High School Students’ Perspectives on Teacher Leadership in Post-Pandemic Hybrid Classrooms

Abstract

Teacher leadership plays a critical role in shaping student engagement and academic identity, especially within hybrid learning environments that have emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While leadership in education has been widely studied, limited attention has been given to how students themselves subjectively experience and interpret teacher leadership in these new learning contexts. Existing research often relies on quantitative approaches that fail to capture the emotional and relational dimensions of leadership, raising the question: How do students make meaning of teacher leadership in hybrid learning settings? This study adopts an interpretative phenomenological approach to explore the lived experiences of high school students and their perceptions of teacher leadership during hybrid learning. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with ten students (5 males and 5 females, aged 16–18) from urban public high schools in Indonesia and analyzed thematically through a process of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Four key themes were identified: empathic leadership, adaptive support, structural disconnection, and the redefinition of what constitutes a “good leader” Students highlighted the importance of emotional presence, flexibility, and relational trust in their interactions with teachers, often valuing this over technical competence or authority. These results demonstrate that leadership, from the students’ perspective, is experienced as a humanistic and context-sensitive phenomenon. The study contributes to a richer understanding of educational leadership by centering student voices and offers practical implications for developing emotionally responsive leadership practices. Future research should expand this inquiry across different cultural and institutional contexts to explore the universality of these experiences.