Administrators’ Unintentional Sensegiving and


Journal website: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/   Manuscript received: 4/28/2018 
Facebook: /EPAAA  Revisions received: 11/11/2018 
Twitter: @epaa_aape  Accepted: 11/12/2018 

 

education policy analysis 
archives 
A peer-reviewed, independent,  
open access, multilingual journal  
 
 
 
 
 
  

 Arizona State University 

 

Volume 27 Number 3  January 14, 2019 ISSN 1068-2341 
 

 

Administrators’ Unintentional Sensegiving and  
System Reform Outcomes 

Lok-Sze Wong 
Northwestern University 

United States 
 
Citation: Wong, L. (2019). Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes. 
Education Policy Analysis Archives, 27(3). http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.27.3854  
 
Abstract: One popular diagnosis for the problem of inequitable educational opportunities 
is the need for schools and schooling systems to undergo systemic change. While research 
shows that leadership support is essential for implementing system reforms, critical 
questions remain about how leaders help shift other’s understandings and practices. 
Employing the theory of sensegiving, this longitudinal, multiple -case study examines how 
administrators help teachers and other administrators make sense of a system reform 
during the first two years of implementation. I found that administrator’s unintentional 
sensegiving complicated others’ understandings of the new system reform, which 
complicated implementation. Based on these findings, I introduce the concept of 
unintentional sensegiving to theorize how leaders can give sense in ways they do not intend, 
yet have large impacts on how others understand and respond to a reform. Before 
championing a system reform, leaders deserve opportunities to (a) become familiar with 
the details of that reform and system reforms in general; (b) carefully study their existing 
systems, including their local contexts, and consider what dynamics might be created when 
they implement the new reform; (c) explore how their existing systems could shift to 
match the design of the system reform; and (d) practice drawing on their wells of 
knowledge to help others shift their understandings about their practice.  

http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/
http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.27.3854


Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 2 

 
Keywords: education policy; system reform; instructional coordination and coherence; 
implementation; sensegiving; knowledge development; leadership preparation  
 
Sensegiving no intencionalidad de los administradores y los resultados de la 
reforma del sistema 
Resumen: Un diagnóstico popular para el problema de oportunidades educativas injustas 
es la necesidad de escuelas y sistemas de enseñanza que sufren cambios sistémicos. 
Aunque las investigaciones demuestran que el apoyo al liderazgo es esencial para 
implementar las reformas del sistema, todavía hay cuestiones cruciales sobre cómo los 
líderes ayudan a cambiar el entendimiento y las prácticas de los demás. Usando la teoría de 
sensegiving, el estudio longitudinal de varios casos examina cómo los administradores ayudan 
a los profesores y otros administradores a comprender la reforma del sistema durante los 
dos primeros años de implementación. Descubrí que el sensegiving no intencional de los 
administradores complicó la comprensión de los demás sobre la nueva reforma del 
sistema, lo que complicó la implementación. Con base en estos resultados, presento el 
concepto de sensegiving no intencional para teorizar cómo los líderes pueden dar sentido de 
maneras que no pretenden, pero aún tener grandes impactos sobre cómo los demás 
entienden y responden a una reforma. Antes de defender una reforma del sistema, los 
líderes merecen oportunidades para (a) familiarizarse con los detalles de esa reforma y 
reformas del sistema en general; (b) estudiar cuidadosamente sus sistemas existentes, 
incluyendo sus contextos locales, y considerar qué dinámicas pueden crearse cuando 
implementan la nueva reforma; (c) explorar cómo los sistemas existentes podrían cambiar 
para adaptarse al proyecto de reforma del sistema; y (d) practicar el diseño de 
conocimiento para ayudar a otros a cambiar sus entendimientos sobre su práctica. 
Palabras-clave: política educativa; reforma del sistema; coordinación instruccional y 
coherencia; aplicación; sensegiving; la construcción de sentido; desarrollo de conocimiento; 
preparación de liderazgo 
 
Sensegiving não intencional dos administradores e resultados da reforma do 
sistema 
Resumo: Um diagnóstico popular para o problema de oportunidades educacionais injustas 
é a necessidade de escolas e sistemas de ensino sofrerem mudanças sistêmicas. Embora as 
pesquisas mostrem que o apoio à liderança é essencial para implementar as reformas do 
sistema, ainda há questões cruciais sobre como os líderes ajudam a mudar o entendimento 
e as práticas dos outros. Empregando a teoria do sensegiving, esse estudo longitudinal de 
vários casos examina como os administradores ajudam os professores e outros 
administradores a compreenderem a reforma do sistema durante os dois primeiros anos de 
implementação. Descobri que sensegiving não intencional dos administradors complicou a 
compreensão dos outros sobre a nova reforma do sistema, o que complicou a 
implementação. Com base nesses resultados, apresento o conceito de sensegiving não 
intencional para teorizar como os líderes podem dar sentido de maneiras que não 
pretendem, mas ainda assim ter grandes impactos sobre como os outros entendem e 
respondem a uma reforma. Antes de defender uma reforma do sistema, os líderes merecem 
oportunidades para (a) familiarizar-se com os detalhes dessa reforma e reformas do sistema 
em geral; (b) estudar cuidadosamente seus sistemas existentes, incluindo seus contextos 
locais, e considerar quais dinâmicas podem ser criadas quando elas implementam a nova 
reforma; (c) explorar como os sistemas existentes poderiam mudar para se adequar ao 



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  3 

 
projeto de reforma do sistema; e (d) praticar o desenho de conhecimento para ajudar os 
outros a mudarem seus entendimentos sobre sua prática. Palavras-chave: política 
educacional; reforma do sistema; coordenação instrucional e coerência; implementação; 
sensegiving; desenvolvimento de conhecimento; preparação de liderança 
 

Administrators’ Unintentional Sensegiving and System Reform Outcomes  

One popular diagnosis for the problem of inequitable educational opportunities is the need 
for schools and schooling systems to undergo systemic change (Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, 
Luppescu, & Easton, 2010; Cobb, Jackson, Henrick, Smith, & MIST Project, 2018; Cohen, Peurach, 
Glazer, Gates, & Goldin, 2014; Daly & Finnigan, 2016; Darling-Hammond, 2010). Instead of 
targeting individual or subgroups of children, policymakers and educators could focus on schools, 
districts, and the institution of public schooling as systems that require structural and cultural 
change. The theory of action in instructional system reforms asserts that quality increases when 
elements of instruction—e.g., standards, curriculum, materials, professional learning, instructional 
strategies, assessments—are coordinated and coherent (Bryk et al., 2010; Cohen & Ball, 1999; 
Newmann, Smith, Allensworth, & Bryk, 2001; Purkey & Smith, 1983). Research demonstrates that 
instructional coordination is associated with higher student achievement (Bryk et al., 2010; Rowan, 
Camburn, & Barnes, 2004), and Title I funds are often used to purchase and implement more 
equitable system reforms (Rowan et al., 2004). Since the 1980s and 1990s, system reforms, such as 
standards-based (a.k.a. systemic), whole school (e.g., comprehensive school reforms), and 
comprehensive large-scale reforms, continue to generate enthusiasm in the promise of shifting the 
existing systems that educate U.S. children (Bryk et al., 2010; Daly & Finnigan, 2016; Leithwood, 
Jantzi, & Mascall, 2002). 

While system reforms aim to ameliorate inequitable educational opportunities, we’re still 
learning what promise this theory of action holds (Cohen et al., 2014; Daly & Finnigan, 2016; 
Peurach, 2011). What does it take to shift our existing schooling systems towards ideal, coordinated 
and coherent ones that can adeptly manage daily instruction that equitably educates all students? 
Further, is it possible to change fundamental understandings about practice, particularly when 
practitioners will continue to work within a network of education, business, and government 
organizations that struggle to support coordinated and coherent instruction?  

System reforms pose a novel challenge for policymakers and educators mainly because they 
aim to coordinate often disparate parts of an existing system so that the whole system is more 
responsive to students’ needs. System reforms aim to change how educators perform instruction or 
schooling by requiring teachers and administrators to collaborate closely with others they were not 
trained to work with (e.g., teachers in other programs or grade levels) to bring coherence to 
children’s daily learning opportunities through aligning their separate daily practices. In addition to 
transforming their knowledge and beliefs about instruction, culture, and behavior, teachers and 
administrators are being asked to enact a type of collective practice that produces improved learning 
and schooling opportunities for all kids. This would be a challenging task amid stable political and 
financial conditions. It is even more arduous when situated in contentious times where local control, 
equity, accountability, and other policies and pressures simultaneously press educators for results. 

District and school leaders are key contributors to implementing and sustaining system 
reforms (Aladjem et al., 2006; Herrmann, 2006; Newmann et al., 2001; Rowan et al., 2004). When 
leaders champion such reforms, allocate appropriate resources, and provide stable political and 
financial environments, they help create a context that allows teachers, administrators, and even 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 4 

 
external partners, to work together over time. These practices help ensure that a reform’s new ways 
of coordinating instruction become part of the schools’ normative culture.  

However, institutionalizing new ways of working also requires shifts in participants’ cultural-
cognitive understandings, and these shifts are the most difficult aspects of practice to change 
(Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott & Davis, 2007). Despite research on the roles that local leaders 
play in system reforms (Aladjem et al., 2006; Herrmann, 2006; Newmann et al., 2001; Rowan et al., 
2004), critical questions remain about how leaders can help change what daily instruction looks like 
(Bridich, 2015). Such key questions include: how does a leader help shift others’ understandings and 
practices to meet the goals of an ambitious, system-wide reform in a context where educators 
wrestle to manage multiple, often conflicting policy demands; and what knowledge and skills do 
leaders need to successfully help others shift?  

This paper examines what knowledge administrators need to implement and sustain 
coherent instructional systems. To understand how leaders help change others’ cultural-cognitive 
understandings, I employ the theory of sensegiving (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991) from organizational 
studies, which examines how leaders strategically shape others’ sensemaking (Weick, Sutcliffe, & 
Obstfeld, 2005). I designed a longitudinal multiple-case study to examine administrators’ work in 
two schools within the same district during their first two years of implementing Multi-Tiered 
System of Supports (MTSS, a.k.a. Response to Intervention, or RtI), a prevalent system reform. I 
then observed whether and how administrators’ sensegiving influenced others’ sensemaking, 
providing a rare opportunity to study systemic processes across multiple organizational levels. 
Sensegiving draws on existing knowledge. The findings indicate that leaders often did not have 
detailed knowledge of how MTSS proposes parts of a system should fit together nor how parts of 
their existing system already fit together, in order to accurately give sense to others. Moreover, the 
system reform effort came in tension with accountability and teacher evaluation policies, creating a 
challenging context that administrators were not prepared to encounter or manage.  

To explain, I introduce the theoretical phenomenon of unintentional sensegiving. Unintentional 
sensegiving explains how leaders’ existing knowledge can cause them to give sense in unintended 
ways that affect how others understand and respond to change efforts. By conducting a cross-level 
examination of systemic processes, I am able to provide a new insight on how administrators can 
influence teachers’ understandings and implementation of system reform policies. Thus, I offer an 
understanding of the micro processes involved in changing cultural-cognitive understandings and 
practice in response to system reform policies. I then discuss how leadership preparation programs 
and in-service training can develop the knowledge and skills required for productive sensegiving. I 
also discuss the implications of sensegiving for policy implementation and how it can be leveraged in 
future system reform efforts.  

Literature Review 

 In this literature review, I draw together research from both organizational studies and 
education to understand how leaders can help shift others’ understandings and practices to 
accomplish a system reform. First, I define the theoretical construct of sensegiving and describe its 
role in implementation. I then discuss what leaders would ideally know to accurately give sense 
during system reform efforts.  

Sensegiving and its Role in Implementation 

Fundamentally changing people’s practice requires changing the mental maps or frameworks 
that they use to guide their actions—what institutional theorists call cultural-cognitive 
understandings (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott & Davis, 2007). Cultural-cognitive understandings 



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  5 

 
are the culturally supported, taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions that people use to shape their 
actions. Operating as mental maps and frameworks, cultural-cognitive understandings guide people’s 
sensemaking processes when they encounter novel, confusing, or unexpected situations, such as a 
new system reform (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Weick et al., 2005). Because cultural-cognitive 
understandings are deeply rooted, they are considered the most difficult aspect of practice to change 
(Scott & Davis, 2007). Yet, to fundamentally change practice, people might need to consider the 
underlying beliefs and assumptions that govern their current practice. In other words, if educators 
seek to change their practice (such as classroom instruction or the management of instruction), they 
may need to change the cultural-cognitive understandings that direct their practice. 

Leaders can play a key role in helping others shift their cultural-cognitive understandings 
through a process that organizational scholars call sensegiving. For instance, when educators encounter 
and try to make sense of a novel system reform, leaders can provide meaning to and resolve 
conflicts concerning the design of the reform to help guide people’s sensemaking processes as they 
learn the reform (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). Thus, sensegiving shapes 
the resource—the well of knowledge—that people draw on when they try to make sense of the new 
reform and how it bears on their and others’ responsibilities. In their seminal study, Gioia and 
Chittipeddi (1991) define sensegiving as “the process of attempting to influence the sensemaking 
and meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of organizational reality” (p. 
442). Gioia and Chittipeddi describe how a new university president strategically engaged his direct 
reports and, later, a growing number of constituents in his vision for change. His intentional 
messaging shaped others’ sensemaking to reflect his vision. In turn, these new understandings 
guided people to engage with each other and how they perform their work in a manner aligned with 
his vision. As a result, the organization made significant strides towards implementing the 
president’s strategic change efforts. 

Sensegiving helps us understand how leaders’ actions can contribute to altering the mental 
maps people use to understand their and others’ work (Foldy, Goldman, & Ospina, 2008; Maitlis, 
2005; Smith, Plowman, & Duchon, 2010). For example, Foldy et al. (2008) identify sensegiving 
strategies that leaders might use to produce five types of sensegiving outcomes that are changes to 
cultural-cognitive understandings. These “cognitive shifts” are: (1) changes in how the problem is 
viewed, (2) changes in how a solution is viewed, (3) changes in how a constituency views itself, (4) 
changes in how parts of a constituency view other parts, and (5) changes in how others view the 
constituency. While implementing a system reform, leaders might prioritize shifting how parts of 
their constituencies see each other (e.g., how general education teachers see Title I and special 
education teachers, and vice versa) and focus less on how outsiders view teachers, although 
managing the environment will also be an important ongoing task (Cohen et al., 2014).  

Sensegiving occurs through verbal communication, activities, symbols, and symbolic action 
(Fiss & Zajac, 2006; Maitlis, 2005; Smith et al., 2010). Thus, sensegiving is accomplished through 
what people say as well as what they do. For example, Orlikowski, Yates, Okamura, and Fujimoto 
(1995) described how company leaders slowly modified features of a new system-wide technology to 
carefully shape employees’ cultural-cognitive understandings and use over time. Their strategic, non-
verbal actions resulted in the full integration of the new technology.  

Sensegiving is performed by people other than formal organizational leaders (Foldy et al., 
2008; Maitlis, 2005), such as direct reports or external partners in the change effort. Thus, leaders 
should carefully consider the multiple messages organizational members will receive about 
instruction, and how they can help their members make sense of the messages in a manner that 
helps members shift their practices (Coburn, 2005). Maitlis (2005) found that when formal leaders 
and other organizational members work together to create a single account of an issue and possible 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 6 

 
solutions, their sensegiving can create a guided sensemaking process, leading to consistent and 
unified change efforts. Conversely, those who do not work together send multiple messages that 
create fragmented, restricted, or minimal sensemaking processes, which can lead to limited or 
disjointed change efforts.  

While sensegiving is not yet a concept used in PreK-12 education research, a small but 
growing body of literature discusses how messages from education leaders can shape teachers’ 
sensemaking (Brezicha, Bergmark, & Mitra, 2015; Carlson & Patterson, 2015; Coburn, 2005; 
Matsumura & Wang, 2014; Park, Daly, & Guerra, 2013; Spillane et al., 2002). For instance, Spillane 
et al. (2002) find that leaders’ understandings of and reactions to accountability policies can shape 
how their teachers respond to said policies. Coburn (2005) highlights how leaders can shape 
teachers’ sensemaking of new reading policies through: (a) shaping access to policy ideas; (b) shaping 
how people understand and interpret new policies and their implications; and (c) shaping the 
conditions of teachers’ learning opportunities.  

Sensegiving, itself, draws on the sensegiver’s existing knowledge, often embedded in cultural-
cognitive understandings formed during prior sensemaking processes (Rouleau, 2005; Spillane, 1998; 
Spillane et al., 2002). In other words, shaping others’ wells of knowledge requires drawing on the 
sensegiver’s well of knowledge. What leaders know determines how well they can give sense. For 
example, Spillane et al. (2002) found that school leaders’ actions were shaped by their sensemaking 
of accountability policies. Each administrator in the study understood the same policies differently 
and subsequently shaped teachers’ understandings and actions differently. Thus, if we aim to help 
teachers and other educators shift their understandings and practices to meet the goals of an 
ambitious system reform, we should concern ourselves with their leaders’ wells of knowledge. 

Leaders’ Wells of Knowledge for System Reforms 

Because sensegiving draws on an individual’s well of knowledge (Rouleau, 2005; Spillane, 
1998; Spillane et al., 2002), leaders’ pre-existing knowledge of system reforms will affect how adeptly 
they can help others make sense of their change effort. The more novel a reform is to a leader, the 
less knowledge the leader will have to draw from as they help others change their practices. 

For this reason, leading system reforms might pose particular challenges. To begin, leading 
the construction and management of coordinated instructional systems could be novel to many 
leaders. They may not have the pre-existing knowledge and skills to accomplish this task. The 
principle of shared, common understandings around curriculum and curricular tools is often lacking 
in schools and school systems (Cohen et al., 2014). Yet system reforms require leaders to understand 
how parts of a system (e.g., general education, Title I/At Risk, and special education) can better 
coordinate, including how a system reform is embedded in curricular materials or other instructional 
guidance. MTSS, for instance, involves teachers and administrators sharing knowledge of a single 
curriculum, suite of assessments, curricular materials, and strategies so they can have rich, in-depth 
conversations about students’ learning needs and how they will jointly serve those needs (Fuchs, 
Fuchs, & Compton, 2012; Vaughn, Denton, & Fletcher, 2010). Thus, leaders require opportunities 
to learn about the design of the particular system reform they will champion, as well as how to lead 
system reforms in general. 

Such a well of knowledge is especially complex because each school or district is a unique, 
existing social system that functions in specific ways. Each social system is also located in a unique 
local context that is governed by particular policies, funding streams, politics, expectations about 
professional practice, and students’ ever-changing needs. Sensemaking is a sociocultural process, as 
well as a cognitive one (Coburn, 2001; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Weick, 1995). Teachers and 
administrators manage multiple, and sometimes conflicting, messages about their practices, and have 



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  7 

 
existing cultural-cognitive understandings that already govern those practices. Giving sense in such 
complex conditions is challenging and requires administrators to know their own systems well 
(Bredeson, Klar, & Johansson, 2011; Brezicha et al., 2015; Stein & Nelson, 2003). Thus, leaders 
deserve opportunities to study their existing systems and what dynamics the system reform will 
create in the local context. 

Further, many instructional reforms involve a few relatively tightly knit and familiar areas of 
a system, such as an elementary ELA curricular adoption and its accompanying professional 
development. However, system reforms require that leaders know how to coordinate multiple, often 
disparate, areas of a system, and how to change the function of each area while carefully attending to 
how these changes generate alterations in other areas. The broader the system reform, the more 
dynamics amongst multiple moving parts need to be juggled, attended to, coordinated, and made 
coherent. More importantly, adding moving parts means considering how additional people from 
diverse departments will make sense of and fold in the proposed changes to their work. Subgroups 
of actors who are guided by different spheres of responsibilities and funding streams (e.g., general 
education, Title I/At-Risk, English as a Second Language, special education) and who are unused to 
working together make this particularly challenging. For instance, teachers are typically not trained, 
incentivized, or supported in attending to and improving collective practice (Bryk et al., 2010; 
Cohen, 2011). Consequently, they face difficulties in developing collective understandings and 
enacting the sort of coordinated instruction that system reforms aim to foster (Cohen et al., 2014; 
Newmann et al., 2001; Rowan, Correnti, Miller, & Camburn, 2009). If the existing system is not 
already well coordinated, leaders will have few existing understandings and practices to help them 
solve implementation issues. Thus, leaders deserve opportunities to study how their existing systems 
could shift to match the design of the system reform, and what it might take to make those shifts. 

Finally, because many leaders will not have prior experiences with leading a particular or any 
system reform in their particular social systems and local contexts, they might lack prior experiences 
with giving sense to a system reform prior to leading their change efforts. They deserve 
opportunities to practice drawing on their wells of knowledge to help others shift their cultural-
cognitive understandings about their instructional practices, such as how their new curricular 
materials are designed to help them actualize the system reform or how they can coordinate their 
practice with others in their social system. 

While the existing literature investigates how sensegiving can shift people’s cultural-cognitive 
understandings and actions toward desired implementation outcomes, it does not explore 
sensegiving in complex, education system reforms. Nor does it explore the knowledge base and 
learning opportunities leaders might need to give sense in ways that beget the desired systemic 
changes. This study addresses the following research questions: 

1) What was the nature of administrators’ sensegiving during their implementation of a system 
reform? 

2) How did administrators’ sensegiving shape implementation? 

Method 

This longitudinal, multiple-case study (Yin, 2009) examines the work of four district and 
school administrators in two elementary schools within a rural district during the first two years of 
implementing MTSS. By including two school sites, I was able to compare the implementation 
dynamics between two different social systems of work (i.e., networks of educators situated in 
particular contexts). Studying sensegiving requires a close analysis of the social process of meaning 
making. Thus, I designed this study to engage in close observation and inquiry of two social systems, 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 8 

 
affording a rare opportunity to observe systemic processes within and across organizational levels 
and boundaries. To control for differing policy and demographic variables that might confound our 
understandings of administrators’ sensegiving and policy implementation, two schools—Fairview 
and Riverside1—were chosen from the same district. Fairview and Riverside are governed by the 
same district policies. Further, the schools serve similar student populations. During the study, 52% 
of the students at Fairview qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. The majority of the students’ 
parents or guardians identified them as White (88%), with the rest identified as Hispanic, two or 
more races, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, or American Indian/Alaskan, respectively. At Riverside, 
50% of the students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. The majority was identified as White 
(87%), with the rest identified as Hispanic, two or more races, Asian/Pacific Islander, or American 
Indian/Alaskan, respectively. None of the students at either school were classified as English 
Language Learners. 

In this study, the new system reform that administrators and teachers strove to implement 
was MTSS. To support its implementation, the district purchased Reading Street, a reading program 
with MTSS embedded in its design, to help provide infrastructure that would support their teachers 
and administrators as they worked towards shifting their practices. Below, I describe the changes in 
practice that MTSS demands as a system reform and how Reading Street was designed to support 
these changes. I illustrate the sensegiving that leaders must undertake to help teachers and other 
administrators implement this particular system reform.  

Multi-Tiered System of Supports 

MTSS is a current version of Response to Intervention (RtI), which traditionally served as a 
special education framework for identifying and supporting students’ needs. Expanding on RtI, the 
MTSS framework emphasizes the role the whole school plays in instruction; in other words, the 
systemic nature of instruction (Baker, Fien, & Baker, 2010; National Center for Learning Disabilities, 
n.d.)2. MTSS places a heavy emphasis on strengthening general education along with developing 
equitable procedures for identifying students who need additional academic support. The change in 
name illustrates the shift in focus from interventions to a school-wide instructional system. Figure 1 
is a common depiction of the framework. 

 

                                                 
1 Names of organizations and individuals are pseudonyms. 
2 The MTSS framework is also used for providing behavioral or social emotional supports. This study focuses 
on the implementation of a school- and district-wide reading system. Consequently, the rest of the 
manuscript will focus on instruction. 



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  9 

 
Figure 1. The MTSS framework, representing all students and their fluid movement through tiers. 
 

A main principle of the MTSS framework is that students move fluidly through the tiers of 
support (Fuchs et al., 2012; Vaughn et al., 2010). Any student may need additional supports at any 
time to master any aspect of the curriculum. For instance, a student who had some challenges 
learning short vowel sounds may suddenly struggle with long vowels. Her general education teacher 
would immediately provide extra support (Tier 2), maybe in the form of small group instruction, 
taught by the general education teacher or by another teacher in an adjacent program, such as Title I, 
ESL, or even special education. If the student continued to struggle, she would immediately receive 
more intensive, targeted support (Tier 3), again provided by her general education or another 
teacher. Meanwhile, she would still receive the ongoing Tier 1 instruction provided to all students. 
Further, she would move out of Tiers 2 or 3 as soon as she mastered the long vowel skills that 
originally triggered the additional support. This principle is meant to shift teachers’ and 
administrators’ understandings of how to organize whole and small group instruction, how to 
formatively assess students’ progress, and how to fluidly coordinate instruction with other teachers 
within and across grades and programs (e.g., general education, Title I/At-Risk, ESL, special 
education) to best support students’ ever-changing learning needs. 

To support such a fluid instructional system, teachers and administrators need curriculum, 
materials, strategies, and assessments that are aligned and coordinated across tiers of support. This 
alignment and coordination is meant to span across a school year as well as across programming and 
grade levels to effect an instructional system that supports students throughout their tenure. 
Instructional alignment and coordination of this breadth requires teachers to share common 
understandings of the curriculum and to coordinate their enactments of curricular materials and 
assessments. Thus, in addition to their individual responsibilities, in the MTSS framework, teachers 
within and across grades and programs constantly work together to study individual students’ 
learning needs, curricular materials, and instructional strategies so they can generate rich, in-depth 
conversations about students’ needs and how they will jointly serve those needs. 

Reading Street. To support teachers and administrators with implementing MTSS, the 
district adopted a new elementary reading program to provide some infrastructure: Reading Street 
Common Core 2013, published by Pearson. MTSS was a key feature of Reading Street’s design. The 
reading program supports MTSS by tightly coordinating multiple elements of an instructional 
system—a common K-5 curriculum, a suite of tiered curricular materials, and a suite of tiered 
assessments. The program’s pacing guide details how Reading Street builds knowledge and skills 
across weeks and units in a year and across grade levels, while spiraling review throughout. In 
addition to whole class Tier 1 lessons, the program provides a wealth of materials and strategies to 
support Tier 2 instruction that aligns with specific Tier 1 lessons. The program also includes a suite 
of assessments to help support rapid cycles of formative assessment. Further, Pearson developed a 
supplementary intervention program, My Sidewalks, for Tier 3 instruction that aligns with the 
content in Tiers 1 and 2. My Sidewalks contains its own set of materials and assessments to 
continually diagnose and monitor students’ progress.  

Data Collection 

I collected data from August 2012 to June 2014. During Year 1, I visited each school 
approximately every five weeks for five days, which provided a consistent sampling of dialogue and 
instruction during the first year when, arguably, administrators and teachers would wrestle the most 
with how to implement MTSS. During Year 2, I visited each school in the fall and spring for two 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 10 

 
weeks each time, and I conducted mid-year phone interviews. In addition, throughout the year, I 
interviewed some participants by phone after attending key events.  

I conducted a total of nine semi-structured interviews with the superintendent and district 
curriculum director, and 20 semi-structured interviews with each principal (see Appendices A and B 
for excerpts from Year 1 Spring protocols). Interviews lasted between 60 to 180 minutes and were 
recorded and transcribed. In addition, I shadowed each principal twice to learn how they understood 
and enacted their roles and responsibilities in this system reform effort. I observed 34 district- and 
school-level meetings where staff discussed reading instruction, such as staff meetings, grade-level 
meetings, and MTSS Team meetings. I also observed 19 MTSS and Reading Street trainings, 
documenting these using open-ended field notes. Additionally, I collected relevant artifacts (see 
Table 1 for distribution of interviews and observations).  

From each school, I recruited two general education teachers per grade level to observe the 
degree of instructional coordination within and across grades, and one Title I and one special 
education teacher to observe coordination across programs. Three participating Fairview teachers 
retired at the end of Year 1. I then recruited three new teachers who held the same positions as the 
retired teachers. I directly observed and inquired about their understandings and enactments of 
reading instruction, specifically areas where MTSS guided them to collaborate and coordinate with 
others (e.g., planning for Tier 2 or 3 instruction, studying assessment data). I took open-ended field 
notes during classroom observations, conducted semi-structured interviews (see Appendix C for 
excerpts from Year 1 Spring protocol), and collected relevant artifacts. In all, I conducted 52 
interviews and 29 observations with nine Fairview teachers, and 66 interviews and 40 observations 
with eight Riverside teachers. 

Data Analysis 

Data analysis was conducted concurrently with data collection to allow for the refinement of 
subsequent data collection procedures (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013; Yin, 2009). I analyzed 
data deductively, to test existing theories, as well as inductively, to develop an explanatory frame.  

My analysis focused first on how teachers and administrators attempted to enact school- or 
district-wide systems of reading instruction, as designed in the MTSS framework. I wrote analytic 
memos that addressed this focus during each round of data collection. When I began coding, I 
started with an inductive review of the analytic memos to identify emerging themes and to assign 
initial codes (Miles et al., 2013). One emerging theme was teachers’ and administrators’ confusion 
and frustration as they tried to make sense of multiple messages on how to best implement their 
schools’ and district’s system reform. I conducted a second round of coding that was deductive and  

 
Table 1 
Distribution of Interviews and Observations  

 Year 1 Year 2 

Participant/Event Interviews 
Observations 
or Shadowing Interviews 

Observations 
or Shadowing 

District     
Charles (Superintendent) 2 0 1 0 

Cara (Curriculum Director) 3 0 3 0 
District-Level Meetings - 8 - 1 
Fairview     
Kendall (Principal) 8 2 1 0 
1st grade Teacher A 4 3 3 1 



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  11 

 

 
guided by the concept of sensegiving, which involved coding the analytic memos for the sources of 
confusion and frustration, such as Reading Street and My Sidewalks teachers’ manuals, 
administrators, or other teachers. Preliminary findings indicated that administrators’ messages 
carried greater weight than other sources of information during people’s sensemaking processes 
because administrators have authority over teachers’ and other administrators’ employment. I used 
pattern matching (Yin, 2009) to better understand the sensegiving role of all sources, including 
administrators, in shaping people’s understandings and practices around MTSS and instructional 
coordination (e.g., how to align teaching within and across grades and across programming). Next, I 
reviewed all observations, interviews, and artifacts to confirm my original triangulation of the data, 
seeking disconfirming evidence and refining the findings. The data indicated administrators’ 
sensegiving did carry greater weight than other sources regarding how to implement MTSS. I 
checked the findings with participants who verified the findings resonated with their experiences 
(Miles et al., 2013). Finally, I inductively coded administrators’ sensegiving to better understand the 
nature of their sensegiving, including the knowledge they drew on when they formed their messages 
to guide implementation. In addition to intentional sensegiving, administrators sent messages about 
implementation that they did not intend to send. These instances caused the greatest confusion and 
frustration. I grouped these instances into categories that describe the sensegiving that 
administrators performed.  

1st grade Teacher B 7 3 0 0 
1st grade Teacher C 1 0 3 2 
2nd grade Teacher A 7 3 0 0 
2nd grade Teacher B 4 3 0 0 
2nd grade Teacher C 1 0 3 2 
2nd grade Teacher D 0 0 3 2 
Title I/At-Risk Teacher 6 3 3 2 
Special Education Teacher 4 3 3 2 
School-Level Meetings - 8 - 2 
Riverside     
Claire (Principal) 8 2 3 0 
3rd grade Teacher A 7 4 3 2 
3rd grade Teacher B 4 3 3 2 
4th grade Teacher A 6 3 3 2 
4th grade Teacher B 4 3 3 2 
5th grade Teacher A 5 4 3 2 
5th grade Teacher B 7 3 3 1 
Title I/At-Risk Teacher 5 3 3 1 
Special Education Teacher 4 3 3 2 
School-Level Meetings - 11 - 4 
Trainings     
District MTSS Trainings - 1 - 2 
School MTSS Trainings - 9 - 2 

Reading Street Trainings - 2 - 3 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 12 

 

Findings 

Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) define sensegiving as “the process of attempting to influence 
the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of 
organizational reality” (p. 442). Consequently, sensegiving is typically described as intentional, 
strategic actions that leaders and others take to shape organizational outcomes. Yet, not all actions 
are intentional. Central office and school administrators in this study demonstrate that sensegiving 
can be unintentional. These administrators gave sense in ways they did not intend but that created 
far-reaching impacts on how others understood and responded to this system reform effort. 

Administrators in this study performed three types of what I term unintentional sensegiving. I 
label the three types passive, partial, and ambiguous. Each is defined and illustrated below; from 
multiple examples in the data, I select two to illustrate each type of unintentional sensegiving. In 
each example, administrators’ unintentional sensegiving caused confusion and/or frustration, and 
contributed to variance in people’s understandings of the system reform they worked to implement. 

Passive Sensegiving 

When leaders are silent or defer to others, resulting in others shaping messages for them, 
they are unintentionally engaging in passive sensegiving. In the two examples below, the 
administrators were silent and deferred to others’ messages on how to implement Reading Street 
and MTSS, with the intention of letting those knowledgeable others guide teachers’ sensemaking. 
When administrators did speak, they reiterated what the knowledgeable others said. They did not 
know enough about (1) how Reading Street was designed to actualize MTSS; (2) how the reform 
design interacted with their existing systems and broader messages about program fidelity; and (3) in 
what ways their existing systems could shift to match the design, nor were they given sufficient 
opportunities to learn. In fact, these administrators learned alongside their teachers. As a result, they 
could not strategically give sense to their system reform effort beyond what others suggested. 
However, teachers needed administrators’ help with implementing Reading Street and MTSS within 
their unique social systems of work. Without help from their administrators, teachers were left to 
make their own sense of how to use Reading Street within their schools. In fact, each teacher or pair 
of teachers developed different understandings, and each chose different manners of enacting 
Reading Street. This resulted in a lack of instructional coordination within and across the two 
schools.  

Passive Sensegiving: Example 1. When implementation began, the District Curriculum 
Director, Cara3, had nascent understandings of MTSS, Reading Street, and how the MTSS 
framework was built into Reading Street. Moreover, as implementation proceeded, her teachers and 
principals gained more knowledge while she did not have as many opportunities to learn. 
Understandably, Cara deferred to Pearson trainers, who said the MTSS framework would be 
actualized if they maintained the fidelity of the Reading Street program. Teachers were familiar with 
the idea of program fidelity from past implementation efforts, and they all agreed on its importance. 
The first trainer defined “fidelity” as teaching all lessons written each day in the teachers’ manual. 
Thus, Cara insisted this was what teachers needed to learn to do: “It’s all there for [the teachers]. It’s 
just getting used to doing it, and doing a 90-minute block, trying to fit it all in.” However, in later 
trainings, Pearson staff changed the definition of “fidelity.” For instance, at an administrators’ 
training, the trainer gave administrators a list of “Must-dos” for each week, which left off a number 
of activities from the teachers’ manual. The trainer said following this list would “maintain fidelity” 

                                                 
3 Again, names of organizations and individuals are pseudonyms. 



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  13 

 
to the program. When Cara and principals passed the list on to teachers, this caused a great deal of 
confusion. Later, another Pearson trainer said teachers only had to cover the “Targeted and Tested” 
content each day to maintain fidelity. Cara reiterated to teachers during that training, “…the 
Targeted and Tested are your minimum.”  

During and after each training, Cara was silent or seemed to agree with each trainer. Thus, 
teachers and principals were unsure of what she thought fidelity meant and how they should 
accomplish any version of it, given their current bell schedules. Yet, because of her power over their 
jobs, her definition of fidelity mattered most. One teacher explained: 

I’ve gotten mixed messages. The different trainers that we’ve had come in from 
Reading Street, from Pearson…We expressed concern to our curriculum director 
saying, "How–, the scheduling doesn't match this." And we really didn't get a 
response, so—yeah…how can I fairly be, objectively be evaluated that way? That’s 
not fair. 

 
Cara admitted her own frustration over how Pearson trainers complicated their change efforts: “The 
teacher trainings, because they’ve been done by different people, there have sometimes been mixed 
messages.” 

Teachers and principals made multiple requests for Cara to make a district-wide decision on 
what she would accept as fidelity, but, afraid of misguiding them, she did not attempt to clarify 
Pearson trainers’ sensegiving for her staff, nor did she help them troubleshoot their bell schedules. 
Her passive sensegiving unintentionally left her staff to guess her expectations. Teachers’ 
sensemaking varied across classrooms. Some understood Cara’s silence as an indication to ‘try to 
teach everything in the manual,’ while others thought they could make their own decisions because 
Cara did not know or would not find out. One principal said, “I guess if she’s not going to give me a 
directive, I just need to make a directive... Sometimes it’s just better to ask for forgiveness than for 
permission.”  

Additionally, because of Cara’s deference to the mixed messages from Pearson trainers, each 
principal gave sense to their teachers in different ways. Kendall, Fairview’s principal, mandated her 
teachers teach all activities listed in the teachers’ manual. Claire, however, buffered her teachers from 
what she perceived as ill-informed guidance. This resulted in varied sensemaking amongst Claire’s 
teachers, depending on the sense they made of Cara’s messages, which led to teachers using Reading 
Street in multiple ways.  

Passive Sensegiving: Example 2. Similarly, Kendall’s (Fairview’s principal) lack of 
knowledge of Reading Street and how it served the MTSS frame limited her participation in solving 
implementation issues in her school, even though her teachers looked to her for guidance. In one 
example, teachers asked Kendall if they could read or have the Pearson software read sections of 
Reading Street assessments to students. Some children did not read at grade-level, and their scores 
reflected their decoding skills more than their vocabulary or comprehension skills. Teachers wanted 
to read sections of the assessments, but they also did not want to violate the fidelity of Reading 
Street or the MTSS framework, which was driven by data from these assessments. Kendall was 
uncertain and told her teachers she deferred to Cara. Cara was also uncertain and chose not to 
respond. Kendall and Cara’s passive sensegiving allowed messages from other schools to shape 
teachers’ sensemaking. One teacher described a visit to another school: 

She’s the [teacher] who said to us, “Oh, you’re not reading the test? Well, we do ours 
on the computer, so we are.” So we came back and dialogued and we said our test 
scores are going to look worse than Mirror Lake’s. We haven’t, I don’t believe, have 
gotten a clear answer from our curriculum director as to what [she] wants.  



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 14 

 
 

Absent clear messages from their administrators, Fairview teachers made different choices, 
depending on the sense they made of guidance from other schools. Kendall expressed her 
frustration with the lack of coordination across classrooms; this violated a key principle of the MTSS 
framework. How could they use these data to drive building-wide instruction when the data spoke 
differently about students’ needs? Yet, due to her lack of knowledge and experience with Reading 
Street and MTSS, Kendall did not feel comfortable guiding her teachers.  

In these two examples, Kendall and Cara engaged in passive sensegiving because they 
intended to rely on more knowledgeable others to help guide the implementation of this system 
reform. They did not realize their staff needed them to help make sense of others’ messages in light 
of their specific contexts. They also failed to understand that their deference and silence sent 
unintended messages that shaped principals’ and teachers’ understandings and actions towards an 
uneven implementation of MTSS.  

Partial Sensegiving 

Leaders engage in partial sensegiving when they unintentionally provide limited information 
that does not convey their full message. Consequently, they unintentionally send a partial message 
that does not convey their full point or meaning. The unintended message is the one that shapes 
others’ sensemaking. In the examples below, administrators intentionally sent messages to their 
direct reports about how to use or manage Reading Street in service of MTSS. They were not silent, 
nor did they defer to others. They had clear guidance to give, and they communicated that guidance. 
Unfortunately, the messages they sent were not complete enough to ensure that all participants 
understood their intentions. The administrators did not know enough about (1) the design of MTSS 
and Reading Street; (2) the dynamics occurring amongst the reform, their existing systems, and 
broader accountability policies; and (3) how to communicate change efforts given these dynamics. 
Thus, their well-intentioned efforts amplified existing confusion, frustrations, and fears. 

Partial Sensegiving: Example 1. The implementation of MTSS and Reading Street 
occurred during development of a new statewide teacher evaluation process. Teachers and 
administrators anxiously awaited any news on its progress. Cara unintentionally fueled existing fears 
and confusion by providing principals with a Reading Street walk-through checklist accompanied by 
limited explanation. Kendall said she initially thought the checklist was “daunting.” She stated that 
Cara told them it was a tool to help principals keep track of what they observed and to help them 
see the larger system at work. Kendall intended to use the checklist in that manner. Claire, 
Riverside’s principal, said it came across as “all about compliance.” The walk-through form listed 
every activity in Reading Street, “…and you just circle ‘Yes, I saw it,’ or, ‘No, I didn’t see it.’” Claire 
feared this form would be used to evaluate teacher performance. 

While Cara did not clarify her message, she made it clear she wanted principals to use the 
checklist. Since Kendall and Claire made sense of Cara’s message in different ways, they again 
moderated the message differently for their respective faculty. Claire openly expressed her 
frustration to her teachers and refused to use the checklist. In her interview, she explained: 

When I do a walk-through, it’s not about compliance. It’s about, ‘What feedback do 
you want? What feedback can I give?’... And how do you do that with the new 
evaluation? Because [the teachers] feel it is all about getting caught, and I’m trying to 
make sure it is not. But they are getting double messages when they get a walk-
through form like that.  

 
Kendall, however, decided to share the checklist with her teachers: 



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  15 

 
They kind of flipped out. So I promised them I would not use it until the second 
semester…I don’t want to write anybody up for not doing Reading Street. They are 
all doing it, and they are all trying their best.  
 

Kendall said she tried explaining it was just a tool for principals to help them see the building-wide 
MTSS system, “But the teachers didn’t hear that,” she stated. “What the teachers thought was that I 
was going to use that checklist to write their evaluations. And I wasn’t going to do that.” 

Cara intended to help principals see and manage an instructional system, but her partial 
sensegiving was overwhelmed by stronger messages about accountability and evaluations. She did 
not see or understand the dynamics at work amongst the system reform, their existing social systems 
of work, and broader accountability policies. Nor did she know how to fully convey her intentions 
of using the checklist to help actualize their K–12 MTSS system, and not to evaluate teachers. The 
situation left teachers and principals simultaneously fearful and resentful of Cara.  

Partial Sensegiving: Example 2. While attempting to realize a key principle of MTSS in 
her school, Kendall unintentionally gave the impression that she expected her teachers to do more 
work without additional support, further complicating their change efforts. During a staff meeting, a 
teacher raised a concern about the content of their Tier 2 supports. Recall that Tiers 2 and 3 provide 
additional supports to master a skill or concept above and beyond the main or core lesson that all 
students receive. This teacher pointed out that some Reading Street small group lessons did not 
target the skills students needed, as determined by diagnostic, benchmark assessments. Instead, the 
lessons retaught or expanded on skills and concepts introduced that week by Reading Street. The 
teacher argued that some students needed opportunities to master letters and sounds more than to 
master new content. Further, she argued using more targeted lessons was important for gathering 
data on what interventions teachers attempted in Tiers 2 and 3 before referring a student for 
comprehensive evaluation. If small group lessons did not teach the skills that benchmark 
assessments identified students needed, then Tier 2 efforts could not contribute to those data.  

The rest of the staff agreed in principle. However, most teachers said they did not have time 
to teach both small group and targeted lessons, as they barely fit the small group lessons into their 
curriculum. Further, they could not exclude the small group lessons in their manuals because this 
might violate the fidelity of the program, and thus go against their curriculum director’s directive, 
possibly affecting their evaluations.  

Kendall agreed with the teacher who raised the concern and encouraged everyone to find a 
way to teach targeted lessons, which could be found in Reading Street’s Response to Intervention 
(RtI) kit. She ended the conversation shortly afterwards, foreclosing an opportunity to discuss the 
issue further or to help her faculty brainstorm possible solutions. This gave teachers the sense that 
she required they figure out how to teach both small group and targeted lessons without additional 
support. One teacher exclaimed during her interview: 

 
And when is that going to happen? It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, I should be using that kit.’ 
Could you tell me, in my day, today, when I would have had time to do additional? I 
can’t even get through what I’ve got, and you’re telling me I have to do more? And 
individually with these students? I, here, that’s what, AAAAAAAAAA! I can’t do it! 
There’s only one of me… [laugh/crying] I’m trying. I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing 
wrong?’ I’m having more and more self-doubt. 
 

Teachers provided varied responses to what they perceived as a directive. Some eliminated or 
thinned out Tier 1 and small group lessons to accommodate the RtI kit. Others asked Title I 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 16 

 
teachers to cover RtI lessons instead of the My Sidewalks lessons they were supposed to cover. 
Some juggled all lessons, including the RtI kit, so that each lesson had equal opportunity to be cut or 
barely taught each week. The problem of responding to students’ needs in a timely manner—a key 
principle of the MTSS framework—was unevenly addressed. Moreover, Tier 1 instruction was 
weakened in some classrooms. 

Cara and Kendall’s partial sensegiving led their direct reports to misunderstand their 
intended messages. Instead, teachers heard their administrators make unreasonable demands that the 
teachers would be held accountable for. Cara and Kendall intended to provide guidance that would 
help administrators and teachers serve children within the MTSS framework. Unfortunately, their 
own wells of knowledge were not deep enough to help them send clear and complete messages 
about their guidance.  

Ambiguous Sensegiving 

When leaders send vague or contradicting messages, they unintentionally engage in ambiguous 
sensegiving. This is in contrast to partial sensegiving, where messages are clear but unfinished. With 
ambiguous sensegiving, others may openly question the content of the intended message and struggle 
to use the elusive guidance as a resource for their own sensemaking. In the two examples below, 
administrators sent confusing, mixed messages that left teachers struggling to understand what they 
meant and what the consequences were for instruction. The administrators did not know enough 
about (1) the MTSS frame and how Reading Street served that frame; (2) the dynamics between the 
reform and their existing social systems of work; and (3) how to guide others’ understandings.  

Ambiguous Sensegiving: Example 1. While Claire saw many strengths with Reading 
Street, she also saw problems. She had few opportunities to learn how the program could function 
as their school’s primary tool for tiered instruction. Instead, Claire saw Reading Street as a basic-
level reading program, which was in contrast to what she viewed as good instruction: “It feels like a 
step backwards to me, because it’s very basally.” Her understanding of Reading Street conflicted 
with her intentions of establishing MTSS, which she believed would support good instruction. 

Consequently, Claire’s guidance to her teachers was a mix of establishing a building-wide 
reading system and experimenting with which components of Reading Street to use or discard. At a 
staff meeting, she described Reading Street’s strengths, such as the K–5 scope and sequence that 
allowed teachers to collectively plan and analyze data. However, she also told teachers to view the 
first year of implementation as a pilot year. They would test the components of Reading Street and 
determine which proved useful enough to continue using for their students. Further, while she 
thought building-wide consistency was important, she asked teachers to only worry about 
consistency within their grade levels during the first year. She wanted each grade-level team to 
experiment with which components worked well for their students. This was in direct contrast to 
what Cara expected, and what Kendall mandated at Fairview. 

At other meetings, Claire asked teachers to have a healthy skepticism of the program. During 
an interview, she also said that she would send a memo to her staff stating they should examine 
Reading Street through the lens of authentic reading instruction and cut anything that got in the way 
of children reading real books. Consequently, when a teacher asked if they could cut the small group 
instruction from Reading Street, she said, “Of course,” without considering how that eliminated 
opportunities for Tier 2 instruction, a key principle of the MTSS frame.  

Some teachers were grateful for the flexibility: “She has given us permission this year to use 
what we can.” Other teachers were confused by her ambiguous messages. One teacher said:  



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  17 

 
I think [Claire] has been more—not forceful: “We're doing Reading Street. That's 
what you're doing” … End of discussion kind of thing. At the same time, out of the 
other side of her mouth, she'll say, ‘Well, yeah, but you have the freedom to do this.’ 
 

Claire’s mixed messages resulted in a variety of enactments of Reading Street, which made 
implementing MTSS increasingly difficult because teachers’ various methods complicated 
opportunities to collaborate across programming and grades. In fact, as the year progressed, more 
teachers began individually deciding how to modify Reading Street, which further complicated 
collaboration within and across grade levels and programming.  

Additionally, Title I and special education teachers had a difficult time providing students 
with Tiers 2 and 3 instruction through using My Sidewalks, because general education teachers no 
longer taught the corresponding weekly lessons in Reading Street. My Sidewalks was designed to 
align with Reading Street week by week. However, students pulled out during designated tiered 
instruction periods had different general education teachers. Title I and special education teachers 
could not cover multiple weeks of My Sidewalks lessons within one tiered session. To manage 
students’ needs, given the master calendar and general education teachers’ instructional choices, Title 
I and special education teachers operated separate instructional systems from general education 
teachers, which contradicts a key principle of MTSS.  

In her effort to create a coordinated instructional system, Claire unintentionally sent 
ambiguous messages that led to a lack of instructional coordination and coherence. Claire realized 
this by the end of the first year of implementation. However, she did not have the knowledge or 
experience to draw upon to reshape her messages and help redirect teachers’ instructional decision-
making, nor was she provided with sufficient professional development to help her manage the 
implementation of a novel system reform. Thus, the difficulties teachers faced with collaborating 
were not addressed, and reading instruction remained uncoordinated across Riverside classrooms 
throughout the second year of implementation.  

Ambiguous Sensegiving: Example 2. While trying to maintain district-wide instructional 
coordination, Charles, the superintendent, unintentionally gave the sense that teachers could deviate 
from Reading Street. He attended a Riverside staff meeting to discuss an unrelated topic and ended 
up participating in a discussion about how to use Reading Street. One teacher expressed that by 
using Reading Street as instructed by Pearson trainers and Cara, she was not providing high-quality 
reading instruction for her students. The following conversation ensued: 

Charles: We need fidelity. This isn't so that you don't have good teaching. You can 
still do project based learning. 
Teacher: No, we can’t. We’re not allowed. 
Charles: [Teacher], you know what good teaching is. I trust that you know what good 
teaching is. We need to follow the program with fidelity. It doesn't mean you can't 
still do project based learning. 
Teacher: Well, I'm getting evaluated. [Cara] can come in at whatever time she wants 
and she can write up that I'm not following the curriculum, and you could get rid of 
me. 
Charles: No, she can't. 

 
Technically, Claire confirmed later, Cara could dismiss this teacher for not following the district-
mandated curriculum. Thus, in this interaction, Charles both contradicted his curriculum director 
and delivered his own set of ambiguous messages about teaching Reading Street with fidelity and 
instructing a project based unit. As another teacher recalled: 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 18 

 
I think when [Teacher] was told that she could do her project-based unit, it was 
kinda like, ‘Alright, you're giving me permission, too?’ [She laughs] [Cara] was very 
clear. We teach Reading Street, Reading Street only. That will be the same thing she 
keeps saying. [Charles] is the one who said, ‘I have never said you cannot do best 
practice.’ ‘Well what does that mean [Charles]?’ ‘You know what that means because 
you know what best practice is.’ ‘Okay, [Charles], [laughs] are you overriding [Cara] 
or not?’ So it does have that little, ‘I'm not sure.’ 
 

Another teacher was concerned about how Charles’s ambiguous messages would be 
interpreted by other teachers, “You know, that's opening a Pandora's box. Now other people 
know that this is happening. And so, in their room, it makes me wonder, what are they not 
doing now? It's undermining everything.” 

Charles intended to help shape a coordinated instructional system by saying teachers could 
accomplish both best practices and fidelity to Reading Street. However, because he was not 
provided with opportunities to learn how to manage the implementation of a novel system reform, 
he did not fully understand the MTSS framework, the design of Reading Street, or what his district’s 
existing instructional system looked like. Thus, he unintentionally gave the sense that teachers could 
deviate from Reading Street in order to engage in best practices. In addition to sending ambiguous 
messages, he contradicted another central office leader who sent strong messages to teachers that 
they had to use Reading Street with fidelity. As a consequence, Riverside teachers began to use the 
components of Reading Street even more variably than before, including not using Reading Street at 
all. It became more difficult for grade level teams to coordinate their work, and even more difficult 
for Title I and special education teachers to coordinate with general education teachers. 

These four well-intentioned administrators did not have adequate opportunities to develop 
their wells of knowledge before they led the implementation of MTSS. Further, no knowledgeable 
expert was present to provide on-site learning opportunities or to help problem solve when issues 
arose. Instead, these administrators struggled independently for two years to construct a Multi-
Tiered System of Support, to manage their teachers’ learning opportunities, and to best serve their 
students. They deserved opportunities to (1) learn how Reading Street served the MTSS frame; (2) 
study the dynamics amongst the system reform, other policies, and their existing systems; and (3) 
consider how to shift their existing systems.  

Discussion 

Unlike the deliberate and strategic actions taken by leaders in the existing sensegiving 
literature, leaders can also give sense in unintended ways that produce large impacts on how others 
understand and respond to change efforts—what I have termed unintentional sensegiving. Unintentional 
sensegiving comes in multiple forms, and this study highlights three: 

 

 Passive: deferring to others, staying silent 

 Partial: providing partial information 

 Ambiguous: sending vague or inconsistent messages 
 

Research on sensegiving has not attended to the phenomenon of unintentional sensegiving and its 
consequences for organizational outcomes. However this study reveals the prevalence of 
unintentional sensegiving, highlights its nuance, and expands our understanding of sensegiving and 
organizational outcomes in general. In this study, administrators’ unintentional sensegiving, in 



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  19 

 
interaction with other messages, created variance in people’s cultural-cognitive understandings and 
enactments of a system reform, contributing to the uneven implementation of MTSS in their 
schools and district. While multiple actors always perform sensegiving, central office and school 
administrators’ sensegiving carries more weight because of their power over people’s employment. 
Thus, if we aim to help practitioners shift the deeply rooted cultural-cognitive understandings that 
guide their practice, we must pay attention to their leaders’ wells of knowledge. 

This study also deepens our understandings of system reform policies, both their complexity 
and the supports required to actualize them. I designed this study to allow me to observe 
participants in multiple settings throughout their social systems, spanning across organizational 
levels and boundaries. Because of this study design, I was able to reveal the following insights about 
system reform policies and implementation. System reforms pose particular challenges because of 
their complexity, the complexity of existing systems that they are integrated into, and the dynamics 
with the local policy context. Before administrators and other leaders attempt to guide a system 
reform, they deserve more opportunities to (1) become familiar with the details of the specific 
reform and system reforms in general; (2) carefully study their existing social system, including its 
local context, and consider what dynamics might be created when they implement the new reform; 
(3) explore how their existing systems could shift to match the design of the system reform; and (4) 
practice drawing on their wells of knowledge to help others shift their cultural-cognitive 
understandings about their instructional practice, such as how new curricular materials can help 
them actualize the system reform or how they can coordinate their practice with others in their 
social systems. Because the leaders in this study did not have enough systems knowledge to draw on, 
they were not prepared to lead wholly effective and successful systemic change and provide others 
with appropriate supports. In their well-intended attempts, they unintentionally gave sense in ways 
that resulted in varied and conflicting sensemaking across the district. These varied understandings 
complicated the construction of a Multi-Tiered System of Supports and even fractured existing 
instructional coordination. 

This study also adds to our knowledge of the social relationships amongst central office 
administrators, principals, and teachers by tracing how sensegiving and sensemaking form a social, 
communication network, and how this network shapes implementation. These social relationships 
are the connective pathways along which complex information and resources can travel. Due to my 
opportunities to interview and observe administrators and teachers across multiple settings during 
the first two years of implementation, I was privy to administrators’ honest thoughts, struggles, 
decision-making, and messaging; and the honest and stark commentary from both teachers and 
administrators as they experienced misinformation and confusion while attempting to actualize 
MTSS. I detail how administrators’ unintentional sensegiving traveled the social systems’ 
communication pathways and contributed to uneven understandings and enactments of a new 
system reform. 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 20 

 

Implications for Leadership Development 

 The findings contribute to our field’s evolving understandings of professional leadership 
development, both in preparation programs and in-service training. The richer and more frequent 
professional development we offer to leaders, the deeper their wells of knowledge. In other words, 
in addition to off-site and periodic trainings, leaders need ongoing and on-site opportunities to learn 
with each other that are embedded in their daily practice. Because productive sensegiving around 
system reforms relies on detailed knowledge of an existing system in an existing complex local 
context, leaders need opportunities to learn within their daily practice, with each other, and ideally 
with knowledgeable others. Off-site and periodic trainings, while useful for building theoretical 
knowledge of MTSS, were not enough to construct the practical knowledge and skills the 
administrators in this study needed to shift their particular social systems of work. Indeed, 
establishing a new instructional system requires learning how to coordinate or rearrange pieces of a 
particular current system that lives within a particular political and financial reality. This means 
learning while practicing. 

Interveners—such as external organizations, preparation programs, states, districts, or 
school sites themselves—can work with schools and districts to create social, ongoing, on-site, 
embedded-in-practice learning opportunities, including opportunities to learn about intentional and 
unintentional sensegiving, and to rehearse productive sensegiving. This would entail adding to the 
typical suite of professional development by taking administrators’ and teachers’ learning curriculum 
even further into practice than most implementation designs. In addition to developing formal 
structures within schools and districts to allow for such learning opportunities, it would entail 
working closely with partners to develop cultural-cognitive understandings and enactments of 
coordinated and continuously improving instruction. This might include working closely with a 
coach, a knowledgeable other more experienced with a particular system reform who could 
problem-solve with and model how to give sense in light of that district’s or school’s existing social 
system. Honig (2012) demonstrated how central office leaders engaged in such professional 
development with their principals to help build principals’ instructional leadership capacity. Central 
office leaders need and deserve the same sorts of learning opportunities. This type of professional 
development would be costly (Cohen & Ball, 1999), including additional expenses to address more 
of partners’ complex local contexts (e.g., districts’ assessment systems, competing policies) with little 
support and possibly pushback from these contexts (Cohen et al., 2014). However, delving deeper 
into daily practice could connect more links in the complex chain between policy and practice 
(Cohen & Hill, 2001). 

Implications for Policy and Practice 

Policy makers also have a role to play in supporting local leaders with implementing 
equitable system reforms, and, thus, could also develop their own wells of knowledge on sensegiving 
and system reforms. Similar to intentional sensegiving, unintentional sensegiving can have significant 
consequences for whether and to what degree any instructional improvement effort is achieved. 
Since sensegiving draws on wells of knowledge about particular subjects, novel reforms are more 
likely to produce unintentional sensegiving. Thus, before administrators and other leaders attempt to 
lead a system reform, they deserve more opportunities to deepen their wells of knowledge. Leaders 
also need to communicate the same message, which means they must have opportunities to learn 
together in order to develop shared knowledge. With knowledge of how they can intentionally and 
unintentionally shape others’ understandings and actions, leaders will be better equipped to send 
clear messages and provide effective guidance on how to shift instructional practice. Such 
knowledge is critical to help administrators and teachers make the cultural-cognitive shifts required 



Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  21 

 
to enact their new roles and responsibilities within a coordinated and coherent instructional system. 
Absent clear sensegiving, they will construct other understandings and continue moving forward 
with their work, using these other understandings to guide their actions, actions that are not likely to 
actualize the system reform policy. Moreover, teachers and administrators will experience confusion, 
frustration, even fear, and this will influence their students’ learning opportunities.  

Conclusion 

This paper extends the existing organizational studies literature on sensegiving by 
introducing the phenomenon of unintentional sensegiving, and demonstrating how unintentional 
sensegiving can undermine implementation efforts. Additionally, I classify three types—passive, 
partial, and ambiguous—which allows the nuances of unintentional sensegiving to be addressed 
during leadership professional learning opportunities. In this study, administrators’ unintentional 
sensegiving traveled along hierarchical, connective paths to create dissimilar cultural-cognitive 
understandings and enactments of MTSS. Leaders deserved but did not have rich opportunities to 
develop their wells of knowledge for systemic change. Thus, they struggled with helping others shift 
their cultural-cognitive understandings and practices towards a more coordinated and coherent 
instructional system.  

System reforms ask leaders, explicitly or implicitly, to change how they practice in major 
ways. Traditional understandings of administrative roles and responsibilities, including devolving 
responsibility for instruction to teachers, are no longer appropriate (Purkey & Smith, 1985; Smith & 
O'Day, 1991; Spillane, 2004). Administrators are tasked with working together across school, central 
office, and other organizational boundaries to construct and support coherent and continuously 
improving instructional systems. In other words, administrators are charged with changing their own 
and helping others change their cultural-cognitive understandings of how instruction is performed 
and managed. They must accomplish this task within politically and financially contentious 
circumstances. Further, because many schools and school systems are still designed to support 
traditional roles, administrators are likely constructing their new jobs within more traditionally 
organized social systems. Learning how to construct and lead a coherent instructional system 
requires learning (and possibly designing) a new job while trying to change the very social system of 
work that supports that job. Their work is only further challenged when they do not have the 
requisite knowledge they need to lead intentionally and effectively.  

The hope and promise of equitable, ambitious system reforms continues to generate 
enthusiasm amongst policy makers, reformers, researchers, and educators. However, equitable 
education cannot stem from reforms that are inequitably implemented, in this case due to 
insufficient professional learning opportunities for administrators and teachers, poor 
communication, and competing policies. This study elucidates some of the challenges local 
educators face and inadvertently create in fulfilling the promise. Teachers and administrators deserve 
more support in changing the very organizations that govern their work and their students’ learning 
opportunities. As we move forward, we must ensure that we are providing local educators with the 
support they deserve in their charge to equitably serve children. 

Acknowledgements  

I wish to thank the teachers and administrators who contributed their time to this study in the hopes 
that other educators could learn from their experiences. I also wish to thank Cynthia Coburn, David 
Cohen, Caitlin Farrell, Daniella Hall, Chris Harrison, Kelly McMahon, Carrie Sampson, Jim Spillane, 
and Kristin Whyte for their helpful feedback on this manuscript.  



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 22 

 

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Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes  25 

 

About the Author 

Lok-Sze Wong  
Northwestern University 
lok-sze.wong@northwestern.edu  
Lok-Sze Wong is a research associate at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern 
University. Dr. Wong’s scholarship is at the intersection of poverty, race, and schooling, specifically 
efforts to improve instruction and its management through system reforms. Dr. Wong earned her 
Ph.D. in Educational Policy and Leadership at the University of Michigan. 
 

 

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Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 27 No. 3 28 

 

 arquivos analíticos de políticas educativas 
conselho editorial 

Editor Consultor:  Gustavo E. Fischman (Arizona State University) 
Editoras Associadas: Kaizo Iwakami Beltrao, (Brazilian School of Public and Private Management - EBAPE/FGV, 

Brazil), Geovana Mendonça Lunardi Mendes (Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina), Gilberto José Miranda, 
(Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Brazil), Marcia Pletsch, Sandra Regina Sales (Universidade Federal Rural do 

Rio de Janeiro) 
 

Almerindo Afonso 

Universidade do Minho  

Portugal 

 

Alexandre Fernandez Vaz  

Universidade Federal de Santa 

Catarina, Brasil 

José Augusto Pacheco 

Universidade do Minho, Portugal 

Rosanna Maria Barros Sá  

Universidade do Algarve 

Portugal 

 

Regina Célia Linhares Hostins 

Universidade do Vale do Itajaí, 

 Brasil 

Jane Paiva 

Universidade do Estado do Rio de 

Janeiro, Brasil 

Maria Helena Bonilla  

Universidade Federal da Bahia  

Brasil 

 

Alfredo Macedo Gomes  

Universidade Federal de Pernambuco 

Brasil 

Paulo Alberto Santos Vieira  

Universidade do Estado de Mato 

Grosso, Brasil 

Rosa Maria Bueno Fischer  

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande 

do Sul, Brasil 

 

Jefferson Mainardes  

Universidade Estadual de Ponta 

Grossa, Brasil 

Fabiany de Cássia Tavares Silva 

Universidade Federal do Mato 

Grosso do Sul, Brasil 

Alice Casimiro Lopes  

Universidade do Estado do Rio de 

Janeiro, Brasil 

Jader Janer Moreira Lopes  

Universidade Federal Fluminense e 

Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, 

Brasil 

António Teodoro  

Universidade Lusófona 

Portugal 

Suzana Feldens Schwertner 

Centro Universitário Univates  

Brasil 

 

 Debora Nunes 

 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande 

do Norte, Brasil 

Lílian do Valle 

Universidade do Estado do Rio de 

Janeiro, Brasil 

Flávia Miller Naethe Motta 

Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de 

Janeiro, Brasil 

 

Alda Junqueira Marin 

 Pontifícia Universidade Católica de 

São Paulo, Brasil 

Alfredo Veiga-Neto 

 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande 

do Sul, Brasil 

 Dalila Andrade Oliveira 

Universidade Federal de Minas 

Gerais, Brasil