The Promises and Pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence in Instructional Leadership: A Focus on Teacher Supervision

Artificial intelligence (AI) has and will continue to transform education for years to come. While researchers tend to focus on the impact of AI on teaching and learning, relatively few have considered the impact of AI on school leadership, particularly instructional leadership, and specifically teacher supervision—an aspect of school leadership that possesses the closest connection to AI’s origins in education. In this paper, we first describe the role of school leaders as instructional leaders. We then move to consider one aspect of instructional leadership—teacher supervision—and its theoretical and empirical understandings. In the second section of the paper, we outline various promises and pitfalls of using AI for teacher supervision using existing research on AI in education that informs key tasks and skills of teacher supervisors—observation and feedback. In our final section, we combine our understandings of teacher supervision and our considerations of using AI for teacher supervision to outline promising avenues for research.