teacher evaluation and provides new evidence that current enactment of teacher evaluation reform may be limiting the value of evaluation ratings for use in personnel decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the intersection of teacher emotions, teacher collaboration and educational reform, particularly with respect to time, a key teacher resource that is often impacted in school change.

This paper draws upon data gathered in an in-depth, two-year qualitative case study of teacher teams in two US elementary schools. A total of 57 interviews and 102 hours of teacher team meeting observations were conducted across the two schools. The data analysis process involved several rounds of content coding of interview transcripts and teacher team meeting observation notes using MAXQDA software.

Teachers at the two schools benefitted from collaborative school structures that allowed time and space to innovate and brought joy to their professional lives. Strong professional communities served as sources of support as teachers experienced stress and frustration with reforms that created demands on their time and shifts in their teaching. Leadership played an important role in providing emotional support and autonomy to teachers, allowing teachers to flourish collectively.

This study has important implications for how researchers, policymakers and practitioners conceptualize the emotional dimension of teachers’ time in educational reform efforts. It is critical to consider whether expectations for what teachers can accomplish in collaboration are realistic in light of current working conditions. Given that emotions are at the core of teaching and the process of change, it is important to continue to explore the connections between teacher emotions and the professional capital they build in collaboration with each other.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how school leaders use high-stakes teacher evaluation to improve and, if necessary, remove low-performing teachers in their schools. It explores how cognitive, relational and organizational factors play a role in shaping the way school leaders implement teacher evaluation.

Using a database of in-depth interviews with 17 principals and assistant principals, this study uses cross-case comparisons to examine one district’s efforts to improve the performance of low-performing teachers through evaluation.

School leaders’ framing of teacher performance and their efforts to improve instruction reveal the cognitive, relational and organizational aspects of working with low-performing teachers and, if necessary, pursuing removal. Notably, this study found that cognitive and relational factors were important in school leaders’ teacher improvement efforts, but organizational factors were most salient when attempting to remove teachers.

Because evaluating and developing teachers has become such an important aspect of school leaders’ day to day work, this study suggests that school leaders could benefit from more assistance from district personnel and that preparation programs should build in opportunities for aspiring leaders to learn more about their role as evaluators.

The success or failure of teacher evaluation systems largely hinges on school leaders, yet there is scant research on how school leaders make decisions to develop and remove low-performing teachers. This study sheds light on the central role school leaders play in implementing high-stakes teacher evaluation.

This chapter reframes the notion of teacher quality to encompass teacher qualities and teaching quality in the context of current demands on teacher and student learning. The chapter includes an exemplary case study of a program that depicts the kinds of qualities and practices that would be needed for effective teaching and learning in an era characterized by the need for higher-level skills and knowledge. The final section presents the implications for pre-service and in-service professional development to address the challenges the reconceptualization of teacher quality presents.