Leadership practices of school principals in collaborative innovation 3 55 45). Our data analysis involved three rounds that will be further explained below: Open, axial and selective coding. 3.3.4.1. Open and axial coding to study leadership practices The first author read all interviews for open coding, using N-Vivo Pro 12. To include the context of the answer, the unit of analysis was the whole interview question together with the answer of the school principal. Data were coded on whether the units were about leadership practices or not, based on Chreim’s (2014) definition of leadership practices. Interview units that were not about leadership practices were mainly covering themes like expectations of the innovation and school background information. The first and second author coded two not yet coded interviews and reached consensus with sufficient reliability (Cohen’s Kappa .64) on the main code leadership practices. Then axial coding was applied (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to inductively identify leadership practices, resulting in a coding scheme. Multiple codes could be scored on one unit. The first and second author had three rounds of peer debriefing and formulated indicators of each code. Afterwards, no new codes were needed to code the interviews. The reliability of this coding round was good (Cohen’s Kappa .81). Table 3.2 depicts the coding scheme. 3.3.4.2. Selective coding to study the how of leadership practices To explore how school principals enact their leadership practices, selective coding was entailed by rereading the leadership practices, found in the open and axial rounds of coding. By doing this, we aimed to identify meaningful differences between school principals’ leadership practices. The differences we found concerned school principals’ involvement in collaborative innovation processes in their schools. Indicators that helped us to discover leadership practices of more involved school principals were words such as: ‘Us’, ‘we’, ‘together’, ‘collectively’, ‘our process’ and verbs like: ‘Being present’, ‘being up to date’, ‘asking questions’, ‘advising’, ‘listening’, ‘cooperating’, ‘thinking along’, ‘coaching’, ‘showing vulnerability’, ‘providing professional space’, indicating the involvement in leadership practices. Less involved leadership practices were indicated by words such as: ‘Teachers among each other’, ‘their process’, ‘they’, and verbs like: ‘Hearing’, ‘steering’, ‘letting go’, ‘being at a distance’, ‘controlling’, ‘working commercially’, ‘focussing on management’. We also scored the explanations school principals gave about why they acted a certain way and whether they acted consciously.
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