Teachers Making Sense of Principals’ Leadership in Collaboration Within and Beyond School

The purpose of the study is to create a deeper understanding of teachers’ sense-making of principals’ leadership in the context of collaboration within and beyond school. Data were collected over three years, from semi- structured individual and group interviews with teachers, as well as a part of a teacher questionnaire. A qualitative content analysis, guided by an institutional perspective on organizations and sense-making theory, was performed, and the analysis revealed that important sense-making was related to the leadership practices and the formal leader. The findings provide an elaborated illustration of how intentional efforts to collaborate and develop the schools in various collaboration beyond school may affect the normative, and cultural-cognitive aspects within schools.