Educational Leadership for Agentic AI in Pre-University Educational Contexts
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a set of technologies currently transforming learning, teaching, and educational leadership. Generative AI is one such technology and refers to a form of artificial intelligence used to produce novel digital content, including text, images, audio, and video. This synthetic media is created in response to user prompts. In educational contexts, generative AI has been used to draft course material, personalise tutoring, and summarise complex multimedia information.
Indeed, the global educational system finds itself in the throes of the fourth industrial revolution, not as a bystander but as a system undergoing evolutionary change. There is a growing literature on applications of generative AI to education, particularly scholarship around innovation in teaching, learning, research, and leadership. Despite this, there remains a key gap in knowledge for agentic AI and educational leadership. These new forms of AI are important because they impact individual, collective, and institutional levels of change.
This Research Topic invites contributions which cover original research, theoretical papers, and case studies from various pre-university educational institutions that cover, but are not restricted to, the following thematic areas as they relate to agentic AI and educational leadership:
Policy and governance – what frameworks and guidance must educational leaders provide for the use of autonomous agents across the institution for learning, teaching, and research?
Continuous professional development – how should professional development be reimagined in the agentic era of educational leadership and what are the cognitive and technical needs of educational leaders in the agentic era distinct from the generative era of AI?
Systemic capacity building – how can educational leaders build institutional resilience and shared practice across the institution to maximise the potential of agentic AI and minimise any associated risks?
Reimagining the leadership function – what does the arrival of agentic AI imply for the daily practice and decision-making processes of individual leaders and the collaborative structures of leadership teams?
Ethical challenges and institutional security – what are the boundaries for responsible use when AI agents interact with personal data and how does institutional data security change in the agentic environment?
Theoretical Frameworks – to what extent do existing theories of digital leadership or generative AI still apply in the agentic era and what new conceptual models are needed to understand educational leadership in the agentic era of AI?
By synthesising these diverse themes and perspectives, this Research Topic aspires to build a strategic road-map for educational leaders in pre-university education who are navigating the transition between the ‘chat-paradigm’ of generative AI and the action-oriented reality of agentic AI within a dynamic multi-level framework.
Article types and fees
This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:
- Brief Research Report
- Conceptual Analysis
- Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
- Editorial
- FAIR² Data
- FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
- General Commentary
- Hypothesis and Theory
- Original Research
- … View all formats
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Keywords: Agentic AI, Educational Leadership, Generative AI, Policy and Governance, Professional Development, Ethical Challenges, Institutional Capacity Building
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
