Conclusion, Contributions, and Suggestions 6 125 teams, there were teachers with a more central role than others and thus their network had an uneven distribution of leadership. Teachers with a more central role were more often asked for advice and thus performed a leadership role. Irrespective of the degree of distributed leadership, teachers were most often central members in the networks, followed by coach-teachers. We studied how degrees of distributed leadership related to school teams’ sociocultural context in Chapter 5. 6.1.2.4. Sociocultural contexts of distributed leadership: Collaborative spirit In Chapter 5 we addressed the research question: How can differences in distributed leadership between collaborative innovation-oriented teacher teams be understood from multiple sociocultural context levels? We studied the sociocultural contexts of these teacher teams, with lower and higher degrees of distributed leadership as found in Chapter 4. Questionnaires and interviews were conducted in 14 teacher teams. We found that teams with higher degrees of distributed leadership have school principals with a Team player leadership pattern (Chapter 3), experience no threshold when it comes to asking advice of another, have an intrinsic motivation for collaborative innovation, and have conversations about improving education beyond the scope of their own classroom. We described these teams with higher degrees of distributed leadership as having a stronger collaborative spirit to improve education compared to school teams with lower degrees of distributed leadership. Lastly, we did not find a link between the degree of distributed leadership and teaching experience, personal contact, team size and team gender composition, intensity of working together on lesson practice, and educational sector. 6.1.3. Answering the main research question Based on the four empirical studies, we discern three overarching themes. By addressing these themes below, we start answering our main research question: How do school principals and teachers lead collaborative innovation in schools? 6.1.3.1. School principals’ role in leading collaborative innovation Firstly, we found that school principals search for a balance in steering frameworks and providing professional space to teachers. In interviews, they mentioned that starting to work with leerKRACHT created a new situation in which they had to search for their role again (Chapter 3). This search resulted in various patterns of school principals’ leadership: how school principals enact leadership practices differs. We identified three
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw