Sherry Ganon Shilon

Implementing a curriculum reform for personalized learning calls for school leaders’ role as boundary spanners in meeting outside expectations and inside activities. This qualitative study examines school principals’ bridging and buffering strategies for personalized learning within a national curriculum reform implementation via a shared sense-mak...

School principals are located at the interface between competing demands by a wide spectrum of stakeholders leading to tensions and ambiguities in their role. Understanding principals’ role tensions within organizational and occupational professionalism during Covid-19 crisis is of considerable importance for improving the capacity of school leader...

Success of curriculum reforms calls for both collaborative learning and unlearning processes. Focusing on the latter, school doubting process, an innovative term, is used in this paper as an active framework for organisational unlearning through which educators question their existing mind-sets and unfreeze old approaches to teaching and learning....

COVID-19 requires educational leaders to collectively make sense of their inclusive practices. This qualitative study explores how COVID-19 crisis shaped Israeli superintendents’ and principals’ role in fostering school sense-making processes during a reform based on Amendment No. 11 to the Special Education Law. Data were collected with 22 Jewish...

Purpose The study explores characteristics of strong school cultures through principals' exploitation of additional resources within implementation of a national reform. Design/methodology/approach An interpretive approach was utilized to analyze qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 35 Israeli high school principals who implemente...

Purpose This conceptual paper explores a novel model explaining teachers' perceptions of their effective leader through the lens of implicit leadership theory (ILT), using the concepts of school principals' sense-making and cognitive complexity (CC). Design/methodology/approach The sense-making framework and CC theory were used to explain ILT, whi...

This qualitative study explores school principals’ perceptions and enactments of shared sense-making processes during a generally-outlined pedagogical reform, i.e. a broad-policy reform allowing educators to exercise their discretion in meeting its pedagogical goals, aiming to inquire what makes such processes critical to schools’ collective effica...

Through a sense-making lens, this qualitative study explores high school principals’ considerations while they perceive and enact additional resources within a national reform implementation. Principals’ allocation of resources, especially as part of a national reform, is a complex matter for schools’ effectiveness in an era of accountability. This...

This qualitative study explores how 60 Israeli high school principals vary in their perceptions and enactments of shared sense-making processes while engaging in strategic activities to gain teachers’ support during a national reform implementation. Data analysis has yielded three major themes: (a) a common language; (b) a collaborative learning pr...

Educational reform implementation in today’s fast changing world requires a critical transition from individual to school sense-making processes. Managing expectations from above (e.g. external demands) and below (e.g. internal school goals) while performing within multiple overlapping contexts, principals seem pulled in many different directions s...

In the face of the dynamic tension between internal goals and external reform demands, school principals’ role has become increasingly more complex and their sense-making more crucial. Yet, research has paid little attention to the significant role principals perform as sense makers in local reform implementation processes. This study explores high...

Principals’ implementation of national reforms in the educational arena resembles a wild ride on a roller coaster as they face with contradicting demands, ongoing confusion and ambiguity. As critical change agents, principals interpret and translate reform demands into local practices through a process of sense-making. This current qualitative rese...

During reforms, principals often experience ambiguity, contradicting demands, and lack of information. As critical change agents and system players, principals interpret reform demands and translate them into school practices through a process of sense-making. The current qualitative research explored 59 elementary school principals’ sense-making o...

Effective education reform depends on its successful realization by the school leadership carrying out the reform. School principals and middle leaders in the 21st century re-examine their traditional role so as to understand complexities and ambiguities characterizing their various responsibilities within the context of school reform. As critical...

Purpose – The ongoing challenge to sustain educational reforms requires a learning process through which doubt is induced as a means of fostering productive school change. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of doubt as well as the doubting process and its importance to the school community, particularly with regard to educational...

Purpose – In light of limited sustainability of past collaborative‐learning‐centered initiatives over time, the purpose of this paper is to explore the determinants considered by both teachers and principals to influence the sustainability of a collective‐learning‐from‐success (CLS) initiative in 12 urban elementary schools. Design/methodology/app...