The rhetoric of top-down decisions continues to raise questions about practitioners’ realities. During covid 19, many educational systems adopted context-driven policies. Morocco implemented an alternation-based education which is a marriage between self-directed learning (SDL) and classical education. Self-directed learning policy focused on increasing off-school learning time to alleviate the repercussions of health crisis dissonance. The paper analyzed data to explain practitioners’ readiness across the scales of Moroccan educational language policy at three levels. At a higher scale, the study used a structural-historical approach to code themes about self-directed learning in policy texts. At an intermediary level, we administered five semi-structured interviews with ELT inspectors. At a lower scale, the study designed a participatory action research with five English language teachers to observe policy in action and piloted a study to validate research instruments. Data-driven results show that top-down decisions neglect teachers’ key concerns about inadequate policies, the absence of efficient training, and limited pedagogical support. Until these concerns are addressed, practitioners’ interpretations of central policies remain ambivalent.