This study examines how principals and teachers at three schools made sense of multiple and potentially conflicting instructional reforms. This study explores how reforms penetrated schools, how principals and teachers shaped reforms once they were introduced, and how teachers ultimately reconciled myriad reform messages. First, this research questions the assumption that instructional reforms are more or less the same and argues instead that much productive knowledge can be generated from establishing a typology of different reforms and analyzing how local actors (e.g., principals and teachers) respond differently to different types of reforms. For example, in this study mandated reforms were typically shaped through legislation and came to schools through traditional bureaucratic channels. Thus, principals had a particularly important role with mandated reforms, as they served as conduits for reforms and their responses shaped teachers’ experiences and to a large extent determined what a mandated reform became. Most reforms to come to the three schools in the study, however, were not mandated. Of these, some reforms were affiliated (but not coterminous) with mandated reforms; some were supported by the state but not required; and some were generated at the county or district level and independent of both mandated reforms and state sponsorship. Unlike mandated reforms, the non-mandated reforms came to schools through diverse routes and often shifted the organization of the reform activity which, in turn, potentially altered the roles of teachers and principals. These reforms typically created a relationship of mutual reliance across different system actors. While each of the reforms types provided for teacher learning in some way, the characteristics of teachers’ opportunities to learn varied considerably. Mandated reforms provided the most impoverished opportunities for teachers to learn, most often relying on reform documents to which teachers paid only modest attention. Non-mandated reforms were split between behaviorist and situated learning opportunities. Behaviorist learning opportunities relied on training teachers in large batches and expected teachers to take a passive role in their learning. Teachers were often assigned to participate in these reforms and they did so without complaint. At the trainings themselves, however, potential teacher resistance to the trainings created a barrier to teacher learning and reform enactment. Situated learning located teacher learning in local contexts and required teachers to construct their own understanding of reforms through consideration of reform ideas with their own experiences and situations. Non-mandated reforms that relied on situated learning were particularly difficult to achieve. They required one or more reform entrepreneurs who would generate enthusiasm for a reform and then use their social connections to secure the teacher commitment necessary for a reform to become established. Entrepreneurship and social connections were not enough. The teachers also needed their own compelling reasons to participate, as reforms that situated teacher learning locally were more demanding of teachers’ time and effort. Finally, this study considers how teachers reconciled messages from multiple reforms once the reforms penetrated schools and teachers had opportunities to learn about them. I argue that each of the reforms penetrate schools only weakly and teacher learning about and knowledge of reforms remained limited in most cases. Consequently, teachers highlighted congruence across reforms and, when pressed, decided easily between reform imperatives. In other words, teachers did not perceive that multiple reforms created unsolvable dilemmas. Consequently, this study suggests that perceptions of congruence and highlights the difficulty securing substantive teacher learning that might cause teachers to re-evaluate their practice in a fragmented system that relies on entrepreneurship, social connections, and teacher discretion.
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