20 can help school principals and teachers to reflect on how they lead their educational innovations and inspire them to approach innovation processes collaboratively. Furthermore, insights into how distributed leadership practices are related to their sociocultural contexts might help school principals and teachers to be aware of context and to take contextual factors into account. Teacher and school principal professional development programs can help teachers and school principals learn how to enact leadership in relation to the context and how to distribute leadership on a day-to-day basis. 1.6. Overview of chapters In order to answer our main research question, this dissertation presents four empirical studies, each contained within its own chapter. The data were gathered in two cohorts of schools, the first form September 2017 to June 2019, the second from September 2018 to June 2020. We describe hereafter the focus and method of each study. In the first paper (sub-question 1; see Chapter 2), we describe a study on teachers’ perspectives on what plays a role in horizontal and vertical working relations for collaborative innovation. We answer the following research question: How do horizontal and vertical working relations in school affect collaborative innovation practices? We use a mixed-methods design, including a questionnaire on horizontal and vertical working relations (n = 1,200 teachers from 124 schools) and on collaborative innovation practices (n = 2,036 teachers from 157 schools), as well as group interviews with 53 teachers from 20 schools. The two questionnaires are part of the program and thus developed by the Foundation leerKRACHT. In the second paper (sub-question 2; see Chapter 3), we describe a study in which we dive deeper into leadership practices of school principals in collaborative innovation. We answer the following research question: How do school principals enact leadership practices in leading collaborative innovation? We conduct interviews with 22 school principals (of 22 schools) about their leadership. Since studying the role of formal leaders only does not fit with the approach of collaborative innovation, we use a social network perspective to describe and measure distributed leadership in our third paper (sub-question 3; see Chapter 4). We answer the following research question: How can distributed leadership in school teams be described and measured by applying a social network perspective? We conduct a social network questionnaire within 14 school teams, including 118 teachers and 12 school principals.
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