Teacher communities are crucial sites of curriculum making. Reforms flow to schools through macro and meso sites of curriculum making and teachers are in key role of translating new ideas into practice by reconstructing their professional thinking, both as individuals and as a community. Moreover, in participatory reforms where the aim is to build capacity of the whole system, the curriculum making should be understood as a two-way interaction, shaping and shaped by the educational reality (Mølstad, 2015). This requires curriculum making strategies that allow teachers to partake in active, transformative learning and sense making in curriculum making sites to build ownership, coherence, and agency with respect to the development work (Pyhältö et al. 2018; Priestley et al. 2012). The data was collected with the Curriculum Reform Inventory (Tikkanen et al. 2017) designed to measure an interactive and dynamic process of through which individuals and teacher communities construct the new knowledge and meaning of the curriculum reform (Sullanmaa et al. 2019). The two-level path modelling was utilized for analysing clustered data including the 75 schools and 1556 individual teachers from these schools during the most recent (2016) Finnish core curriculum reform. The results showed that to the significant extent, the adopted curriculum making strategy balanced rather well between providing scaffolds and instructions and allowing dialog. Accordingly, teachers perceived that the change management was adequately realized and the knowledge sharing including enhancing participation and transformative dialogue was sufficiently enabled in the curriculum making. Further, the strategy including balancing the steering and transformative dialogue seemed to be crucial both for promoting the individual teachers’ and professional communities’ capacity to process the big ideas of the new core curriculum. Moreover, it promoted perceived curriculum coherence and further impact on school development. However, the results indicated that the schools differed in terms of their capacity to maintain the balance between the steering and dialogue in the curriculum work. In other words, school level sites of curriculum making seem to offer different opportunities for participation and transformative learning of both teacher communities and individual teachers. This may lead to increasing differences in terms of professional learning and agency and, consequently in student learning. In larger scale it also challenges the participatory reform when part of teachers and teacher communities are not able to partake in the process and build capacity in terms of curriculum.

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