Leadership practices in collaborative innovation: A study among Dutch school principals

Abstract

School principals and teachers are expected to continuously innovate their practices in changing school environments. These innovation processes can be shared more widely through collaboration between principals and teachers, i.e. collaborative innovation. In order to gain more insight into how school principals enact their leadership practices in leading collaborative innovation, we interviewed 22 school principals of primary, secondary and vocational education in the Netherlands. All participants have implemented the same collaborative innovation programme, aimed at enhancement of collaboration between teachers and school principals within schools, that has already been implemented by 900 Dutch schools. They were interviewed twice during the implementation year. Interview transcripts were analysed using an open coding strategy looking for leadership practices. Based on 11 leadership practices, we described two main leadership patterns: school principals enacting leadership practices as either a team player or as a facilitator. We conclude that our findings suggest a wider repertoire of leadership practices than is reported in previous studies. Future studies would need to address the generalisability of the practices and patterns as found in this specific context of collaborative innovation.

Developing the strategic collaboration model in basic education

“…The second research question focus on to explore how the role of school strategic leadership in term of achieving education service innovation. The results of interview by researchers as: The results of this study have also related to the argumentation of scholars that eventually the strategic leadership in education is rapidly challenged and asked the school leaders to concern and undertake to encounter the external and internal change for innovation of education caused by the tensions of external expectation and internal school priorities [8], [40], [41]. In the context of creating the school innovation and quality service in education, then school leaders should be performed strategically through collaboration to overcome complexities and decision making in schools [42], [43].…”

“…Meanwhile, the strategic leadership in education at least must have four elements capacity that must be performed, for example, ability to school improvement and transformation, effective teaching assessment, creating school innovation, and supporting capacity development for teachers, and effective collaboration planning [8]. The strategic alliances in collaboration are emerged to get unique insights for those who collaborate with each other [9], and also the school strategic leadership will make any creations with them their own skill to become a creative school leader [10].…”

The relationship between distributed leadership and teacher innovativeness: Mediating roles of teacher autonomy and professional collaboration

“…The tight correlation between professional collaboration and teacher innovativeness found in this study is consistent with several former pieces of research ( Fullan, 2016 ; Torfing, 2019 ). Meanwhile, from a collective perspective, distributed leadership reduces the interpersonal distance between principals and individual teachers, and the school staff is then encouraged to initiate collaborative innovation together ( de Jong et al, 2020 ). It is noteworthy that the direct effect of professional collaboration on teacher innovativeness is much stronger than the effect of teacher autonomy on innovativeness, and this phenomenon also exists in their mediation effects.…”

Ethnopedagogical Leadership Based on Lampung’s Local Wisdom in Schools

“…A leader is at the center of the group change and activity. Thus, leadership is also said to be the process of directing and influencing activities that has relation to the work of group members [5,6].…”