Innovations in Educational Change by David Hung & Shu-Shing Lee & Yancy Toh & Azilawati Jamaludin & Longkai Wu

Author:David Hung & Shu-Shing Lee & Yancy Toh & Azilawati Jamaludin & Longkai Wu
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811363306
Publisher: Springer Singapore

7.7 Conclusion

As policymakers incorporate and press radically “new” ideas, they produce uncertainty, puzzles, and ambiguity for those who are charged with implementing policy (micro level) in practice. The resulting uncertainties, puzzles, and ambiguities trigger sense-making and create a need for skilled sense-givers who can negotiate not only the meanings of policy for practice but also the very legitimacy of policy itself. School leaders, we argue, have been left to manage in the middle between teachers and policymakers with different expectations and norms about what it means to be a professional educator. Leaders in our study deployed a constellation of tactics as they attempted to advance the legitimacy of accountability policy, to frame (and reframe) policy messages, to position (and reposition) themselves vis-à-vis external policymakers and school staff, and to direct teachers’ attention in ways that privileged particular ideas about instruction and teacher professionalism. What our study allows us to demonstrate in a theoretically generalisable manner is that during unsettled times, when logics are in contestation, school leaders at the micro level may be left (by default) to do the “heavy lifting” when it comes to giving others a sense of policy’s legitimacy and its meanings and compelling others’ cooperation in putting those meanings into practice. This heavy lifting is work that those making policy and supporting school leaders should take into account.

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