This study sought to shed light on teachers’ thinking as they implemented an educational intervention. Specifically, this study looked at teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about teaching and learning, their interpretations of a policy’s attributes, and how those views impacted implementation quality. The findings from this study describe how factors related to the implementation of a program interact with teachers’ knowledge and philosophies of teaching. This interaction was shown to be related to the success of implementation in these schools. Based on its findings, this study recommends that further investigation into the role of teacher sense-making and its impact on implementation using the framework proposed in this paper. Further efforts should be made to improve the survey for this purpose. The effectiveness of a program is mediated by the quality of implementation, which this research shows is related to perceptions of a program. As schools grapple with implementing programs, principals and other leaders of implementation should pay close attention the factors related to implementation that are described in this paper.