Teachers making sense of result-oriented teams: A cognitive anthropological approach to educational change

Studies on educational change efforts abound but generally limit themselves to post hoc explanations of failure and success. Such explanations are rarely turned into attempts at providing models for predicting change outcomes. The present study tries to develop such a model based on the teachers’ impact analysis of a management-driven intervention, introducing new public management principles at a Dutch school for vocational education and training. The study uses a mixed method approach, the quantitative part of which encompasses the accomplishment of a cultural domain analysis. It appears that in this case the new public management ideology of result-oriented teacher teams contradicts substantial aspects of the existing teachers’ meaning system, and fails to meet not yet satisfied needs within the current meaning system. As a consequence, the relevance of a substantial number of the cognitions that constitute result-oriented teacher teams appears to be limited. The authors discuss the consequences for the chance to successfully change the teachers’ meaning system and draw conclusions that suggest a set of more general building blocks for assessing change policy plans and practices in educational settings.