Leadership practices of school principals in collaborative innovation 3 53 This further increases school principals’ responsibilities since they are responsible for attracting new students. In this paper, we study school principals in primary, secondary, and vocational educational sectors. 3.3.2. Sample 3.3.2.1. School program aimed at collaborative innovation In the current paper, leadership practices were studied in the context of a program that aims to stimulate collaborative innovation between teachers and school principals. The program uses a methodology that is partly based on Agile principles, meaning a team-based approach to improving processes step by step. The methodology consists of weekly stand-up meetings, sprints, and retrospectives, amongst other things (see Rigby et al., 2016) and consists of two phases. Firstly, an intensive implementation phase during one school year. External advisors of the program help schools to learn the methodology. The expected outcomes of this phase are enhancement of collaboration and shared responsibility. Secondly, a phase towards independence and sustainability of the collaborative innovation processes in school. The period of this second phase is school-dependent. An independent foundation initiated the program in response to the international study of the OECD (2016), which highlighted that the educational quality of Dutch schools is more than sufficient but could be further improved by enhancement of collaboration within schools. So far, approximately 900 Dutch primary, secondary, and vocational education schools have implemented the methodology of this program. 3.3.2.2. Participants Each school year, around 120 new primary, secondary, and vocational education schools choose to implement the methodology of this program. We randomly selected schools that started working with the program in September 2017 and 2018. The school principals received a short explanation about the investment required and the benefits of participating in the study. This resulted in 11 schools participating in our study in September 2017 and 11 schools in September 2018. In Table 3.1, we provide an overview of our sample of 22 school principals. Two school principals of secondary schools and all vocational education school principals were responsible for a department of a larger school, the other school principals were responsible for the whole school. The schools were well-spread throughout the Netherlands and were all in the implementation year (Sørensen & Torfing, 2016). In this year, schools learn how to apply and work with the methodology.
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