Leadership for Learning as an intentional, community-wide activity: the importance of developing a shared language in schools

Shared Sense-Making Processes Within a National Reform Implementation: Principals' Voices

“…In this context, sense-making is a collective process that takes place in social interaction and negotiation by tools such as the use of language (Coburn, 2005). Developing a shared language is essential to school effectiveness since, being epistemic, it is rhetoric that determines our worldviews and consequently our practices (Marsh, Waniganayake, & De Nobile, 2013). Because reform implementation is an ongoing process, which entails the translation of new ideas into school practices, principals engaged in gatekeeping strategies while interpreting external demands as an opportunity to develop a common pedagogical language (Allen & Penuel, 2015;Matsummura & Wang, 2014).…”