Leadership practices of school principals in collaborative innovation 3 59 Actually, I am involved too much. When I am not here, the program meetings do not take place and that will be the end of the innovative processes in our school. I promised the teachers that I will pull them through (...) that is why I do this now. I do not feel like I can step back now. (SP6) These school principals seem to represent leadership practices that claim the innovation is an ‘Our’ process but is actually led by the school principal. Therefore, we distinguish two sub-patterns: Key players representing school principals who say: “I am leading our innovation”, and Team players representing school principals who consider themselves to be part of the team with the teachers, and consciously prioritise being present and sharing responsibility with their teachers. Table 3.4 presents descriptions of these two (sub)patterns. We described the leadership (sub)patterns based on two or more leadership practices. In the left column, each line is explained by a summary of the description’s meaning. 3.4.2.2. Leadership pattern ‘Their’ The second leadership pattern is characterized by school principals showing less involved leadership practices (see Table 3.3). These school principals identify teachers and internal school coaches (i.e., trained teachers) to be responsible for the implementation of the methodology of the program. Furthermore, they are more distant from the innovation process. Therefore, we labelled this as the leadership pattern ‘Their’. Because we found no clear sub-patterns within the Their-pattern, we refer to school principals with this leadership pattern as Facilitators (see Table 3.4). These Facilitator school principals evaluated their practices mostly as too uninvolved. Most school principals attributed this to a lack of time. Only two school principals mentioned that they sometimes choose to be more distant to enable teachers to share responsibility for the program’s execution. All Facilitator school principals mentioned that they see their main task in collaborative innovation as facilitating the teachers to work with the program.
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