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Since the Florida State Department of Education promoted lesson study as a stateside teacher professional development model using the Race to the Top funding, school districts across the state have taken various approaches to promote lesson study. However, we do not know yet how district leaders made sense of this new model of teacher professional development and promoted it districtwide. Interviews with district leaders from 17 districts were conducted from 2013 to 2015 to examine how they made sense of the state mandate on lesson study and developed district policies and approaches to promote lesson study. The interviews revealed that district leaders commonly identified the importance of teacher buy-in, but they differed in how they sought teacher buy-in to promote lesson study. "Bottom-up" districts generated teacher buy-in by promoting autonomy and ownership of lesson study process, while "top-down" districts kept many of the decisions at the district level as an attempt to generate school principals' buy-in and maintain lesson study fidelity.