AI in Instructional Leadership: The Question Isn't Whether to Use It

A recent piece in The Learning Professional offers a frame that educators wrestling with AI should think hard about. In "Using AI in Professional Learning? Don't Eliminate Friction — Design It," B. Busselle of WestEd draws a distinction that reframes the conversation: not all friction supports learning, and not all of it drains. The goal isn't to preserve every obstacle or remove every one. It's to be intentional about which kinds of effort serve growth and which just exhaust people.

That distinction matters for instructional leaders. If we're honest about where principals and APs spend their time, a lot of their effort isn't the productive kind.

Consider a formal classroom observation. A 45-minute walk through a classroom. Then the real work begins: transcribing notes, sorting evidence against a rubric, mapping it to the right framework domains, pasting everything into a form. For many leaders, that process runs six to eight hours per observation. Multiply it across a staff of 30, and two months of the school year disappear into documentation.

That's not productive friction. It's the kind Busselle describes as draining energy "without deepening expertise," the compliance-driven work the framework says should be removed.

Stacey Hensley, an assistant principal at Lubbock ISD, put it plainly: "By the time I'm done doing all that first part, what brainpower is left to do the actual grading?" After years of spending evenings transcribing recordings and pasting notes between documents, she started using KickUp's AI-powered scripting tool during observations. Her time per observation dropped from six to eight hours to a fraction of that. Take a look at Stacey's story →

But here's the part that matters most: the feedback got sharper. Not because AI wrote it, but because she wasn't exhausted by the time she reached the part that requires her judgment. She's also clear about what AI doesn't do: "I was the one in the room witnessing the lesson. I saw the light in a kid's eyes when they finally understood something. AI doesn't see that."

That's the framework in practice. The cognitive ownership, the judgment that makes feedback meaningful, stays with the leader. What changes is what depletes that capacity before they ever get there.

Principal Kelly Schaeffer of Wisconsin Rapids, who has used every kind of observation tool across her career, says it this way: "Think of it as an organizational tool and a facilitation tool, not a replacement for your judgment. You're still the expert." Here's Kelly's story →

So the question isn't whether to use AI. It's what work we want to protect, and what work is just in the way. The analysis, the pattern recognition, the feedback conversation: those develop expertise. The transcription does not.

AI, used this way, doesn't replace instructional leadership. It returns leaders to it.

KickUp is a professional learning, coaching, and evaluation platform built for K-12 districts. Learn more about KickUp AI at kickup.co/ai.