10 Questions arise for schools, scholars, and policy makers on how to organize and lead more collaborative forms of innovating education (e.g., Vanlommel, 2021). Secondary school teachers who were interviewed for the research presented in this dissertation, for instance, noted: “We wanted to improve our lessons and education but how to do that was unknown to us. We had conversations with each other but didn’t really get anywhere”. A school principal mentioned: “I noticed there was room to improve our education, but I did not want the change to be dependent on my formal role”. These quotes illustrate that many Dutch teachers and school principals together search how to improve their education and how to lead these innovation processes. All schools that we studied chose to work with a two-year program of Foundation leerKRACHT, implemented by schools locally.3 This independent foundation aims to structure collaboration in schools to improve education.4 It stimulates school principals to be involved in innovation processes and to share responsibility for the success of the innovation with teachers. Furthermore, it stimulates teachers to collaborate and take the professional space provided by their school principals to innovate education. 1.1.3. Leading collaborative innovation In both educational practice and literature, the focus is still mainly on teacher collaboration, such as in professional learning communities and data teams (Admiraal et al., 2021; Hargreaves & O’Connor, 2017; Schildkamp et al., 2016). In organizational literature, however, scholars try to go beyond this. They have introduced the notion of collaborative innovation. Collaborative innovation is characterized by a multi-actor approach to innovation. A specific feature of this notion is that it involves both horizontal and vertical working relations (Bekkers & Noordegraaf, 2016; Sørensen & Torfing, 2018). Horizontal relations refer to working relations between persons and organizations at the same hierarchical level. In this dissertation we study relations between teachers. Vertical relations pertain to working relations that cut across different organizational levels, functions, and hierarchies (Torfing, 2019). In this dissertation we study relations between teachers and school principals. These horizontal and vertical working relations in schools need to be led (Angelle, 2010; Bason, 2010; Ospina, 2017). There is growing public and scholarly awareness of the importance of leadership and leading innovation processes in schools (AVS 3 leerKRACHT means “Learning force” and also “Teacher” in Dutch (usually referring to teachers in primary schools). 4 https://stichting-leerkracht.nl/.
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