Teacher leadership in AI-integrated K-12 classrooms: agency, identity, and authority

This study investigates how teacher leaders enact leadership within AI-integrated classrooms, highlighting the posthuman entanglements that shape their agency, identity, and authority. While AI’s instructional uses have been widely examined, how AI integration reshapes teacher leadership – its practices, identities, and sources of authority – remains underexplored, particularly through posthumanist lenses. Using a multi-country qualitative interview study within an interpretive design, semi-structured interviews with teacher leaders from multiple Arab States were thematically analyzed to uncover five interrelated themes: recalibrated leadership practices, reconfigured professional identity, distributed agency, ethical ambivalence toward AI, and posthuman pedagogical imaginaries. Findings reveal that leadership is increasingly co-constituted through human – machine interactions, requiring new competencies in algorithmic reasoning, ethical discernment, and hybrid pedagogy. Rather than diminishing teachers’ authority, AI integration redefines it – positioning teacher leaders as adaptive actors negotiating the boundaries between autonomy and automation. The study contributes to the emerging scholarship on digital transformation in education, offering both conceptual insights and practical implications for preparing teachers to lead responsibly and innovatively in sociotechnical learning environments.