375 Stewart > English Teachers, Administrators, and Dialogue English Education , July 2012 Trevor Thomas Stewart English Teachers, Administrators, and Dialogue: Transcending the Asymmetry of Power in the Discourse of Educational Policy Extending the Conversation T he frustration in Sasha’s (all participants’ names are pseudonyms) voice was palpable as she told me the story of a drama unit she had put together for her ninth-grade students several years ago. Sasha is a creative, hard-working high school teacher from the southeastern United States who often spoke of her belief in the importance of making students active participants in learning. Sasha’s desire to make the classroom an engaging place for her students is at odds with many of the policy mandates she has received from the administration in her school system. The story she shared with me provides a compelling example of the problems that arise when teachers receive policy mandates that seek to prohibit them from engaging in transactions with policy documents. In this article, I present six English teachers’ perceptions of the dia- logue used by principals and superintendents to communicate policy man- dates in their schools. I wanted to learn about the ways in which the discourse employed by these two kinds of policymakers influenced English teachers’ experiences as professionals and how these policies and the language used “All this work I did. And at the end, mind you, I did not have a single student fail the End-of-Course-Test. Special needs and ELLs [English Language Learners] included, all of them. But the fact that my lesson plans did not coordinate with the pacing guide, they were writing me up and putting something in my file, whatever that means.” —Sasha Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.