Within the framework of complex interactive and adaptive organizations, there is a growing call for educational leadership that is appropriate and responsive to the 21st century's ever-changing learning environments and the need to increase sustainability in educational contexts [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2017]. In this sense, school leaders face many complicated and challenging dilemmas, with contradictory expectations, actions, and reactions. According to Hardman (2010), who coined the concept of regenerative leadership, these unpredictable leadership environments require conscious risk-taking, based on research and learning, to recreate, regenerate, and produce new capacities, interactions, connections, and actions that respond to the prevailing emergent state (Hardman, 2012). The model of regenerative leadership is characterized as an integral theory of leadership, based on developing a global ethic that balances the way we value subjective and objective realities. It is therefore a more effective approach to leading society toward sustainability. Regenerative leadership also emerges as an approach that balances power by encouraging the emergence of multiple voices, actions, and dispositions within the system, from a heterarchical perspective, woven into a network. In this case, distributing leadership is not just a technical operation, but spreads the power to deliberate and act across several leaders. Instead, it is characterized by promoting interdependence in decision-making, collaboration at various levels and in multiple systems inside and outside the organization (Hardman, 2010), from a shared leadership perspective (Carson et al., 2007; Pearce and Conger, 2003).

Regenerative leadership will therefore involve, on the one hand, environments that value all stakeholders, who will be actively and authentically included in conversations and reflective actions about achieving the organizational vision. On the other hand, it is based on a dynamic mindset (Johnson, 2025) that focuses on creating the conditions for teams to thrive. This appreciative thinking contrasts with leadership trapped in a static, deficit-thinking mindset, focused on limitations, inadequacies, and what they lack, leading to doubt, fear, and a belief that their shortcomings limit growth (Acker-Hocevar, 2023).

However, this change in mentality will mean that today leadership's great challenge is promoting learning (MacBeath, 2006). Given that human growth is an organic process and not a mechanical one, it will then be up to leaders, as if they were farmers, to cultivate the conditions for people to grow, learn, and develop (Robinson, 2010a). A challenge of this magnitude will require an integrated and articulated exercise of leadership for learning, with transformational and servant leadership.

Leadership in complex contexts, the theoretical basis of this conceptual analysis article, assumes that effective school change, as a complex adaptive organism, will depend on the exercise of integrative leadership, in which results will be generated by an interactive dynamic between interdependent actors (Jiang, 2023). Harris (2010) argues that the schools of the future will need multiple leaders rather than individual leaders to achieve organizational goals. Given this new understanding of leadership in school systems, different concepts have emerged, such as collaborative, shared, and distributed leadership, demonstrating different approaches to implementing less hierarchical and more integrative models of leadership (Shava and Tlou, 2018).

Although distributed leadership is often used synonymously in the literature with other terms such as shared and collaborative leadership (Gumus et al., 2016; Spillane, 2005), they are distinct approaches. Although all these models reconceptualize school leadership as a collective rather than individual effort, abandoning the belief in traditional solo leadership that sees the leader as a hero, they are not identical. All three models of leadership can be implemented to varying degrees, depending on the organizational culture and the specific needs of each group, on a continuum ranging from highly structured forms of limited delegation to almost total team autonomy (Hargreaves and Fink, 2005).

So, on the one hand, distributed leadership is more about specific leadership behaviors, formal positions, and particular types of influence, and refers to an approach in which several people share responsibility and decision-making in a team or organization (Gronn, 2002; Spillane, 2005). On the other hand, shared leadership focuses on multiple sources of influence within teams, constituting one of its emergent properties. It results from participation in activities that influence other members, in areas related to direction, motivation, and support, through interactions involving negotiation and the sharing of leadership responsibilities. Therefore, shared leadership is a relational phenomenon that implies mutual influence between team members as they work to achieve their goals (Carson et al., 2007; Pearce and Conger, 2003).

Coleman (2011) also presents two main ways of using the concept of collaborative leadership. On the one hand, collaborative leadership appears as an alternative way of describing distributed leadership practice. In this case, collaborative leadership relates to sharing leadership with followers to promote learning and greater organizational effectiveness. On the other hand, in a slightly different conception, collaborative leadership focuses on promoting joint work, within and outside the boundaries of the organizational structure, so leadership aims to obtain the benefits of collaborative advantage.

In this work, we approach shared and collaborative leadership approaches, given the growing interest in collaborative work over the last 30 years, driven by the idea that working in partnership can improve efficiency and add value to results (Stoll et al., 2017). Therefore, collaborative work has emerged as an inevitable feature of the 21st century. However, as Coleman (2011) argues, very little research has been carried out into the nature of the leadership needed to maximize the potential of this collaborative work. Hence, the relevance of focusing on the collaborative leadership model.

Collaborative leadership emerges as a strategic approach to leadership at the school level that involves principals, middle leaders, and teachers in shared decision-making and co-responsibility for the learning of all students (Hallinger and Heck, 2010). Thus, collaborative leadership encompasses both formal and informal sources of leadership and conceptualizes leadership as an organizational property aimed at school improvement. This concept of leadership aligns with the broader literature that highlights the importance of empowering teams, minimizing hierarchies, and promoting shared leadership to drive improvement (Jutzi et al., 2025).

In this sense, collaboration will require leaders to give teams the authority to make decisions, allowing team values and structures to develop through interaction rather than control. Thus, leadership styles are co-constructed within the team as roles are shared between members, which increases the overall effectiveness of the group (Kramer and Crespy, 2011). Empirical studies by Hallinger and Heck (2010) have shown that collaborative leadership contributes to school improvement by building academic capacity in targeted areas. The authors consider academic capacity to be a set of organizational conditions that impact what teachers do in the classroom to influence student learning.

To ensure improvement in schools, the literature on collaborative leadership has identified four main focuses of leadership action: sense-making, by promoting a common vision and inspiring others to follow it; empowerment, through encouragement, ownership and participation in the collaborative process; conflict resolution between partners at a strategic and operational level, as well as commitment and effectiveness, to help ensure the benefits of working together (Coleman, 2011). In this way, we can see that collaborative leadership appears, again, as a composite and mixed form of leadership. It involves a skillful combination of various leadership styles and behaviors. According to Coleman (2011), the central question is not which of these elements is preferable for promoting effective collaborative work, but rather which combination of these elements is most appropriate for improving a given context.

Overcoming a sense of permacrisis, a term coined by Collins (2022) to define a context marked by an extended period of instability and insecurity resulting from a series of catastrophic events, will require principals to remain focused on driving a long-term vision, without losing sight of their innovative and entrepreneurial spirit (Johnson, 2025). The term permacrisis in education may be evoked to state the continuous mutability and ongoing societal and technological challenges that influence teaching and learning environments. Robinson et al. (2008), in a literature review on the effects of leadership, found that vision and goals were the second most significant factor in which principals contribute to improving learning in the classroom. They considered vision to be the broad image of the school's direction. Senge (1990) also presented shared vision as one of the five disciplines of the learning organization, when all stakeholders are encouraged to participate in developing that vision. Managing a high level of complexity is only possible by developing a comprehensive and appealing vision that integrates different perspectives and guides the school's activities, showing the path that stakeholders must follow to avoid uncertainty and surprise (Morgan, 2013). It is essential to communicate this vision clearly and involve everyone in it (O'Connell et al., 2011).

It is also up to top leaders to build more collaborative and regenerative leadership, encouraging a change in the school's organizational structure by promoting the school's organization into more autonomous teams, the educational teams. In this way, they can trigger more consistent, reflective, active, productive, and authentic collaboration (Pinheiro and Alves, 2024a,b) and, consequently, deeper and more meaningful teacher learning (Pinheiro and Alves, 2024c). Collaborative management of the learning of all the students in a year or cycle of schooling will require top leaders to give educational teams autonomy and authority to make decisions. In this case, team values and structures develop through interaction rather than control. In this way, leadership styles are co-constructed within the team as roles and responsibilities are shared between members, which also increases the overall group effectiveness (Kramer and Crespy, 2011). This type of collaborative leadership is effective because it uses the diverse skills of all group members and can overcome the weaknesses of designated leaders (Kramer, 2006).

School leaders can therefore play a particularly important role in consistently modeling the elements of professionalism, helping to rebuild the context in which relationships of trust and collaborative work can flourish (Coleman, 2012). In fact, by organizing teaching into educational teams, which function as Professional Learning Communities (Pinheiro and Alves, 2024a), a more productive school climate can be created, since within the same organization there are almost autonomous teams with a high capacity for deliberation, focused on the learning of a large group of students (Formosinho and Machado, 2016b).

When the structure of teaching and learning organization changes, the ability to acquire knowledge becomes destabilized, and it must be recreated through individual or collective action (Bennet et al., 2007). Hence, the importance of changing the organizational structure as an engine for promoting learning and changing mentalities is fundamental for triggering professional learning and innovation in schools. In order to create the conditions for everyone to flourish, it is also up to principals to provide teachers with spaces and times to meet, including in their work schedules, which support the development of more consistent collaboration communities. The literature has shown that it is through more complex professional interactions, through co-construction, that contexts of active and meaningful learning are provided (Drossel et al., 2019; Gräsel et al., 2006; Hargreaves, 2019; Little, 1990), within the framework of a constructivist and social vision of organizational practice.

In their meta-analyses, Robinson et al. (2008) and Grissom et al. (2021) suggests that the principal's support and participation in teachers' professional learning produced the most significant effect on student learning outcomes. Therefore, the principal is important but can only achieve success through the cooperation of others, i.e., the impact of the principal's leadership is mediated by culture, work processes, and people. Therefore, even when leadership is shared, the principal's own leadership is essential to promote the leadership of others (Hallinger, 2011).

In this way, the principal must function as a regenerative leader, prioritizing empowering the members of his or her team to make their contribution through attentive and deep listening and encouragement. The principal must also see people and not just their positions and roles; they must be compassionate, able to show how people are connected, and set an example through a supportive and inclusive attitude. It is also up to them to elevate people to bring out their true potential and help them grow, bringing value to the team, rather than just using them as a workforce to achieve organizational goals. In short, principals, as regenerative leaders, seek to create a strong collective and highlight the qualities of each member.

In turn, the praxis resulting from participation in Professional Learning Communities can change principals‘ thinking about collaborative leadership practices. In this way, it can result in reported changes in their approaches to leadership, shared leadership, and improved collegiality and collaborative learning for teachers (Vijayadevar et al., 2019). Hence, the importance of promoting the organization of teaching by educational teams, capable of functioning as Professional Learning Communities (Pinheiro and Alves, 2024a,b). In this scenario, the school functions as an orchestra, and each educational team is one of its sections. As a harmonious whole, everyone will be able to contribute to the promotion of collaborative and interactive professionalism (Fullan and Hargreaves, 2001) and, therefore, to a culture of learning, within the framework of an ethical school culture, respect for teachers' professionalism and an environment of mutual support (Formosinho and Machado, 2016b; Hargreaves, 2019; Stoll et al., 2017).

Principals of successful schools thus orchestrate the structural, cultural, and agential conditions for distributing leadership. Principals take center stage in the structural reformulations needed to bring shared leadership to life, allowing self-organized leadership practices to occur and evolve naturally. In this way, they play an important role in developing leadership throughout the school. Thus, principals move from being someone at the top of the organization to someone with the primary function of developing the leadership and capacity of others (Shava and Tlou, 2018), by redesigning the organizational structure.

The concept of middle leadership is part of a wider and broader framework that is related to distributed leadership and collaborative practice. However, writing about middle leadership requires clarifying this concept, which is sometimes slippery and has several meanings (Forde and Kerrigan, 2023). In this reflection, we will clarify various definitions of middle leadership, starting with De Nobile's (2018), according to which middle leadership is the influence that people exert in the space between senior leadership at one end and teachers at the other. Therefore, middle leaders may or may not hold formal positions but have responsibility for an aspect of the school's functioning. However, this concept is marked by a blurring of informal and formal leadership roles and confuses the concepts of middle leadership and teacher leaders. For their part, Forde and Kerrigan (2023) make this distinction, considering that middle leaders have positional authority, while teacher leaders exert informal sources of influence through their knowledge and experience. In this article, we follow Gurr's (2019) conception, according to which middle leaders are teachers with formal organizational responsibility, usually focused on the curriculum, responsible for a learning area or a school year.

These middle leaders, particularly in the context of the organization of teaching by educational teams, have significant potential to evolve the modes of educational action, summoning peers to other ways of working and creating new interactions and synergies in the teams they lead (Pinheiro and Alves, 2024d). In this sense, they can contribute to empowering teachers, promoting a change in the way they are teachers, changing their beliefs, improving their skills and thus promoting a culture of collaboration and learning (De Nobile, 2018; Formosinho and Machado, 2009, 2016a,b; Leithwood et al., 2008, 2019; Stoll et al., 2017).

Therefore, it will be up to middle leaders to strengthen collegial relationships to ensure a culture of collaboration, create a harmonious group climate, a sine qua non condition for gaining the trust of team members. In fact, by building harmonious social ties, teachers begin to demonstrate a strong sense of unity and a greater commitment to the work to be done in their team (Chen and Zhang, 2022). Then, it is important that leaders take every opportunity to create empathy and collaboration, as well as a safe environment, promoting opportunities for meetings that force teachers to leave their workrooms, to talk, work, and think together (Tintoré, 2022). In this sense, it is crucial to create affirmative learning environments so that teachers have the courage, strength, and desire to reflect, examine, and improve their practices. So, promoting collaboration between teachers and developing relational trust are two key areas for practicing middle leadership (Forde and Kerrigan, 2023).

However, meaningful learning will require that teachers' current knowledge be challenged (Grimm, 2023). To achieve this, it is essential to de-privatize practices to be widely shared among all team members. Critical reflection on these practices is also important to provide constructive guidance. No less important is the promotion of shared responsibility for the team's improvement efforts (Leithwood, 2016; Tintoré, 2022). Likewise, it becomes essential for these middle leaders to lead by example, presenting exemplary practices, and designing impactful tools that they consider powerful to help stimulate and accompany changes in colleagues' practice, focused on improving student learning. They must also support and encourage colleagues to experiment with new practices, encouraging risk-taking (Chen and Zhang, 2022; Stoll et al., 2017). Middle leaders must act as researchers to be able to analyze the structural conditions that inhibit learning and identify the meaning of the data collected to be able to use it to implement change effectively. In this way, it is up to them to evaluate the impact of the approaches adopted, using a variety of perspectives (Forde and Kerrigan, 2023; Stoll et al., 2017).

Indeed, to change and improve teaching, leaders need to set up Professional Learning Communities, in which teachers examine and negotiate their current understandings of teaching, promoting a habit of inquiry. Seeing the world differently and doing things differently will therefore involve reflecting on experiences, making reflective observations, using abstract conceptualizations, and risking active experimentation, in other words, becoming inquiry-minded (Grimm, 2023).

By promoting collaboration between peers, as well as a critical and constructive analysis of classroom practices and knowing how to read the data collected to promote effective and meaningful change, these middle leaders will become authors and co-authors of their profession. In this way, they will be able to promote the construction of specific and specialized knowledge that allows them to find effective solutions to the problems diagnosed, contribute to the professional development of their peers, and promote teachers' sense of agency and leadership (Stoll et al., 2017).

Like the concept of middle leader, that of teacher leader fits into a broader and wider context of shared leadership and collaborative practice. However, there is a relevant distinction between the two concepts. While middle leaders hold formal authority, teacher leaders exercise more informal sources of influence, for example, through their knowledge and experience (Forde and Kerrigan, 2023). According to Tucaliuc et al. (2025), from a functional perspective of distributed leadership, different people can naturally exercise leadership practices. However, this form of social differentiation does not necessarily overlap with the formal hierarchical structure of the school, understood by the authors as a structural perspective of distributed leadership, which concerns the formal allocation of leadership responsibilities (principal and middle leaders).

Teacher leadership exists when all members of an organization can lead, and leadership is an agency that is distributed (Harris, 2004). Therefore, teacher leadership is exercised when teachers occupy a central position in how schools operate and in the essential functions of teaching and learning (Gumus et al., 2016). Then, teachers are leaders when they become someone who inspires students to construct knowledge, which will involve having an educational approach centered on student learning, addressing their overall development, having a broad concept of educational success, and promoting the development of active citizens (Alves, 2021). Teachers also exercise their leadership when they decide collegially on the appropriate means of instruction, collectively and critically analyze the results of decisions and actions, and collaboratively transform the prescribed and taught curriculum into a learned curriculum. All these dynamics are enhanced within educational teams, thus promoting teachers' professional agency and professionalism (Formosinho and Machado, 2009, 2016b). Teachers also lead when they try to understand the changes they are being asked to make and get involved in them; they participate collectively in decision-making at an organizational, pedagogical, and curricular level; and they generate new ideas for the development of the school.

The leadership role teachers embrace aligns with MacBeath's (2006, p. 45) view that

Hargreaves (2025) also argues that only when teachers and teacher leaders start to work together and take the lead will they be able to offer hope for a revitalized profession and this sick, complex, and unpredictable world in which we live.