Middle tier sensemaking of foundational learning reforms

• In Event: Reimagining the middle tier part I: Activating potential for implementing and scaling education innovations - Investigating roles and structures

Proposal

In response to global concerns about a learning crisis, several LMICs have initiated learning reforms to improve children’s foundational learning. These commonly include scaling up evidence-based interventions, building system-wide coherence, and strengthening data-driven decision making. Middle tier actors, such as regional- or district-level bureaucrats, are often the key change agents of these reforms. These actors have been increasingly assigned instructional support responsibilities, wherein they are tasked with communicating guidelines, supporting program implementation, and monitoring progress. As such, the delivery and effectiveness of foundational learning reforms hinges significantly on them.

Existing studies point to a range of challenges, complexities, and constraints in relation to these actors. For instance, studies have shown that the work of subnational bureaucrats is shaped by rule-driven and apathetic bureaucratic cultures that inhibit a focus on improving learning. Others have illustrated the tensions and misalignments between the bureaucratic expectations that these actors navigate. In essence, scholarship on the middle-tier in LMICs has mainly focused on how management practices, institutional norms, and dispositions affect policy delivery.

However, a cognitive lens to policy implementation provides a new dimension to understand how these actors work. It posits that reform effectiveness is also a function of how individuals interpret or misinterpret policy expectations. Using this lens, this paper examines: How do middle-tier actors in India interpret and implement foundational learning reforms? The study was conducted during 2022-2025 in two states, following the launch of a large-scale FLN policy initiative in the country. The qualitative data includes semi-structured interviews with 34 middle-tier actors and ethnographic observations of the actors’ offices, daily tasks, and professional interactions.

Informed by Spillane et al. 's (2002) cognitive framework, middle-tier actors’ sensemaking of foundational learning reforms was found to be significantly influenced by three aspects: their individual beliefs and knowledge about teaching and learning, their situated positions within larger institutions and social networks, and their engagement with concrete policy signals and messages. These three dimensions informed actors’ understanding of what the reforms are about and what they are expected to do. This in turn shaped how they selectively prioritize policy components and contextualize them. For instance, actors tended to focus on superficial classroom changes and simplify complex pedagogical changes in terms of their own visions for teaching and learning. They often converted their instructional support responsibilities into monitoring reductive and discrete outcomes, which changed the policy’s expected and actual implementation.

These findings present implications for both research and practice in LMICs. The paper emphasizes that, beyond structural reforms in bureaucratic practices and dispositions, it is equally crucial to support middle-tier actors’ sensemaking of a policy’s content, goals, and expectations. In other words, the paper argues against top-down implementation models and behavioral approaches in relation to the middle-tier. Instead, empowering them as change agents for learning reforms will require enhancing and refining their knowledge of teaching and learning as well.

Author

• Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University