Understanding distributed leadership practices in and around teacher teams 5 111 collaboration, evaluating (their own) education, and asking for advice. They see ‘restricted’ professionals as teachers who act autonomously and are especially concerned with effectiveness of their own class, subject content, and didactics. The differences that we found between the teacher teams and their degree of distributed leadership seem to link to these two ‘types’ of professionals. This can also be related to the distinction made by Evans (2008), focusing on educational professionals, between ‘demanded, prescribed, and enacted’ professionalism. This highlights extrinsic versus intrinsic ‘reconfigurations’ of professionalism as well (Noordegraaf, 2015): Teachers who are committed to go beyond routinized ways of working show ‘enacted professionalism’. All in all, teachers from teams with higher distributed leadership practices in our study can be recognized by the term ‘extended professionals’ who are able to ‘enact’ new forms of professional action. Furthermore, in our study we found that school principals in teams with higher distributed leadership participate in the innovation process, as Team players. The Team player is one of the leadership patterns identified by De Jong et al. (2020). They did not yet study the relatedness of these leadership patterns to other concepts. As stated by among others Drewes et al. (2019) and Mentink et al. (2021), the ways in which school principals’ leadership foster distributed leadership practices is relatively understudied. Our study adds to the study of De Jong et al. (2020) and other previous research by providing new insights into the link between school principals’ leadership and distributed leadership, with an emphasis on team relations. Teachers from teams with lower distributed leadership in our study, act more like ‘restricted’ team professionals in terms of Hoyle’s professionals (1975). They are first and foremost concerned with the effectiveness of their own class, subject content, and didactics. This professional attitude is also recognized in other research, stating that some teachers are strongly focused on everyday professional practice in their classroom (Giesbers & Bergen, 1991; Van Gennip & Sleegers, 1994). Within teams with lower distributed leadership, perceiving someone as a leader seems to still plays a role in asking someone for advice. This finding relates to previous research that indicated that teachers ask others for advice when they perceive these others as having relevant expertise or experience, or when they see others as some sort of ‘leader’ (Liu, 2021; Spillane, 2006; Tam, 2019). Our study adds to this current body of knowledge by indicating that perceiving someone as a leader might relate to having relevant teaching experiences, or other kinds of experiences or features. We, namely, did not find teaching experience to play a role in asking for advice, but perceiving someone as ‘leader’ does. A possible reason for this more self-focused characteristic of the teachers and the experienced threshold of asking others who are experienced as leaders, in the teams with lower distributed leadership,
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw