Architecting the artificial intelligence-era principal: Teacher leaders reimagine school leadership

Artificial intelligence (AI) leadership scholarship positions principals as the architects of reform, while reducing teacher leadership to implementation. This study inverted that gaze by examining how AI-active teacher leaders conceptualized the principalship required for AI-saturated schooling without surrendering pedagogy, ethics, or agency. The study used an interpretive design and drew on interviews with 23 teacher leaders from six Arab States. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, generating five themes. Participants construed AI as a third actor that reordered credibility, accelerated decision cycles, and intensified vulnerability around data, care, and professional judgment. They described principalship as leading under epistemic uncertainty, buffering pedagogical experimentation from turbulence and blame, publicly legitimating AI expertise through decision rights, ethically firewalling the school through boundary governance, and re-engineering principalship as socio-technical governance rather than task distribution. The study reframed AI-saturated principalship as an architecture of permissions, protections, and legitimations that amplifies teacher leadership and safeguards educational purpose.