From Stagnation to Renewal: How Principal Leadership Catalyzed Teacher Leadership in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

In increasingly complex and uncertain educational contexts, school leadership is expected to foster improvement while responding to both external pressures and internal organizational challenges. This study examines how principal leadership promoted changes in instructional practice and enabled the emergence of teacher leadership and professional engagement in early childhood education. An instrumental qualitative case study was conducted at an early childhood level of a school in Spain, drawing on semi-structured interviews, a focus group, non-participant observations, and document analysis. The findings show that principal leadership played a catalytic role not through prescriptive actions, but by creating organizational and relational conditions, such as trust, protected time and space, professional learning opportunities, and curricular prioritization, that enabled teachers to redesign practice collaboratively. The establishment of expert groups fostered pedagogical experimentation, professional learning, and knowledge sharing, thereby expanding teachers’ agency and leading to the emergence of informal teacher leadership. These processes strengthened professional confidence, ownership, and alignment with the school’s educational project. The study concludes that sustainable improvement in complex times depends on integrating principal and teacher leadership by creating a supportive school climate as interdependent, mutually reinforcing forms of influence that build organizational capacity for continuous learning and change.