Conclusion, Contributions, and Suggestions 6 139 innovation, and possible tensions, we suggest professional development programs to help teachers explore their own expertise and that of their colleagues. Furthermore, we advise letting teachers practice building trust in colleagues’ decision-making skills. Teachers might learn to let go: they do not need to have a say in everything. Thirdly, the change to more distributed leadership calls for other roles and behaviors among teachers and school principals. The question arises whether all team members need to be excellent in all aspects or whether rather team expertise is called for. Teams can include members with diverse backgrounds and different forms of expertise to be able to enact leadership in varying situations (Bijlsma & Keyser, 2021; Engeström, 2018; Torfing, 2019). Team competencies have received attention for some time in vocational education (Van Vlokhoven &Aalsema, 2021) and recently in primary and secondary education (Ketelaar et al., 2020; Van Tartwijk, 2022). Our findings indicate that it is important to discuss further the relevance of team expertise in schools and policy for leading collaborative innovation. 6.4. Final remarks History shows that educational innovations, in particular at the national level, are often unsuccessful. One important reason for this is that teachers and school principals are often not asked to be or do not feel to be involved in deciding on the content or implementation of nation-wide innovations. There seems to be little governmental attention to change processes in schools, while this dissertation highlights the involvement of teachers and school principals in making innovations happen. We show that teachers and school principals can take joint responsibility in leading collaborative innovation. A collaborative spirit supports this joint process of distributed leadership in collaborative innovation. Such a spirit implies that teachers and school principals go beyond their formal roles or perceptions of leaders when they interact and are intrinsically motivated to discuss and try schoolwide education improvements jointly. Teachers thus need to be given the professional space to lead beyond their role in the classroom. School principals need to be involved in collaborative innovation processes. They need to provide teachers with professional space and steer on the strategy, frameworks, boundaries, and vision. This, in turn, means that policy makers and school board members must realize that educational change takes place within schools, within day-to-day contexts, full of interactions and conversations. Thus, balancing between steering on the one hand and providing professional space to school principals and teachers on the other hand is also useful for policy makers and school board members. Leading collaborative innovations in schools calls for innovative collaborative leadership practices.
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