Studying Teachers’ Sensemaking to Investigate Teachers’ Responses to Professional Development Focused on New Standards

Abstract

Recent research on teacher professional development (PD) underscores the importance of the coherence of PD with standards, curriculum, and assessment. Teachers’ judgments of the coherence of PD with larger system goals influence their decisions about what ideas and resources they appropriate from PD. Little research, however, has examined how teachers formulate these judgments and why teachers’ judgments vary within the same system and for the same reform. In this article, we use organizational theory’s concept of sensemaking to examine teachers’ responses to PD related to the Next Generation Science Standards within two schools in the United States. Our study shows that teachers’ perceptions of coherence emerge from interactions within PD, associated curriculum materials, and with colleagues and leaders in their schools. Some teachers, we found, were able to manage ambiguity, uncertainty, and perceived incoherence productively, while others foreclosed deep and sustained sensemaking. Our findings suggest the need for PD to engage teachers in sustained sensemaking activity around issues of perceived incoherence to bolster teachers’ emergent understandings of standards and improve the likelihood of implementing instructional practices aligned to standards.

Keywords

education policy professional development standards science education

Teachers’ prior knowledge shapes what and how they learn from professional development (PD). Of particular importance is teachers’ practical knowledge, that is, the knowledge they draw on daily to plan and organize their instruction (van Driel, Beijaard, & Verloop, 2001). Sometimes, teachers’ practical knowledge helps them to interpret ideas and resources from PD, but just as easily, such knowledge can interfere with teachers making changes intended by leaders of professional developers (Kazemi & Hubbard, 2008).

Analyzing how teachers’ practical knowledge shapes their response to PD requires a focus on how such knowledge develops within the larger ecology of teachers’ work (Connelly, Clandin, & He, 1997; Doyle & Ponder, 1977). There is evidence that teachers’ own interpretations of their contexts vary widely and diverge from policy makers’ interpretations (Penuel, Fishman, Gallagher, Korbak, & Lopez-Prado, 2009). In turn, these interpretations shape outcomes of PD, particularly teachers’ judgments about how well the goals and strategies of the PD cohere with local standards, curriculum, and assessments (Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001; Penuel, Fishman, Yamaguchi, & Gallagher, 2007).

To date, few studies of teacher PD have examined the ways that organizational aspects of teachers’ work shape what they take away from PD. All too often, studies explain differences in teacher change in terms of individual learning styles, beliefs, or concerns, even when scholars take a situated perspective on teacher learning (e.g., Beijaard, Van Driel, & Verloop, 1999). In fact, within the PD literature, there is very little focus on the organizational and institutional contexts where PD occurs and how these shape teacher practice (Cobb, McClain, Laumberg, & Dean, 2003). The limited focus on these broader contexts is problematic because contemporary large-scale reforms demand coordination and coherence across multiple components of complex educational systems, including components related to PD (Jackson & Cobb, 2013; Linn, Kali, Davis, & Horwitz, 2008). In addition, teachers’ knowledge of educational contexts in which they work is an integral part of their knowledge for teaching (Shulman, 1987).

In this article, we draw on the idea of sensemaking from organizational studies to interpret teachers’ response to PD linked to new science education reforms in the United States. Sensemaking, we argue, provides a useful framework for analyzing teachers’ responses to PD because PD activities create new and foreground existing sources of ambiguity and uncertainty for teachers in their organizational environment. Using evidence from a study of teacher PD focused on the Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; National Research Council, 2013), we illustrate how focusing on teachers’ attempts to resolve ambiguity and uncertainty provide us with a powerful lens for explaining when and how teachers’ participation in PD can influence teachers’ decisions about implementing reforms.

Policy Context for the PD

The PD that is the focus of the current study took place within the United States, in a time when many states had just adopted ambitious new standards in English/language arts, mathematics, and science. The reforms embody perspectives on teaching and learning developed over many years of interdisciplinary research on student learning from sociocognitive and sociocultural perspectives (National Research Council, 2005, 2007). They share with other reforms being undertaken by countries in Europe and North America over the past decade that emphasize focusing instruction around a few core ideas of disciplines and promoting student engagement with disciplinary forms of reasoning (De Jong, 2007).

The PD discussed in this study aimed to develop teachers’ understanding of the NGSS (National Research Council, 2013). Developed from the vision of science learning articulated in the Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012), the NGSS call for disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts and science practices to be integrated in science education. This integration is reflected in sets of “performance expectations” for students, which (as of summer 2014) 12 states and the District of Columbia have adopted as their new science standards.

If findings from implementation research on earlier generations of standards in mathematics and science education are a guide (Garet et al., 2001; Spillane, Reiser, & Gomez, 2006; Supovitz & Turner, 2000), providing PD and supports for individual teachers will be a critical condition for the success of NGSS. Such PD is necessary to develop teachers’ understanding of science content, the vision of the Framework, and instruction that engages students in science and engineering practices.

However, even when PD has a positive impact on teachers’ attitudes, knowledge, and skills, it does not always lead to durable or even immediate changes to their instructional practice. Prior research suggests that teachers’ perceptions of incoherence among their own goals for student learning, district goals, and goals presented in PD may, in part, explain why the impacts of PD can be limited (Garet et al., 2001; Penuel et al., 2007). At present, though “coherence” is widely accepted as an important feature of PD, we do not have useful frameworks for guiding our understanding of how and why teachers’ perceptions of coherence may vary within the same larger reform context (Penuel et al., 2009).

In the current policy context in the United States, there are many reasons to expect teachers’ perceptions of coherence to vary in ways that could either support or impede adoption of practices consistent with the vision for science learning outlined in the Framework for K-12 Science Education. Teachers may perceive strong support from district leaders eager to adopt the vision and therefore perceive a high level of coherence. At the same time, teachers in the same district could perceive there to be a low level of coherence because of differences in how they perceive district- or school-level support. Understanding and ultimately addressing teachers’ concerns about coherence is critical to implementing reforms linked to the Framework and NGSS.

Conceptual Framework: Sensemaking

The concept of sensemaking offers one productive way to analyze how teachers wrestle with issues of coherence, as it considers how local actors negotiate meaning from a variety of, often conflicting, messages they encounter in their local environment. Sensemaking describes the ways that actors “structure the unknown” (Waterman, 1990, p. 41) within organizational settings such as schools (e.g., Coburn, 2001). Actors engage in sensemaking to resolve ambiguity and manage uncertainty within their environment and make retrospective, as well as prospective sense of change. Sources of ambiguity can include the presence of conflicting goals, contradictions or paradoxes, limited resources available to perform actions demanded of external change agents, lack of clarity with respect to roles and responsibilities, or the absence of measures for judging the success of action (Weick, 1995). Uncertainty that occasions sensemaking arises when people lack understanding of how different aspects of the system are changing, the potential impact of change on the system, or the response options that are open to them (Weick, 1995). Follett (1924) described the sensemaking process as “confronting the activity” of one’s environment, as it involves a noticing of change or difference, but includes the potential for integrating difference into one’s practice.

Sensemaking processes are also influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others (Weick, 1995). Within organizations, “decisions are either made in the presence of others or with the knowledge that they will have to be implemented, or understood, or approved by others” (Burns & Stalker, 1961, p. 118). In addition, sensemaking often occurs in discourse-rich environments (Currie & Brown, 2003) in which people attempt to resolve ambiguity by relying on different vocabularies of meaning that draw from ideology, professional paradigms, and tradition. Furthermore, in large organizations where the activities of many different actors must be coordinated, sensemaking also entails sensegiving, or efforts by leaders in organization to help guide others’ sensemaking efforts toward the accomplishment of desired organizational goals (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991).

Education researchers have used sensemaking theory to interpret teachers’ responses to new policies and programs introduced into their schools and districts. For example, Coburn (2001) examined the interactional processes teachers in a single elementary school used to make sense of new and often conflicting messages about reading instruction. In a subsequent analysis, she documented how individuals’ sensemaking in relation to changes in reading policies were shaped by individuals’ history of involvement with earlier reform efforts, as well as by messages in their immediate school environment (Coburn, 2004). Other policy implementation studies have documented the ways that both school leaders and interactions with colleagues exert normative pressure that in turn can have an effect on individual teachers’ classroom practice (Coburn, 2005; Coburn & Russell, 2008; Penuel, Frank, & Krause, 2011; Penuel, Sun, Frank, & Gallagher, 2013).

Studies have examined teacher sensemaking in science education, primarily in the context of program implementation. In science education, teachers interpret new policies in relation to the instructional materials, framing their response on the basis of access they are able to gain to new materials and support in how best to use them (Penuel, Shear, Korbak, & Sparrow, 2005; Vesilind & Jones, 1998.) In addition, studies of teacher understanding of science reform—such as standards-based teaching—suggest that teachers interpret new policies in light of access to curriculum materials and hands-on activities (Penuel et al., 2005; Vesilind & Jones, 1998).

Scholars have also begun to apply sensemaking theory to examine teachers’ responses to PD in science education. Penuel and colleagues (2009) used sensemaking theory to help explain discrepancies between policy makers’ and teachers’ judgments about how well particular curriculum materials aligned with standards and PD. They found teachers’ judgments about the coherence of PD with standards influenced teachers’ decisions to implement materials introduced through PD. It mattered little that policy makers made a clear and strong effort to create systemic alignment at the policy level, suggesting a need to understand better how teachers make judgments about coherence.

We hypothesize that sensemaking offers a particularly useful framework for analyzing teachers’ responses to new messages about teaching and learning encountered in PD that are related to major reforms, such as the adoption of new standards. In the United States and elsewhere, teachers’ environments are populated with numerous and changing sources of ambiguity and uncertainty, including fluctuating policies around teacher evaluation and continued pressure to demonstrate growth on external tests. Multiple reforms compete for attention and resources, and science teachers—even though they have a limited sphere of autonomy within their classrooms—are not immune to the shocks and interruptions (Weick, 1995) these competing reforms introduce. NGSS, for some, will be experienced as a shock or interruption from the external environment (Weick, 1995), presenting them with an occasion for individual and social sensemaking that does not just demand new knowledge but also demands meaning making.

In this study, we set out to document and analyze the ways that NGSS-related PD provided opportunities for teacher sensemaking to resolve ambiguities and manage uncertainties associated with implementing messages from the workshop. Specifically, we ask,

What are the key sources of ambiguity and uncertainty with which teachers wrestle, during and after PD?

How does their sensemaking shape their decisions about their teaching practice?

Method

This article employs a multiple-case study methodology (Stake, 2005) to explore the ways teachers make sense of science practice-focused instruction and the NGSS. We look closely at two school sites over a 16-month period, and although data were collected from numerous sources (e.g., PD field notes, classroom video, teacher online logs, teacher surveys), we focus this analysis on teacher interviews and artifacts of teaching (e.g., teacher-developed assessments or instructional resources) that we viewed as products of teachers’ sensemaking processes.

Research Context

The district where this study took place, Georgetown School District,¹ served more than 140,000 students and had a student composition during the time of our study that was 42% African American, 32% White, 18% Hispanic, and 5% Asian. Fifty-four percent of the students in the district were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRL). The teachers in schools discussed in this analysis participated in PD on the Framework (Year 1) and NGSS (Year 2), and on the Project-Based Inquiry Science (PBIS) curriculum materials (described in more detail below).

Framework and NGSS PD

The Framework and NGSS workshops both took place during the month of August prior to the start of the school year in 2012 and 2013. Members of the research team and committee that developed the Framework and NGSS led the PD. PD activities in the Framework and NGSS workshops emphasized learning about disciplinary core ideas through driving questions; science practices, with particular emphasis on modeling and explanation; and how core ideas, practices and crosscutting concepts are integrated in performance expectations. In particular, teachers had practice developing and revising models and writing and revising scientific explanations related to material they were required to teach (per state standards). For example, during the Framework workshop (Year 1 of the study), teachers worked in small groups on an activity from Investigating and Questioning our World Through Science and Technology (Krajcik, Reiser, Sutherland, & Fortus, 2013) curriculum that focused on the particulate nature of matter (one topic teachers in Georgetown were required to teach). In these small groups, teachers created models of what happens to air inside a syringe when the syringe plunger is pushed and pulled. Teachers then shared and compared those models with their colleagues—presenting their small group work with the larger group. During the NGSS workshop (Year 2), teachers developed and revised explanations in small groups that described energy transfer, demonstrated across multiple phenomena. PD facilitators also emphasized the language demands inherent in the NGSS practices (Lee, Quinn, & Valdés, 2013) and which of the Language Arts and math Common Core tasks overlap with the NGSS practices. Teachers also examined the NGSS performance expectations and were given an opportunity to adapt state standards into performance expectations.

PBIS PD

Curriculum is widely viewed as an essential resource to help teachers understand new standards and support standards-based instruction, and it has played a critical role in standards-based reform efforts in the United States throughout the past 50 years (Atkin & Black, 2003; Krajcik, McNeill, & Reiser, 2008). Teachers in this study also received PD in the PBIS, a comprehensive 3-year curriculum sold and distributed through It’s About Time (IAT) Publishing. The curriculum is comprised of science units in life, physical, and Earth science, spanning Grades 6 through 8. A typical unit takes 8 to 10 weeks to complete. In contrast to other materials that present ready-made investigations for students to carry out, PBIS presents challenges to students in which they must investigate phenomena and apply concepts to answer a driving question or to achieve a design challenge.

As a curricular support to teachers shifting their instruction toward a science-practice approach, PBIS is a good candidate as it has features that align with the vision of the Framework. The driving question or challenge typically targets a core idea in science, and the activities within each unit provide students with multiple occasions for investigating as scientists would—through observations, asking questions, designing and carrying out experiments, building and using models, reading about the science they are investigating, constructing explanations, and so forth. In this way, the PBIS curriculum’s design emphasizes a knowledge-in-use perspective (National Research Council, 2007) and reflects in a broad sense the principles of the Framework. At the same time, the particular goals of PBIS units do not align perfectly to performance expectations as articulated in the NGSS. In addition, not all of the eight practices emphasized in the Framework are prominent within the investigations. This partial alignment is important to point out because for the teachers in our study, the materials embodied and even served as a stand-in for the Framework and NGSS.

Teachers in the current study received PD focused on this curriculum, in addition to the PD they received related to the Framework and NGSS. It took place at three time points throughout each school year and ranged between 1 and 3 days—August, October, and January, roughly—and intended to coincide with teachers’ curricular pacing (Figure 1). For example, the initial workshop was designed to introduce teachers to the curriculum and the introductory unit they would teach; the October workshop prepared teachers for the second unit (Energy); and the January workshop for the third (Everchanging Earth). Teachers had opportunities to learn about the design principles behind the curriculum. Workshop leaders emphasized connections between NGSS and curriculum activities and structures, with particular attention given to the role of scientific practices of constructing explanations and developing and using models within the curriculum. Teachers worked as their students might through condensed versions of the curriculum units they would teach. They were additionally given an opportunity to discuss alignment of the new curriculum with their district pacing guide within small groups and in collaboration with district personnel.

Figure 1.

Professional development workshop timeline.

Participants and School Sites

We selected the two school sites for this analysis on the basis of multiple criteria. First, the teachers at these sites were participating in other data collection, namely, a smaller video study (Moorthy et al., 2014), in which teachers’ recorded focal lessons for the larger research study; the weekly online logs (D’Angelo, Moorthy, Allen Bemis, & Sherwood, 2014) through which teachers noted their implementation frequency of the eight practices outlined in the Framework; and these teachers agreed to participate in interviews. Teachers at these sites also attended roughly the same amount of PD days offered through the study during Year 1 (see Table 1). Although teacher attendance in PD was comparable, issues of concern (interpreted as ambiguity or uncertainty) and questions raised by these teachers during PD (as noted in the PD workshop field notes) varied significantly; and as part of an initial review of data, two different schools were selected for additional analysis because of the sharp contrasts between them with respect to sources of ambiguity and uncertainty, to help elaborate our initial framework such that it might explain differences in sensemaking across school contexts (Yin, 2013). These two school contexts are described in detail below.

Table 1.

Participants by School.

School	Teacher	Framework PD^a	PBIS PD^a	Video	Interview
Norman	Joan	2	4	Y	Y
Norman	Abby	2	5	Y	Y
Central	Marie	1	5	Y	Y

Note. PBIS = Project-Based Inquiry Science; PD = professional development.

Number of days in Year 1.

Central Middle School

The area around Central has seen large demographic shifts over the past decade. The student population at Central is roughly 40% African American and 40% Latino, 96% on FRL, and a large Spanish-speaking population. Central is historically a low-performing middle school, with less than 50% of students at grade level over the past several years. Teachers at Central are expected to keep and maintain data folders that included assessment scores for students. Building administrators—specifically, the principal and assistant principal—expected teachers to assess students daily. Over the course of the Years 1 and 2 of the study, the science department decreased by half. Three teachers—formally in the larger study—were reassigned to different discipline areas (social studies, math, and physical education), leaving the sixth-grade teacher in this study, Marie, as the remaining “veteran” science teacher. At the time of this analysis, Marie was in her third year of teaching.

Norman Middle School

Norman sits toward the northern boundary of the school district and serves a population of students who are mostly White (76%) and affluent (23% FRL). The school touts a mission to “inspire, empower, and challenge learning” in its community. In general, Norman ranked high in terms of test score proficiency. Teachers at Norman were expected to maintain consistent pacing with other teachers in their same grade level and subject area. Abby and Joan were two of four sixth-grade science teachers at Norman. With their classrooms positioned just across the hallway, Joan and Abby regularly visited each other’s rooms throughout the day. At the time of the study Joan had been teaching for 10 years and Abby for 3.

Abby, Joan, and Marie were selected for this study because of their different approaches to sensemaking and the availability of data from a broad range of sources collected as part of the study, namely, participation in the video study, weekly online logs, teacher surveys, and workshop attendance.

Data Collection and Sources

Data for this analysis were collected over a 16-month period. Although data sources collected were multiple (field notes, teacher interviews, teacher-developed artifacts, online posts made by focal teachers, and focal teacher survey data), we focused this analysis on teacher interviews and teacher-developed artifacts. We have outlined descriptions of these data below.

Teacher interviews

The first author interviewed focal teachers during the fall of Year 2 of the larger study. The interview protocol was developed using a construct-centered approach to assessment design (Wilson, 2005) that utilized both Weick’s (1995) typology for sources of ambiguity and uncertainty and our field note data (see also, description of coding scheme development in Data Analysis). Interview topics included instructional management practices at teachers’ schools sites—such as what teaching and classroom-organizational practices (e.g., essential questions or objectives posted) building administration look for, lesson planning expectations, and teacher responsibilities—and teachers’ perceptions of coherence between the NGSS, their current instructional approaches, and state and district goals. The interviews were conducted over Skype or in person and were audio recorded and transcribed. Interview length ranged from 25 to 75 min.

Teacher artifacts

During informal conversations and interviews, our focal teachers mentioned a number of materials they had developed to address building or district expectations, such as particular lesson plan sections, additional assessments, or activities. We collected these artifacts from teachers as evidence of their sensemaking. In addition, Abby and Joan were asked by IAT to conduct the PBIS workshop during the fall of Year 2; for this workshop, the two created a CD of materials of the Energy unit for teachers attending (also in the larger study). We collected these materials and discussed them with Abby and Joan during their interviews. In particular, the first author asked Abby and Joan their process of developing the materials and in what ways these materials differed from PBIS or other curricular materials they were using for their instruction.

Data Analysis

Because we were interested in the sources of ambiguity and uncertainty that emerged for teachers within our study, we inductively defined what these sources were, based on teachers’ expressed concerns and questions during PD (as documented in our field notes). We used the field notes to establish topical categories that emerged for teachers in their responses to PD messages during workshops (e.g., “assessment,” “building administration,” “pacing”). We then tested and iterated on these codes with additional data, namely, teacher artifacts and interview transcriptions. Once we identified consistent topic codes, each set of field notes, each interview, and artifact was initially coded for all topics. At this point, we also identified schools where we could focus analysis, and decided on Norman and Central because the processes at these schools appeared to vary the most (as described above in Participant Selection). In a second round of coding, we identified what we considered sources of ambiguity evident in statements teachers made related to different topics. This second round of coding drew explicitly on Weick’s (1995) typology of sources of ambiguity in sensemaking. We then operationalized these sources through patterns that emerged in our data (as illustrated in Table 2). Sections of all three teachers’ interviews (about 30%) were coded independently by the first author and one additional coder. Percent agreement was 94% across all codes; Cohen’s kappa ranged from 0.72 to 0.87 with the exception of two topical codes: “time” and “district initiatives.” Differences for codes with low reliability were resolved by discussion and consensus. The first author then coded an additional third of the interview data and checked codes with the corater.

Table 2.

Descriptions of Sources of Ambiguity and Uncertainty Used in Coding Teacher Sensemaking of NGSS.

Source of ambiguity	Description
Conflicting goals	Conflicts between district pacing demands and teaching science-practice focused lessons. District- or school-level initiatives (e.g., curriculum or technology use) that interfere with instructional goals. Building evaluation guides—formal and informal—that conflict with goals. Messages from PD that teachers interpret as what they “already do.”
Absence of measures	Absence of measures aligned with NGSS that teachers can use as assessments; lack of coherence between measures teachers are held accountable for and those aligned with NGSS; available assessments are perceived to be misaligned with what teachers should be teaching
Limited resources	Expressed lack of time to engage with NGSS or adapt existing curricula to align with NGSS. Lack of available material or technological resources needed to engage students in science practices. Lack of assessment items (see Absence of Measures). PBIS or other curricular assessments are misaligned with NGSS.
Role ambivalence	Lack of clarity about how to support students’ engagement in science practices, developing understanding of core ideas, or how to teach crosscutting concepts

Note. NGSS = Next Generation Science Standards; PD = professional development; PBIS = Project-Based Inquiry Science.

Results

The most prevalent sources of ambiguity and uncertainty for the teachers in this study were conflicting goals, an absence of measures, and limited resources. As we elaborate in the sections that follow, teachers’ organizational structures were integral in shaping their sensemaking in response to these areas of ambiguity and uncertainty. However, the differences in how teachers resolved these sources of ambiguity and uncertainty bolstered differences in their perceptions of how well messages from the PD cohered with goals for teaching and learning in their respective contexts.

Sources of Ambiguity and Uncertainty at Norman and Central

For the teachers in this study, conflicting goals emerged as the most prominent source of ambiguity and uncertainty that, depending on teachers’ organizational contexts, either resulted in teachers’ constrained sensemaking or served as fodder for sustained sensemaking around the PD messages. Specifically, teachers faced uncertainty around pacing and timing, as the curriculum and the school district allotted differing amounts of time to science topics. Teachers also faced conflicting goals with respect to what constituted best science teaching practice, requiring them to make sense of the multiple and sometimes competing messages from the PD leaders, their building administration, their students, as well as their prior teaching experiences and their previous and continuing education degree programs.

Although perhaps not as disruptive as conflicting goals, an absence of measures for gauging successful implementation of science-practice instruction surfaced as a source of ambiguity and uncertainty for teachers. Because assessments of student learning available to teachers measured content and did not adequately measure science and engineering practices, teachers faced uncertainty around how to measure student learning. As will be discussed more fully in the next sections, for one of our teachers, a lack of shared views regarding what counted as valid assessment coupled with the district-mandated expectation to assess student learning on a daily basis and track student assessment data proved particularly problematic and significantly foreclosed her sensemaking process.

In terms of limited resources, the PBIS curriculum did not sufficiently provide teachers with the supports they needed to implement NGSS-aligned practices. Teachers required additional tools—such as clearer pacing guides—to support their instruction of both NGSS practices and their current state standards. Limited time, coupled with curriculum materials that inadequately supported the NGSS, made it difficult to fully implement instructional strategies for engaging students in science practices throughout the school year.

Conflicting Goals

At both Central and Norman, there were conflicting goals present that influenced teachers’ implementation of practices. At Central, there were conflicts between teachers and building administration around learning goals, specifically the purpose and value of PBIS and whether these resources were organized in ways that promoted student learning. At Norman, these conflicts were mostly around instructional pacing, specifically around competing demands about how teachers should organize their instructional time and how to prioritize their time outside of the classroom. In both instances, routines and tools for monitoring instruction were occasions for surfacing conflicting goals.

Conflicting goals at Central Middle School

At Central, there was a lack of coherence between the building administrators’ views regarding the instruction and Marie’s own views about instruction. Marie valued developing students’ conceptual understanding. She believed her implementation of science practices supported in PBIS, like constructing and using models, deepened student understanding of scientific concepts in ways that her prior instructional approaches (that placed the teachers as the primary disseminator of information) did not. She appreciated how lessons built on each other in the PBIS materials, allowing her to revisit their investigations to build understanding of relevant terms and concepts to students’ repertoire of experiences. However, for building administrators, some PBIS lessons appeared to lack “rigor,” as they were too aberrant from traditional instructional approaches, particularly those that came earlier in a unit series and were intended to be the first step in developing student understanding.

A classroom visit during a lesson on energy made visible the differences in these viewpoints. In this lesson, an early lesson in a sequence of lessons about types of energy, students are asked to “mess about” with various toys. The toys have springs and gadgets, and students are encouraged to make predictions about what kinds of energy are present in the toys. Later in the lesson series, students return to their predictions after a series of investigations with new conceptual resources to identify the forms of energy. However, to an observer unfamiliar with the sequence as a whole—in this case, Central’s assistant principal—the earlier lesson of “messing about” appeared to lack the kind of intellectual rigor the building administration had come to expect in science classrooms. The assistant principal gave Marie a less-than-favorable evaluation for the lesson, with her primary question being, “Where’s the rigor here?” Marie explained her reaction to the assistant principal’s observation this way:

With these toys, kids are trying to figure out how these things work, describing what that type of energy is doing what. There is an end result. . . . For her to say that there is no rigor in this program is a load of BS! But, how do you walk up to your principal and say, “That’s a load of BS?” You can’t, and have job security.

Marie’s reaction here speaks to her belief in the value of science-practice instruction, seemingly based in her observations of student responses to this way of engaging in science practices and developing understanding of core ideas. She described this approach as being “best” for her students.

Coming to this conclusion required a process of sensemaking with conflicting messages about the importance of particular goals for instruction. At the time, Marie was working toward her master’s degree at a local university. She found there to be vast differences among what her program suggested as effective teaching practices and the messages presented at the Framework workshop on one hand, and those enforced at Central on the other. She claimed, “Nothing that my administration says about rigor is what I’m learning about rigor.”

Despite her administration’s insistence otherwise, Marie believed engaging students in science practices from the start was a more appropriate goal for science instruction than goals for science learning her administrators seemed to favor. Marie interpreted her assistant principal’s view of science-practice instruction as lacking understanding of the knowledge-in-use approach to science learning as compared with the kind of teaching the school promoted. Marie explained that with the model of teaching endorsed in the school, teachers would “frontload” information and vocabulary to students, provide them with a demo, and then ask students to do something with the content. So, according to Marie, when building administration did not see lessons that followed this type of trajectory, they were confused and dismissed the approach as not providing students with the degree of challenge needed. In the Framework workshop, Marie had received explicit messages that such preteaching of vocabulary was counterproductive to deep understanding of core ideas.

Goal conflict can become an occasion for sensemaking when teachers are required to participate in other, related activities in which administrators monitor teachers’ instruction. This was the case for Marie. In Year 1 of the study, Marie was able to use a lesson plan template provided by the publisher of PBIS. But in the second year of the study, Marie’s administration began requiring teachers to use a particular template that did not align with the lesson format of the PBIS curriculum. Marie was also required to incorporate materials at least twice a week from the current district-adopted curriculum for science. Marie found creative ways to fill in the lesson template to meet this requirement, but she also described this step to be a “waste of time” and unnecessary. In addition, Marie did not see how both curricula could be incorporated, as she interpreted them as being too dissimilar. In explaining how she managed to meet the school’s expectations, Marie explained, “I just don’t do it . . . it’s like having on the sweater and adding a scarf.”

Ultimately, Marie’s process of sensemaking brought her to different conclusions about the importance and value of a science-practice focused teaching approach than her building administration. The primary source Marie drew on for her sensemaking was students’ responses to the knowledge-in-use approach to teaching present in the PBIS curriculum. She described the ways that her students “had something tangible to go back to” when answering questions about science content, and she contrasted this with other methods that simply gave students the content and asked them to memorize it. In addition, rather than try to find ways to satisfy both the study’s demands and her school’s administrative requirements, she chose to follow one set of guidelines that was more aligned to the demands of NGSS.

Conflicting goals at Norman

At Norman, the building administration and teachers had shared ideas about the value of PBIS and a science-practice approach to instruction. In fact, the building principal’s son was in one of the PBIS teachers’ classrooms during Year 1 (not one of the two teachers discussed here). Having drawn from her son’s experience and excitement around science, she had concluded that this approach to instruction was an effective one.

But Norman teachers still experienced goal conflict, specifically around pacing demands. The school administration expected teachers to be on pace with the other sixth-grade science teachers. This meant that teachers should teach roughly the same lesson on a given day. The members of the sixth-grade science team met on a semiregular basis to collaboratively develop an instructional plan for each lesson. To make decisions around pacing, the team—led by Abby—relied heavily on the district pacing guide and state standards. Per the request of teachers and district leaders, the publisher (IAT) had developed a pacing guide to align with the state standards to help teachers meet district expectations while still implementing the curriculum with integrity (see Table 3). The pacing guide was intended as a resource for teachers while implementing PBIS.

Table 3.

PBIS-Developed Pacing Guide Selection for Learning Set 2.

Learning Set 2: What affect how much energy an object has?
2.1 Understand the Question Think About What Affects How Much Energy an Object Has?	Scientists often work together and then share their findings. Sharing findings makes new information available and helps scientists refine their ideas and build on others’ ideas. When another person’s or group’s idea is used, credit needs to be given.Energy is the ability to cause change or do work.Kinetic energy is associated with the motion of an object.	6.P.2.2. Explain the effect of heat on the motion of atoms through a description of what happens to particles during a change in phase.	30 min
		6.P.2.3. Compare the physical properties of pure substances that are independent of the amount of matter present including density, boiling point, melting point, and solubility with properties that are dependent on the amount of matter present to include volume, mass, and weight	30 min

Note. PBIS = Project-Based Inquiry Science.

The pacing suggested by IAT did not fully align with the pacing established by the district, however. As Joan explained, “The book allocates more time than what we have in the [district’s] pacing guide; so, if you were to implement the [PBIS] units with complete fidelity, you’d run out of time.” To address this timing conflict, Joan and Abby created an additional pacing guide, which outlined the time suggested by the district for a particular topic, time suggested by IAT, and their suggestion for addressing both. Table 4 shows one small section of the map Joan and Abby created for the PBIS energy unit.

Table 4.

Teacher-Developed Pacing Guide Selection for Learning Set 2.

Section	Activity	TE page	Time	Pacing guide time
Intro	What affects how much energy an object has?	101	5 min	30 min
2.1	Think about what affects how much energy an object has	105	10 min
	Get started	106	10 min
	Share your ideas	108	5 min
	What indicates that kinetic energy is present?	109	10 min
	Reflect	110	10 min
	Update the project board	112	5 min
2.2	What factors determine the amount of kinetic energy of an object?	119	5 min	40 min
	Conference	120	10 min
	Communicate: Share your ideas	122	5 min
	Observe: What affects a cart’s kinetic energy?	122	10 min
	Procedure	123	20 min

Note. TE = teacher edition.

Joan explained how they made decisions around developing this alternative pacing guide: “We had the book out, the district’s pacing guide, IAT’s suggested pacing guide, and unit plans we’d used in the past.” Abby and Joan describe their students’ “needs” as being the most vocal message in coming to decisions about how to organize instructional time. Ultimately, what felt “best” to their students while still “addressing” the state’s standards guided their sensemaking the most.

For Marie, sensemaking in response to goal conflict resulted in an uptake of and focus on instructional practices that, on the surface, most readily cohered with goals of the PD itself. Marie cued in to messages about learning from her master’s program, PD provided from the study, her student’s responses, and her experiences teaching as indicators in support of science-practice instruction. She essentially chose to listen to those messages, rather than her building administrators, which resulted in conflict for her. For Joan and Abby, they were able to sit with multiple and conflicting resources, such as the various pacing guides, and consider the ways the instructional goals represented in the tools were similar or different. In addition, they were able to produce a new instructional tool that could support them in accomplishing what—in some ways—could have been seen as competing goals.

Absence of Measures

At present, there exist only a few kinds of assessments that include multicomponent tasks that assess core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts (Pellegrino, 2013). Some of the tasks developed specifically for the study do include such tasks, and examples are featured in a consensus volume on assessment and the NGSS (Pellegrino, Wilson, Koenig, & Beatty, 2014). However, neither the district nor state used measures aligned to NGSS because the state had not adopted the new standards.

The absence of measures created uncertainty for teachers; it was difficult for them to know when changes to instruction resulted in improved learning. Moreover, the measures that are used in the schools and by the state present tasks for assessment of learning goals that could be viewed as inconsistent with NGSS. As illustrated below, administrators’ insistence on teachers using these types of assessments created potential occasions for sensemaking and exacerbated goal conflicts.

Assessment expectations at Central

At Central, Marie faced a great deal of pressure to demonstrate daily assessments and corresponding data generated from multiple-choice assessments focused on factual recall. During a campus visit, Marie greeted our on-site coordinator (Joyce) and the first author with a look that expressed both humor and frustration. She announced to Joyce, “I’m in trouble again.” Hands lifted just slightly and shoulders shrugged, she exchanged glances with Joyce and shook her head. Without missing a beat, Joyce asked playfully, “What did you do now?” a reference to her earlier conflict with an administrator over her feedback from the observation described above.

This time, Marie was “in trouble” for not providing her principal with a complete data folder, showing student progressions through daily assessments. She said, “We have the data. We assess students at the end of each class, it’s just not going to look like what she wants.” This particular day, Marie had been pulled out of class by her principal and “yelled at” in the hallway for not providing her data folders to building administration. This pressure did not change Marie’s commitment to teaching students through engagement in science practices, as she believed strongly that her students learned most deeply through this approach. With regard to assessment measures, Marie’s sensemaking drew most strongly on what she interpreted as her students’ engagement in class activities and students’ ability to support their ideas with “tangible” evidence. In this way, messages from her building administration about what counted as good or valid assessment did not cohere with the other messages in Marie’s environment (e.g., student responses and PD messages).

Assessment expectations at Norman Middle School

At Norman, Abby and Joan felt that they had more leeway around daily assessments. They started each lesson with a “warm up” activity to assess students’ understanding of material covered in the previous lesson and to generate discussion related to that day’s lesson. These “check-ins”—similar to Marie’s—served as adequate daily assessments for Abby and Joan from the standpoint of school administrators. Though teachers are required to keep data folders, those folders were not monitored in the way that they were at Central:

Abby:

They harp on data, but do they really check it? I mean, we are supposed to keep a data folder.

[First Author]:

I don’t get a sense from you that you have a lot of pressure placed on you or that you’re worried about this.

Abby:

The pressure I feel is more me putting on myself to make sure the students are getting what they need to get. Do I feel it from the administration? Not so much, which is a good thing.

Joan and Abby had developed more formal assessments (tests) for each learning set in PBIS (about five per unit). These assessments included multiple-choice, true–false, and short answer questions. These were not strongly aligned to NGSS, and in many ways resembled the kinds of assessments that the school and district had been using. In the building, teachers referred to these assessments as “common assessments” in that they were shared among grade-level teams. Joan and Abby created and revised these common assessments collaboratively and were given the autonomy by administrators to do so. For example, if students did not perform well on an assessment, Joan and Abby would compare their students’ performance and examine test items to try to interpret why students performed poorly without strong interference from administrators. They might not have intervened, however, had they seen the assessments the two had developed, because they did not diverge in form and content from other assessments in the school.

One reason these assessments may not have drawn attention—and which we will explore in more detail in the next section—is that Joan and Abby were given autonomy with respect to the design of assessments, and they let state standards guide their decision about what items to put on these assessments. Abby described the content (characterized by the first author as “choices about what to teach”) and assessments as being “intertwined”: The assessments “intertwine with the content—we have these standards they have to get and so these assessments are telling me whether they’ve [the students] got that.”

Even so, Abby still felt that the assessments she and Joan had designed did not align well to the vision of the NGSS, stating that she preferred the style of assessment in which students wrote scientific explanations to elucidate science phenomena:

I’d like to do the whole, “tell me about convection;” and where those explanations come along, that’s the best way to assess them because I can see, oh they’re relating it back to what we’ve done; they’ve got the concept.

Limited time, however, left Abby (and ultimately Joan too) feeling reliant on multiple-choice tests that could be graded quickly.

Lack of Resources

Common to both school sites was a concern that PBIS provided an incomplete curricular solution for them. It presented compelling models for a different kind of science instruction, but it took significant amounts of time and did not cover all the standards teachers were required to teach.

At both sites, the teachers expressed a desire to use what they termed as “PBIS strategies” and that we recognized as practice-focused instruction that provided students with opportunities to investigate phenomena through science practices throughout the school year. They wanted to use these strategies in the units for which curriculum materials were not provided. As Joan explained, “I hear from my students that they are talking about what we did in class when they go home. They are able to explain to their parents pretty hard concepts. I can tell they’re excited about class.” All three case study teachers realized providing students with such experiences would require them to adapt their existing curriculum materials that they used to cover standards not taught in PBIS. None felt they had the time to make such adaptations. But by Year 2, Abby had made these adaptations for one additional unit and shared that she felt “very proud” of herself, as this work took a great deal of time. Abby was able to “chunk” the task of adaptation into a smaller, manageable task focused on a single unit. And because teachers at Norman teach the same units, following the Content Lead (Abby’s role during Year 2), Joan would also benefit from the additional unit Abby adapted. Marie, however, had not yet made any adaptations. She explained that she “intended to” make changes to her other units for next school year.

Role of Sensemaking in Shaping Teachers’ Implementation of NGSS

In the previous section, we detailed sources of ambiguity and uncertainty that emerged as occasions for sensemaking as teachers attempted to implement science-practice instruction. In this section, we highlight the ways that teacher sensemaking informed and shaped their perception of coherence and appropriation of ideas and teaching strategies from the PD.

For the teachers in this analysis, their sensemaking led to different perceptions of coherence and appropriation of ideas from PD. In the case of Marie, the tight monitoring of instructional practice by her administration forced expedited and constrained sensemaking about practice-focused instruction, which resulted in streamlined decision making around what of and in what ways to teach the ideas presented in PD. Marie was not able to reconcile the incoherence she perceived and experienced between goals of the PD and those of her site administrators. Joan and Abby’s autonomy afforded them slightly more opportunity for productive sensemaking that resulted in the creation of instructional materials—that supported their implementation of activities to engage students in science practices. This more sustained sensemaking was due in part to principal support Joan and Abby experienced at Norman and their opportunities to collaborate with each other to reconcile conflicting goals across different artifacts guiding their instruction. The result was a kind of coherence they jointly and locally accomplished among key system components.

Sensemaking at Central

At Central, Marie’s sensemaking resulted in a decision to use instructional resources from the study. As she dealt with ambiguity and uncertainty in her environment, she defaulted consistently to the PBIS curriculum and what she interpreted as “the study’s” goals rather than turning to the compulsory goals of her administrators or finding ways to accomplish both sets of goals. For example, when describing her decision making around whether to teach the district-mandated curriculum, Marie explained, “Our principal wants us on the tech book 2 days a week. How can I do that and the PBIS curriculum when they aren’t integrated?” When asked by the first author what was in the tech book and what Marie had used from it, if anything, she replied that she had incorporated “some chemistry stuff—we’ve got that on the tech book. There is some stuff on there, but it’s not going to mesh well [with PBIS].” Marie’s discussion here of the district-mandated tech book highlights her sense of ambiguity—“how can I do that and PBIS?”—while also indexing her truncated sensemaking. That is, rather than consider the ways the tech book might complement PBIS, Marie saw the two approaches as too dissimilar to be integrated and dismissed the district-mandated curriculum because she valued the goals of PBIS more. It was too difficult to adhere to administrators’ goals, she believed, because they were constantly changing. During her interview, Marie indicated that the multiple and continuously changing instructional management practices—such as the change or lesson plan format or the new requirement to include the district-mandated curriculum each week—were too ambiguous. Furthermore, Marie expressed concern that if she were to teach from the tech book, she might “mess with integrating a whole new way of learning,” speaking of the knowledge-in-use approach of practice-focused instruction.

Marie’s tight adherence to implementing the PBIS curriculum could be viewed as a “success” from the perspective of the larger research project, because she was implementing instructional practices in ways we would hope for. However, by not engaging in deeper thinking about how it could fit within larger school or district goals, she missed out in developing more robust understandings of how multiple kinds of materials might be employed and used in an integrated fashion to support student engagement in science practices.

Sensemaking at Norman

In contrast to Marie, Abby and Joan sought to “satisfice” (Simon, 1956), that is, reconcile the messages from both the district and the study and meet each perceived conflicting goal the best they could. They relied on publisher-created resources to help them, and when these did not work, they created their own. Importantly, Abby and Joan were able to work together to develop these; an opportunity Marie did not have. By doing so, they were able to uncover nuances and explore incoherence more deeply, particularly around assessment. In discussing these assessments, Abby explained,

I like the questions that [the research team] gives us with those tests where they give [students] the picture and then ask them to explain. For us [teachers at Norman], we are in just a time crunch and so multiple choice is just the easiest way to do it . . . and where those explanations come along, that’s the best way to assess them because I can see, oh they’re relating it back to what we’ve done; they’ve got the concept.

Here, Abby describes her perceptions of the ways that current assessment measures do not cohere with what she and Joan created while suggesting her ideal or “best” way to assess students that includes both science practices (developing explanations) and content. Her encounter with the model tasks she saw the research team had created generated conflict for her that occasioned sensemaking. She recognized these items as being more aligned with NGSS but noted that a lack of time made it difficult for her to change her practice. Abby’s description here reveals an understanding of one of the goals of science-practice instruction (connecting content with practices), the ways that organizational structures at her school cohered (or not) with this goal, and her autonomy to choose how to assess her students.

Discussion and Conclusion

The preceding results highlight key sources of ambiguity and uncertainty for teachers that shaped their implementation of ideas introduced in PD. Teachers at both sites faced some degree of ambiguity and uncertainty around instructional goals, available accountability measures, and adequate resources. In particular, available time to adapt curriculum materials and assessments of student learning to cohere with the NGSS and differing views of the value and purpose of reform proved especially challenging. Teachers had to negotiate ways to meet the pacing demands of the district while maintaining fidelity to PBIS. Despite these similarities, teachers at each school engaged in different sensemaking processes, as they sought to resolve conflicting goals of engaging students in science practices as part of instruction with goals embodied in district pacing guides, protocols used by administrators to evaluate instruction, and local assessments. In both cases, teachers chose to shift their teaching to align with the vision of the Framework for K-12 Science Education and NGSS, but only in the school where teachers had opportunities to engage with each other in making sense of conflicting goals were teachers able to reconcile perceptions of incoherence between PD goals and goals of their local educational contexts.

Each of the three teachers discussed here shared a belief in the value of science practice and knowledge-in-use instruction; however, their school-specific instructional management practices played a crucial role in shaping teachers’ sensemaking. In the case of Marie, her sensemaking was constrained by the tight monitoring of her environment and the absence of colleagues with whom to collaborate. Although she adopted instruction that incorporated science practices (as supported by the PBIS curriculum), she seemed focused narrowly on teaching the PBIS curriculum as written. In contrast, Abby and Joan were able to engage more fully in sensemaking, a process that resulted in new pacing guides, assessments, and adapted, alternative assignments. As sensemaking is a social endeavor, Abby and Joan served as sensemaking resources for one another, a resource Marie did not have.

The findings here point to the ways that certain tools and routines intended to bring about coherence at the system level can actually undermine it. Though it is widely recognized that contemporary large-scale reforms such as the implementation of new standards require coordination and coherence across multiple components of complex educational systems (National Research Council, 2012), the tools and routines increasingly common in schools as devices for “tightening” the coupling of policy and practice (Spillane, Parise, & Sherer, 2011) may actually create ambiguity for teachers. At the same time—as illustrated by the case of Abby and Joan—if afforded the opportunity to create new meanings in bringing these tools and routines into alignment, a kind of local coherence may be accomplished within the system.

An implication for PD is that we need to provide the same kinds of “active learning” opportunities for teachers around issues of coherence that we value around science content. In other words, teachers need opportunities to engage in collaborative and sustained sensemaking to see, understand, and work through incongruities they perceive between goals and strategies promoted in PD and goals and strategies promoted in their local educational contexts. We can expect, moreover, that these contexts will vary by site, depending on whether teachers work in relative isolation and whether they receive support from their principals. Therefore, some differentiation of opportunity within PD workshops may be necessary.

More broadly, those aiming to support the implementation of new standards through PD must take into account the kinds of goal conflicts teachers encounter, the ambiguity this creates for them, and the need for space to innovate and take risks. These are not typical concerns of many content-focused PD providers, who focus principally on developing teachers’ science content knowledge or supporting curriculum implementation. Focusing on content is important, but workshop leaders must also directly address sources of ambiguity and conflict associated with perceptions of incoherence. As our study shows, perceptions of incoherence can lead to either productive adaptation or to foreclosure of deep sensemaking, depending on the circumstances. Successful implementation of new standards will require focused attention to teachers’ sensemaking and the development of supports that help teachers make sense of ambiguous situations and manage uncertainty.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant DRL-1020407).

Notes

Author Biographies

Carrie D. Allen is a doctoral candidate in educational psychology and learning sciences at the University of Colorado–Boulder. Her research focuses on how to prepare and support teachers in their efforts to enact critical and equitable instructional practices in science education in ways that promote student participation, learning, and sense of belonging. She additionally examines the organizational conditions required for teachers to integrate such practices into their instruction. She is particularly interested in making teacher and student voices more central in designing for science education reform.

William R. Penuel is a professor of educational psychology and learning sciences in the School of Education at the University of Colorado–Boulder. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of innovations in science and mathematics education. He also studies the dynamics of long-term partnerships between researchers and practitioners and is a codeveloper of a new approach to design research in education called Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR).

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