Understanding distributed leadership practices in and around teacher teams 5 109 5.4.2.2. Characteristics of schools Regarding the third and last level, namely characteristics of schools and their distributed leadership practices, we see that most of the teams with higher distributed leadership practices have school principals who described themselves as a Team player, one who participates within the educational improvement processes. The teams with lower distributed leadership practices all have school principals who described themselves as Facilitators who steer from a distance, and two teams had a Key player who direct the process. As discussed in the Methods section, we found that teachers’ perceptions underline the school principals’ leadership patterns. This means that teachers perceive school principals’ leadership as more involved within teams with higher distributed leadership practices. In addition, with regard to a Reason to implement the program, low educational quality indicates a link. Only teams with the lowest distributed leadership, and teams within the middle of the range, started to implement the program because they perceived their educational quality to be too low. We found that both the external advisor and the cognitive students’ results confirmed the remark of the school principal who mentioned that low educational quality was a reason to implement the program. We did not find a link between distributed leadership practices and the following school characteristics: Working on lesson practices, Educational sector, and several Reasons to implement the program. These Reasons are not included in Table 5.4 to improve legibility but are shown in Appendix 5.3. Lastly, we summarized the results in Table 5.5, by presenting the four sociocultural context characteristics that we found to be linked to distributed leadership practices. Table 5.5 Our Results on Links Between Sociocultural Context and Distributed Leadership (DL) Variables (level) Higher DL Lower DL Perceived leader (individual and team) Negative link Theme asked for advice (team) Organizing improvement Students, classes, Lessons School principals’ leadership (school) Team player Facilitator Reason to implement (school) Low educational quality Note. An empty cell means that there was no link.
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