Understanding Principals’ Experiences with AI Dashboards in Teacher Evaluation: Insights into Meaning, Fairness, and Leadership
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Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping educational leadership by transforming how schools evaluate teacher performance, ensure accountability, and make strategic decisions. Within this evolving landscape, AI-enabled dashboards have become central instruments for data-informed leadership, yet limited research has examined how school principals actually engage with and interpret these systems in their daily practices. This study addresses this gap by exploring the nuanced, lived experiences of principals who utilize AI dashboards to support instructional supervision and teacher assessment. Adopting an interpretative phenomenological approach, the research investigates how principals negotiate fairness, professional judgment, and ethical accountability when algorithmic insights intersect with human decision-making. Data were collected through in-situ dashboard walkthroughs employing think-aloud protocols, complemented by semi-structured interviews and reflective digital diaries. The data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and thematic clustering to uncover the psychological, ethical, and relational dimensions of leadership practice mediated by AI. The findings indicate that principals perceive AI outputs as provisional cues rather than prescriptive truths, and that they actively recalibrate fairness by contextualizing data within school culture and human relationships. Moreover, principals employ ethical overrides to maintain transparency, empathy, and professional dignity when system recommendations appear misaligned with pedagogical values. These insights reveal that AI dashboards function most effectively as catalysts for reflective dialogue, not as deterministic evaluators. By situating algorithmic tools within the complex realities of human judgment, this study highlights the need for ethical, contextually responsive, and human-centered AI design in educational leadership.
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