Leadership from below: teachers’ understandings of good leadership practices in Danish schools

This study draws on 22 semi-structured interviews with teachers from four Danish public schools in order to explore school leadership ‘from below.’ Through thematic analysis of teachers’ understandings of good leadership practices, three interrelated dimensions of good leadership are identified: grounded support, organisational clarity and negotiated autonomy. Grounded support refers to leaders’ practical understanding of teachers’ everyday work, enabling meaningful recognition, relational trust and protective intervention in challenging situations. Organisational clarity concerns the communication of coherent expectations, shared norms and a locally meaningful framework for practice, particularly in relation to external policy demands. Negotiated autonomy captures the dynamic balance between clear expectations and professional discretion, where teachers are trusted to exercise professional judgment within agreed organisational boundaries. Together, the three perspectives suggest that good leadership involves the ability to protect and buffer teachers from excessive external policy pressures, grant sufficient autonomy to sustain a genuine sense of professional agency and maintain a relatively flat power structure in which teachers have direct access to leaders and are actively involved in school-level decision-making. In this way, the study contributes to the school leadership literature by offering an empirically grounded, teacher-centred account of the leadership practices teachers experience as enabling and supportive of their core work in schools.