Leadership practices of school principals in collaborative innovation 3 65 3.6. Conclusion All in all, the finding that both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ leadership practices are necessary (Meirink et al., 2010; Hill et al., 2014; Soini et al., 2016) needs more nuance in an educational context in which collaborative innovation is implemented (Torfing, 2019): Distributed leadership (Thien & Chan, 2020), teacher agency (Pantić, 2015), and participative decision making (Thoonen et al., 2011) all play an important role. Based on our qualitative results, we confirmed several well-known leadership practices reported in educational leadership literature (Fullan, 2016; Draaisma et al., 2018; Leithwood et al., 2020) and contribute two relevant leadership practices, Student focus and Transparency, as being at work in this context. Additionally, we contribute to the call of Leithwood et al. (2020) to explore in greater depth how school principals enact leadership practices since our leadership sub-patterns of Team players, Key players, and Facilitators describe in detail how school principals enact their practices in leading collaborative innovation. Furthermore, our integrative view on leadership practices helps further understanding of school principals’ struggles in leading collaborative innovation. These struggles in leading indicate that school principals’ leadership practices and patterns can be shaped in various ways, despite the fact that they chose to implement the same program, aimed at collaborative innovation. The overview of leadership practices and patterns in collaborative innovation that we present in the current study enables school principals to reflect on their own leadership and to consider whether they exert a leadership role that is suitable for their school.
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