136 6.3. Suggestions Based on the findings of this dissertation, various suggestions can be made for future research and for schools. 6.3.1. Suggestions for future research Firstly, we suggest future research on collaborative innovation in schools to broaden the scope of horizontal and vertical working relations. This might help to understand even better how to enhance collaborative innovation. Regarding horizontal relations, we suggest studying how school principals from various schools can innovate their educational and leadership practices collaboratively. Horizontal relations between school principals are rarely studied, as mentioned by Honig and Rainey (2020), while there is an opportunity for them to learn from each other. Regarding broadening analyses of vertical working relations, we suggest including school board members (district leaders in US research). While they are part of the education system, their roles in relation to school principals are rarely studied (e.g., Honig & Rainey, 2020; Hooge & Honingh, 2014; Hooge et al., 2019). Honig and Rainey (2020) argue that school board members’ roles are changing in managing operational matters to helping school principals become more effective leaders. In the Netherlands, we see this changing role in the latest development of the new Inspectorate of Education examination framework. The inspectorate encourages school board members to be more involved in their schools’ quality (de Graaff, 2022; Inspectie van het onderwijs, 2022). Future research could delve into how school board members can support school principals and their professional development. Secondly, our studies were quite explorative and provided insights into the leadership practices of school principals and teachers and the relevance of a collaborative spirit. The collaborative spirit seems especially promising for leading collaborative innovation in schools with distributed leadership. However, future research is needed to examine further how a collaborative spirit arises or is created in school teams and how it develops over time. We interpreted a collaborative spirit within teams based on several sources of data. We suggest that future research interviews teachers and school principals about the team spirit and how they would describe it. Furthermore, future research could study schools that do not work with leerKRACHT or other public/societal organizations to examine which elements of the collaborative spirit are found and how these elements relate to each other. Thirdly, we found that coach-teachers lead collaborative innovation by, for instance, structuring meetings and motivating teachers to collaborate. Future research could study the concrete ways in which these roles are performed and how they might change over time. We expect that roles are subject to change when leerKRACHT becomes more programmed in schools’ culture. Furthermore, the tensions that seem to arise between
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