62 instructional program’ is less apparent in the leadership practices identified in the current study. A possible explanation for this might be that Leithwood et al. (2020) focused on leadership practices related to student achievement, while the program of this study and the role of the school principal is primarily aimed at collaborative innovation and thus enhancing collaboration and shared responsibility and student achievement is a possible indirect outcome. The leadership practices Facilitation, Role Model, and Connect correspond to subcategories mentioned by Leithwood et al. (2020). Interestingly, our leadership practices Student focus and Transparency, were not distinguished yet in earlier studies. Both practices are relevant in the specific context of collaborative innovation in schools and show different ways in which school principals can relate to teachers, other school staff, and students. All in all, we see that even in a small sample of school principals a wide variety of leadership practices were found. 3.5.2. Leadership patterns in collaborative innovation In an attempt to explain the variety in leadership practices between school principals, we described three leadership patterns. The ‘our’ leadership pattern refers to school principals who participate in the innovation process and was divided into two sub-patterns: Team player and Key player. Firstly, Team player school principals enact leadership practices to promote innovation becoming the joint process of teachers and school principals. This pattern shows similarities with patterns described by Torfing (2019) and Eckert (2019), who also described school principals supporting collaboration and shared responsibility. We choose not to use their label of ‘catalytic’ leadership for our sub-pattern, as we did not study its effect on innovation outcomes (e.g., whether the school principals accelerate the process), but describe leadership practices in collaborative innovation. Secondly, Key player school principals reported leadership practices in which innovation is seen as a collaborative process of teachers and school principals that is directed by school principals. Even though previous literature (e.g., Soini et al., 2016; Torfing, 2019) suggested that school principals should be actively involved in collaborative innovation, these school principals seem too deeply involved (by their own evaluation). These school principals mention they have a strong tendency to take ownership of the process, since they do not believe, or trust that teachers will work on innovation productively without their interference. This finding is in line with a previous study, which also found that school principals still tend to play a major role in complex school processes (Zwart et al., 2018). The school principals in the ‘their’ leadership pattern, were labelled Facilitators, which refers to school principals who partake less in the innovation process. They leave the collaborative innovation to the teachers, although they exert control ‘from a distance’
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