This study investigates teachers' perceptions on PLC implementation within religious-based secondary schools in the context of Malaysia. Using a pragmatic mixed-method approach, quantitative data were obtained from 610 teachers about principals' implementation and support for PLC implementation. Then, 16 senior teachers who have successfully…

Education policies are rarely implemented as they have been written or planned. Instead, school principals interpret and apply these policies according to their professional role identity and sensemaking. This study highlights the importance of the micro-institutional context. Specifically, it addresses the professional role identity and…

This paper presents a case-study exploration of how federal and state government policy and Education Acts are interpreted and enacted at school level through the implementation of the International Student Program in Victoria, Australia. Understanding policy and its enactment as multi-layered and often "messy" to frame through our…

This qualitative study explores how 60 Israeli high school principals vary in their perceptions and enactments of shared sense-making processes while engaging in strategic activities to gain teachers' support during a national reform implementation. Data analysis has yielded three major themes: (a) a common language; (b) a collaborative learning…

Purpose: In times of reform and consequential changes, school superintendents act as mediators between government policies and those who implement them in the field. This article explores the perceptions of school superintendents in Israel concerning their professional development (PD) process, especially during the implementation of Israeli…

Entrepreneurship in school is a widespread issue within the school system and it is therefore important to problematise teachers and their role when entrepreneurship is emphasized in their school practice. The teachers in this study, from the secondary and upper secondary levels, were all participating in a Swedish three-year school improvement…

The study's target is to analyze how field-level coalition leaders, namely, the founding principals of Israeli specialized schools, perceive a "high-ambiguity and high-conflict" symbolic educational policy that apparently opposes the basic values that underlie the foundation of specialized schools. Based on an analysis of qualitative…

In this paper we connect the concepts of distributed leadership (DL) and educational change by asking: How do different practices of DL relate to change in schools? We answer this question by studying 12 schools in Switzerland during the implementation of the "Education for Sustainable Development" concept. In an embedded mixed methods…

Studies have shown that principals are essential in successfully implementing large-scale policy reforms in schools. However, the issue of how school leaders interpret and transform reforms is understudied. This article explores how twelve Norwegian school leaders respond to external demands in a new policy context emphasizing national test…

The research investigated the way in which school administrations implement resources provided by Israel's "Courage to Change" reform. The uniqueness of this reform stems from the fact that the allocated resources come in the form of "weekly instruction time" rather than finance, and the school management needs to decide how to…

In a study of Ontario, Canada's province-wide Primary Class Size Reduction (PCS) Initiative, school districts' ability to direct and support schools was related to their experience with planning and monitoring, interest in innovation, and its human and fiscal resource base. Districts with greater "resource capacity" were able to…

This article reviews the literature base on class size reduction and proposes a new analytic framework that we believe provides practically useful explanations of how primary class size reduction works. It presents descriptions of classroom practice and grounded explanations for how class size reduction affects educational core activities by…

Previous work on policy implementation has often suggested that schools leave their "thumbprints" on policies received from above. During the implementation of Primary Class Size Reduction (PCS) Initiative in Ontario, Canada, however, school principals spoke with remarkable uniformity about the ways PCS affected their work. This article…

Grounded within knowledge management (KM) theory and conceptions of tacit and explicit knowledge, this article draws on historical evidence from the Early Years Literacy Project (EYLP), a four-year instructional renewal strategy implemented across 100 schools in a large Canadian school district. The EYLP management approach included a series of…

During the last several decades, educational reform in Sweden has been at once contentious, fast paced, and uneven as control of Parliament and educational policy shifted between left- and right-wing political factions. These political power shifts within Parliament created tension between national and local municipal governments and provoked…