Brave New World: Leading with AI

School leadership has always been a juggling act of stoicism for those who have dared embrace the role, despite the ominous undertones surrounding the whole notion of leadership in education.

Amongst the many challenges faced, having to deal with overwhelming amounts of data and impossibly lengthy administrative processes generally detracts from what is intended as the true focus of leaders, more connected with teaching and learning.

Generative AI tools can be applied effectively not only to streamline many of the most time-consuming habitual tasks that administrators are charged with, but also to creatively exercise our leadership in ways that were hitherto unimaginable.

Document processing, data analysis, and custom GPTs that can automate processes are all tools that are now rendered at our disposal to make our jobs and lives easier, but they merely scratch the surface of what can truly be a significant leadership revolution in what really matters, to have an impact on learning at the school. Here are some of the breakthroughs that are now within our reach in our leadership roles:

Transcend Standardized Measurements

The bane of our eternal quest for measurement has always been that we have had to resort to an endless variety of standardized assessments, all of which are intrinsically flawed in their inability to measure more than a few dimensions of learning and their artificiality. We have long aspired to capture organic data, what really happens in the classroom, and assess more than the conventional metrics associated with learning.

AI can finally come to the rescue. The ability to process almost infinite amounts of data with very high accuracy allows us to capture, through the learning management system of choice or even utilities like Google Classroom, organic data from classroom materials, plans, and assignments. Merely asking a GenAI app to evaluate to what extent the mission and vision, goals and objectives, strategic plans, or any other reference document from the school are actually being implemented as per the data capture will yield invaluable and even quantifiable insights regarding real-life implementation. The long-awaited Holy Grail is finally within our grasp: leaders can even create their own custom dictionaries of terms, concepts, and learning instances that exemplify the pedagogy of the school, and check for their general and targeted occurrence within what really happens at classroom level.

Distributed Leadership

Another perennial aspiration is that of distributed leadership, being able to genuinely tap into the expertise of educators in our teams whose ideas and knowledge are not only relevant but literally grounded in practice. Until now, and despite the emergence of interactive polls and the eponymous word clouds, our attempts at capturing significant real-time data from teams were limited by the tools as well as by the almost inevitable curation that was an inherent part of the process of open-ended surveys or focus groups.

The advent of GenAI tools, with their uncanny ability to summarize, synthesize, and process vast amounts of text, one of their most effective applications, has given us the ability to obtain input from classroom teachers and all educators in the school and provide periodic feedback and updates based on them. We can now truly develop data-driven learning processes, capturing organic real-time data and not relying on the flawed constructs of the past.

The added benefit of being able to process enormous quantities of data is that everybody has a voice, thus overcoming the tiered, hierarchical structure of schools, where department heads and middle leaders sometimes act as gatekeepers, isolating leaders from perceiving, especially in large schools or districts, what is really going on.

Strategies and Planning

Similarly, GenAI is a godsend when it comes to planning, strategies, defining goals, and any other process that incorporates the collective thinking of a group. These processes traditionally involve very targeted discussions, with well-defined outcomes, and one spokesperson per group, who is also usually charged with summarizing the discussion for further processing. The results of these analyses, in turn, are later also filtered by the leaders to arrive at the desired outcome.

GenAI can not only do away with the need to summarize, since the processing of the transcription of an audio recording of the discussion can seamlessly achieve very accurate summarization, but also take advantage of the extensive knowledge base to enrich the process.

These tools can be used, for example, to suggest ideas for strategies or projects based on a discussion, provide all sorts of creative spinoffs and, even more importantly, bear the brunt of what is usually the long and tedious development of supporting documentation.

Some of the other tools can also help generate presentations, infographics, and even videos to communicate the results of the process.

Personalized PD

In the same way as GenAI tools promise to revolutionize learning by finally delivering on the promise of personalized learning, professional development can undergo a similar positive transformation. To start with, most of the state-of-the-art knowledge regarding professional learning in education is contained within the extensive database of GenAI systems, so from various taxonomies to visible learning, these concepts can be blended and customized to best suit each school’s needs.

Just like GenAI tools can become an infinitely patient personalized tutor, they can also act as individual coaches for staff in whatever it is that leaders deem appropriate. Custom GPTs can be created combining reference documents with school information so that any of the learning theories can be customized to the school’s or district’s reality.

Creating a professional development program is no longer a one-size-fits-all proposition, as it used to be, equating more experienced practitioners with new teachers, and, just like in the classroom, not meeting every person’s needs. Case studies, real-life examples, and simulated scenarios, all can be generated within the system for more engaging and attractive learning.

Leadership Coach

Utilizing the “services” of an AI leadership coach constitutes a very legitimate use of its capabilities. No human coach has access to the depth and breadth of knowledge of these systems, whose artificially garnered expertise stems from an almost infinite array of learning instances and materials, as well as case studies and real-life situations. The ubiquitousness and flexibility of these tools, as well as that we need not fear showing our weaknesses or asking dumb questions, are other significant advantages of utilizing them to help us improve our leadership.

We can also model our aspiration and ask the system to help us in becoming a certain type of leader, based on our own values and perceived needs for growth.

It is important to point out that utilizing GenAI for leadership coaching is not mutually exclusive with having a human coach, and that the intended use is no substitute for real-life mentoring and social interaction with peers.

In all of the cases above, as well as the many other applications to help and support leaders, using AI is not an all-or-nothing choice. Very often AI is ruled out from many of its potential beneficial uses through a false zero-sum scenario: AI tools can enhance almost everything we do, and leadership is no exception, but in the same way that we do not consider learning from a book – an inanimate object – a threat to our humanity, relying on these interactive tools should not detract from our ability to express ourselves through our leadership.

It has been said, in a sort of post-singularity evolution, that AI will not replace us, but humans who use AI effectively will. The same applies to school leadership: the leaders of the immediate future are the ones who skillfully use these tools to become more efficient and gain time for significant action, and also those who effectively leverage the power of these tools to transcend the constraints and limitations of leadership roles in education, of which we are only too painfully aware and need to get over with.