Mediating ambiguity: Principals’ sense-making and instructional leadership in curriculum reform enactment

Effective leadership by school principals is reported to involve shaping school cultures, fostering collaboration, allocating resources, and motivating teachers’ attitudes which results in (in-)directly impacting student learning. While the literature recommends a move toward collective and distributed processes of sense-making, the role of the school principal and their respective leadership practices in the context of curriculum reform is still largely underrepresented. Using an integrated framework of policy enactment, sense-making and instructional leadership, this article explores how school principals interpreted curriculum reform at lower secondary level in the Republic of Ireland and how these interpretations translated into leadership practices. This qualitative study, part of a larger national 4-year longitudinal study, interviewed 65 secondary school principals approximately a decade after implementation regarding their experiences of leading Junior Cycle reforms. Our findings reveal that in contested reform contexts, instructional leadership dimensions of programme management and climate-building functionally collapse into reciprocal practices shaped by principals’ diagnostic assessment of organisational readiness. Additionally, time operates as both a manageable resource and a healing mechanism through which resistance dissipates over time. We conclude that the principal's role as policy enabler requires antecedent relational work in creating cultural conditions through which collective sense-making and significant change can proceed.