Describing and measuring leadership by applying a social network perspective 4 75 in schools, by stimulating the establishment of a learning culture and the sharing of responsibilities between teachers and school principals. Such an approach to innovation has been described as collaborative innovation in recent public service organizational literature (Bekkers & Noordegraaf, 2016; Torfing, 2019). The program was initiated by an independent foundation, after an international study by the OECD (2016) highlighted that the educational quality of Dutch schools is more than sufficient but could be further improved by enhancement of collaboration by educational staff within schools. At present, approximately a thousand Dutch primary, secondary, and vocational education schools have implemented the methodology of this program (see Appendix 4.1 for a short explanation of the Dutch educational sectors). We studied distributed leadership within schools participating in this program, as teams in these schools are activated to collaborate and to distribute leadership. The program uses a methodology that is partly based on ‘Agile’ principles, meaning a team-based approach to improving processes step by step (see Rigby et al., 2016). The methodology motivates schools to have weekly stand-up meetings where teachers and school principals meet each other and where goals are jointly set, and tasks agreed upon. These meetings are followed by codesigning lessons and classroom observations by colleagues. The program identifies three roles within schools, for which there are specific expectations: School principals, coach-teachers, and teachers. School principals are encouraged to set directions, be a role model in working with collaborative innovation (e.g., being present at weekly meetings, perform classroom observations and ask for feedback), and to facilitate their teachers improving themselves and the school’s quality. Coach-teachers are teachers who received a training from an external advisor and perform the supervisor role of the implementation phase within the school, training the other teachers to work with the pro- gram. In this way they have a more formal responsibility than the other teachers (Bryant et al., 2020). Teachers are expected to collaborate with their colleagues on a weekly basis, work with the program, and gradually become coowners of the school improvement process. Notably, the program consists of two phases, with the roles’ associated responsibilities changing over time. The first phase entails an intensive implementation period, during one school year, in which external advisors help schools to learn the methodology. The expected outcomes of this phase are enhancement of collaboration and increasingly shared responsibility amongst teachers and school principals. The second phase is focused on sustaining the collaborative innovation processes by aligning the program with the schools’ culture and structure.
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