132 6.2.2. Leading collaborative innovation with distributed leadership practices Both teachers and school principals experience that they lead collaborative innovation together, although this differs from school to school – we found different degrees of distributed leadership in schools. Studying leadership in networks helped us to gain insights into the roles of teachers and school principals in leading collaborative innovation. The role of school principals was discussed in the previous section. Consequently, we discuss here the role of teachers in leading collaborative innovation. Both regular teachers and coach-teachers – teachers with a formal leadership role in the program aimed at collaborative innovation – can play a central role in leading collaborative innovation. Teachers experienced that coach-teachers are needed to prepare and provide structure in collaboration sessions and to connect teachers and school principals in collaborative innovation. These coach-teachers are close to teacher leaders (e.g., Schott et al., 2020; Struyve et al., 2018). Teacher leaders have become a topic of interest in international educational research and policy. They can be either formal or informal leaders and situated at the school-level or grade-level (Struyve et al., 2018). They help translate “principles of school improvement into the practices of individual classrooms” (Day & Harris, 2003, p. 973). The leadership practices of coach-teachers that we found can be related to the findings of a large interview study on teacher-led school improvement (Nguyen & Hunter, 2018) that also found that teacher leaders prepared sessions and played a connecting role between teachers and school principals. Furthermore, Nguyen and Hunter (2018) found that tensions arose between teachers and teacher leaders when teachers transitioned into teacher leadership roles. The first source of tension was that teacher leaders felt they had to avoid conflict and maintain trust and good social ties with their colleagues for teacher acceptance. The second tension concerned the perception that teacher leaders were losing part of their identity as teachers and becoming somewhat like administrators. Although we did not systematically study this, in our interviews some coach-teachers told they also experience tensions. These coach-teachers mentioned, for instance, that they find it difficult to guide and direct their colleagues. They do not want to confront colleagues but they sometimes had to. For instance when teachers were not attending meetings. This tension indicates that leading collaborative innovation together is not a matter simply of combining horizontal and vertical working relations. We would suggest further study on how the tensions between teachers and coachteachers and between coach-teachers and school principals can be reduced. 6.2.3. Collaborative spirit in leading collaborative innovation A collaborative spirit supports team members to distribute leadership in collaborative innovation. We see a collaborative spirit in teams that show three specific elements: Team
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