Directing and facilitating distributed pedagogical leadership: best practices in early childhood educationThis paper uses a hybrid leadership framework to examine how formal teacher leaders at the middle management level direct and facilitate staff resources for distributed pedagogical leadership. By conducting qualitative shadowing, involving video observation, field notes and stimulated recall interviews, and abductive analysis, this study demonstrates and discusses how formal teacher leaders step forward as hybrid leaders who integrate leadership into both interaction and their positional capacity. Building upon established leadership categories, the new category of leading knowledge development is discovered. The main finding is that hybrid leadership is illuminated in various leadership actions, which expand the understanding of leadership work.