How does reform happen? Sensemaking and school reform: An interpretive case study.

Abstract

The organizational sensemaking perspective (Weick, 1995, 2001) may provide a useful framework for understanding the operation of schools and guiding efforts to make them better. Organizational sensemaking is the process by which people <italic>collectively</italic> find their environments, identities, and actions meaningful or intelligible. This dissertation focuses on a two-year case study of an elementary school in a reform project supporting change in reading instruction, sponsored by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA). The focus is on the school, the research design team, and their interaction to see how the reform is enacted through shared meanings and activities. The study found activities driven by individual and collective sensemaking, the result of retrospective, noticing, interpretation, and acting. Reformers resolved tensions and ambiguities in their roles, practices, goals, knowledge, and theories by creating plausible, flexible, partial, and ambiguous models that were only fully realized in their enactment. Teachers and administrators authored the reform design as much as they interpreted it. The needs and expectations of teachers and administrators pushed back on the sensemaking of the design team and transformed the model itself. The process focused on concrete cues, commitments of people, time, money, and activities. Other issues of roles and theories were left to discovery in practice. While many reported positive results, retrospective descriptions of the reform effort differed depending on respondent's prior experiences, involvement with the reform, and ongoing projects. The study concludes: (1) A sensemaking perspective helped maintain a focus on puzzling features of the school change process. (2) Sensemaking concepts helped to make sense of puzzling features of the school change process. (3) Sensemaking concepts are complex and ambiguous and therefore difficult to apply or test consistently. Possible generalizations include: (1) School reform models embody ambiguities that resist specification. (2) Enactment runs both ways. (3) Enactment operates through collective sensemaking rather than negotiation, interpretation, or adaptation.