Implementing agent as an individual sense-maker

This element of the framework includes the personal aspects of the implementer that influence the interpretation and implementation of the policy. This dimension posits that “what the policy comes to mean for an implementing agent depends, to a great extent, on their repertoire of existing knowledge and experiences” (Spillane et al., p. 393). The

Role of Policy Representations

Individual Aspects • Experiences • Prior knowledge • Beliefs • Morals • Values Contextual Aspects • Contexts or Situations Implementing Agent/Teacher

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following section highlights individual cognitive elements which affect teaching and learning and the observed discoveries on how they impact on policy implementation.

4.7.1.1 Prior knowledge and sense-making

The existing beliefs and practices of teachers have the capacity to either facilitate or impede implementation. Unlike the conventional rational perspective which views teacher failure to implement policy as a willful and intentional effort to sabotage policy intention, the sense- making framework understands that teachers may fail to act or behave in ways as anticipated by policy makers just because their knowledge, is limited or contradicting with policy demands. Prior beliefs and dispositions and knowledge that teachers hold regarding policy demand are very important. How teachers interpret and understand the policy messages, and how they consequently implement the policy is greatly shaped by what they know and believe to be good teaching and learning through experience. The emphasis on the role of human sense-making in policy implementation underlines the importance of unintended failures of implementation; however, it allows willful misinterpretation. The paramount idea here is that implementation depends on what teachers understand themselves responding to, and not necessarily that they choose to respond to the policy. The “what” of policy refers to the content and ideas that require the change of the existing behaviour lying in the policy scripts such as directions, goals and regulations. Cohen (cited in Spillane et al., 2002, p. 394) asserts that “when research is used in policymaking, it is mediated through users’ earlier knowledge” complemented but not replaced by the prior knowledge and practice of teachers and other agents.

4.7.1.2 Different interpretations of the same message

Spillane et al. (2002), accept the qualitative assumption that acknowledges the uniqueness of teachers in the way they make interpretations of events and messages. Same policy message directed to different teachers can be received and interpreted as an “inquiry” in various ways. How individual teachers look at the message is determined by their ideas about changing instructional practice rooted in their personal, cultural, historical and contextual background factors. Some differences in interpretation are caused by learning opportunities that different teachers receive, professional development workshops regarding policy understanding, direction and support at schools, circuit or regional levels. On the other hand, even teachers who receive similar training, guidance and support, and attend similar development workshops and exposed to similar professional experiences are said to construct different

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understandings of the policy. This is because of their differing beliefs which influence the way they perceive teaching, learning, subject matter and learners. This underlines the notion that the significance of varying interpretations is based on the influence that prior knowledge has in policy implementation. The interpretation of policy messages and implementation is greatly influenced by individual factors of teachers such as identity. Interpretation of policy provision is a cognitive process where cognition leads to action; thus, it is very important for implementing agents to first understand what it really means and what it is asking them to do before they act on it. It is therefore not amazing that in his study, Higgs (cited in Spillane et al., 2002) finds out that there is a ‘great variability’ in understanding of local educators resulting from how they interpret the state reform individually. The differences in interpretation by individual implementers can be used to predict the level of implementation at local and classroom levels; which implies that the bigger the difference, the greater the variability. This indicates how individual cognition is critical in implementation.

4.7.1.3 Agents can misunderstand new ideas as familiar, hindering change

Another opinion underlined by Spillane et al. (2002) is that human beings, including implementing agents, have the tendency to understand and comprehend notions and thoughts as familiar than they are. This is powerfully influenced and guided by the expectations that implementation agents have regarding change. To understand change, they interpret policy ideas in line with their existing practices, beliefs and knowledge. However, in many circumstances if new ideas and practices do not correspond with what is already known rejection is likely to happen. It is likely that disagreements in terms of understanding and interpreting may arise due to some unforeseen circumstances or conditions that can go unnoticed during the process. In some circumstances, certain features can be noticed and remembered as hindrances that interrupt expectations and become the emphasis of consideration. Change on basic reasoning about teaching has been regarded a challenging and unusual undertaking, if it prompts the rearrangement of individuals’ central prior beliefs. Once more, for some people, new information is reasonably fixed and adjusted in the old representation to appropriate what is already known or encoded without its consequences. What is already known is fully considered.

The mental handling of knowledge involves the protection and maintenance of prevailing structures instead of thorough transformation thereof. There is a tendency to relate new ideas to older ones previously held, without inadequate consideration to differing features from the

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familiar; or integrated without the rearrangement of the existing knowledge and beliefs. This results in hit-or-miss and uneven practice changes in the present implementation of the idea. Policy implementers tend to pay more attention to popular and familiar policy ideas in the previous practice than to new and modern ideas. They lack to rationally link and explain unfamiliar ideas and as a result devote less attention to and overlook them. This inclination of human nature to observe new ideas as familiar is an impediment to effective change. The understanding of teachers regarding teaching and learning is thus a combination of old and new ideas, because new ideas are assimilated into the existing mental structures. The incorporation of new ideas into existing beliefs and understanding can be too demanding and challenging for teachers, especially when the new ideas which represent the intent of policy disagree with their implicit representations. This makes true change to be a difficult accomplishment.

4.7.1.4 Understanding may focus on superficial features, missing deeper relationships

Individual expertise and deep knowledge are very important as they influence the way implementing agents make sense of the conditions and ideas, since they help them to access and use superficial characteristics and deeper philosophies regarding change. Teachers with wider and deeper expertise or knowledge about the principle are likely to understand and depict differences between closely similar, yet different ideas of the principle and act accordingly unlike others. Teachers who are unable to look beneath the surface tend to equate and compare their classroom practices with policy objectives by simply looking at the presence of certain surface fundamental features and conclude their practice to be in line with what is intended by policymakers. However, their classroom implementation mainly fails to reflect deeper and more abstract principles, since they construct their understanding based on deluded superficial relationships and comparisons, and analogical reasoning rather than on deeper meanings. This makes many implementing agents’ neophytes when it comes to the implementation of policy ideas that push for multifaceted and unusual changes in existing behaviour. Recent studies by Spillane (2000) and Spillane and Callahan (Spillane et al., 2002) revealed predominant patterns in the understandings of implementing agents that when encountering new policy ideas about their work they have the tendency to refer to and make shallow links to their previous experiences, making use of incomplete or unrealistic information rather than using deeper underlying structural ideas. Making connections between reform ideas and prior experiences based exclusively on superficial analogies due to inability to understand deeper structural thoughts results in misinterpretation of the whole

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reform purpose and subsequently into superficial implementation of the policy. Tendency to heavily rely on superficial features of policy is seen to be consistent with some studies of implementation failures by Cohen (Spillane et al., 2002) which report that teachers who are seen teaching in line with the reform ideas do so simply because they apply the more outstanding features of the reform however, at the same time they integrate reform ideas into their very traditional practice. In the same vein, Haug (Spillane et al., 2002) states that “partial understandings” are a result of reliance on superficial similarities in which teachers conclude the reform to mean actual changes while in the real sense they do not make a distinction of the need to change vital aspects of students’ interactions in relation to the subject matter.

4.7.1.5 Values, emotions and motivated reasoning in sense-making

The preceded element of individual cognitive sense-making was purely dispassionate cognitive in perspective while debates about reform goes beyond scientific and empirical questions about the conditions of learning and the effective ways to teach. However, it has been reported that many reform ideas about teaching, learning and schooling are very value- laden, and that the substance of the reforms, implementation of changes in teaching practice, affects the fundamental behaviour that are central to implementers’ self-image. This dimension calls for their motivations, goals and affect to come into play in sense-making and reasoning about reforms. Rich associations of abstract intellectual ideas to deeply held values influence the cognitive processes involved in understanding, interpreting, and acting on reform initiatives. The influence of motivation and feelings on cognitive processing is called “hot cognition” or “motivated reasoning.” In the next sections I give a brief outline of the implications that values, emotions, and motivated reasoning have in implementation sense- making.

4.7.1.6 People are biased towards interpretations consistent with their prior beliefs and values

Reasoning about complex judgments can be shaped by goals, affect and biases in numerous ways. Prevailing structures can be very resistant to change because individuals rely heavily on own experiences during argument reasoning than they rely on experiences of external experts. Examples they give from their experiences carry more weight in judgment and decision making than does abstract information. Also, strong motivation can affect the way reasoning is carried out causing people to pay more attention to information aligning with the

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desired outcome or to markdown non-aligning information. There is mainly a tendency for the implementers to focus on information from the consistent experience with the biased point of view which see things working out well. Equally, motivation toward an effect can also influence the speculation we make in reasoning so that we commit more effort to understanding and evaluating undesirable evidence than desirable evidence which is more easily accepted. It also affects the use of personal memories in reasoning and the memory search to remember examples consistent with the target statements are biased. This may lead to the making of quick conclusions and emphasizing unnecessarily on familiar aspects in understanding new policy initiatives and making premature claims to having achieved it.

4.7.1.7 The affective costs to self-image can work against adopting reforms

Affect is a core part of memory and therefore emotional associations are an important part of knowledge structures used to reason about the world and may affect reasoning about value- laden issues. The judgments that people make is colored with recovered emotions, causing people to make either pessimistic reasoning if associated with negative feelings or optimistic if associated with positive ones. Strong motivation to maintain a positive self-image is another linked factor. Predominantly when practices are central to their self-concept or self- schema, people provide explanations that they have performed well in the past and try to prove that their efforts have never failed. Emotions and affective responses in reasoning and judgments activate a motivation to affirm one’s value. Self-affirmation bias affects judgments by exerting pressure in favor of the view that what one has done in the past has value or reduce whatever intimidation that challenges their self-esteem. Implementing a reform could cost teachers some loss in positive self-image. As advocates, teachers may decide that they are ahead of the curve and are already teaching in ways that are consistent with the reform or motivated to discount the reform idea seeing it as inconsistent with the reality that they know best. On the other hand, teachers might accept that change is needed, but attribute their reasons for not adopting the reform to contextual factors such as learners, parents, and lack of support etcetera. All these explanations indicate that the challenge to self-esteem and the tendency of the human judgment-making to preserve self-esteem can work against convincing implementing agents of the need to change and of the differences between their current practices and the goals of the policy.

In addition, values and emotions are critical components when teachers build new understandings about their practice from and about reform initiatives because they justify

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what the teacher understands about reform in their teaching. They disclose the tight links between their values and their emotional experiences in teaching. Nevertheless, the relations between implementing agents’ values and emotions and their sense-making, is not well understood as research on emotional dimensions of teachers’ work is inadequate. This dimension of emotional dimension of teachers is likely worthwhile to investigate. The associations between the values and emotions of local implementing agents and what they come to understand about reforming their practice from policy is one of the areas where studies of cognitive science and social cognition can help shape new patterns of investigation into the implementation process.