Emergence of grassroots innovations in schools through the prism of the role approach: how Russian school staff initiate and support innovations

Grassroots innovations are vital for school development. This article defines them as fundamentally new practices and approaches proposed by school staff, as well as those that are unique to a particular environment. The literature described fragmentarily the contribution of principals, their deputies, and teachers to the emergence of grassroots innovations. We conceptualize the contribution of each category of staff through the prism of the “role” concept, which allows us to capture the set of actions for the emergence of school innovations, find out what “forks” exist in their implementations, as well as how these roles are distributed within school teams. Thematic analysis was used to analyze semi-structured interviews with school administrators and teachers (N = 88) from millionaire city, big city, mediumsized cities and urban-type settlement. The codes of the first level disclosed the role of an employee, the codes of the second level the specifics of the role implementation. The following roles were revealed: initiator, and supporter, who is represented by three roles (consultant, motivator, communicator with partners). Position in the organizational hierarchy determines the formats in which roles are performed rather than which roles an employee is involved in. Deputies “migrate” between teacher and managerial positions. The results of the study indicate the team nature of the emergence of grassroots innovations in schools. Identifying and revealing the roles of school staff in the innovation process allows us to contribute to the scientific understanding of the innovation process in educational organizations. From an applied perspective, it is necessary for role-appropriate input to be endorsed and prized, and for missing roles to be added. For future research, we propose to examine frequencies of different combinations of roles, organizational conditions for the emergence of these combinations, and their relationship to different indicators of innovation process performance. Moreover, we propose to study activities of the deputy separately, independently fro the principal or the teacher. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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