Adaptive Digital Principalship for Islamic Religious Education Teacher Development: A Qualitative SWOT–TOWS Study in a Rural Indonesian Regency

Abstract

Digital transformation creates new demands for teacher professional practice, yet little is known about how principals in resource-constrained, value-based schools translate digital policy into feasible professional learning. This qualitative field study examined technology-based managerial strategies supporting Islamic Religious Education (PAI) teachers in three public elementary schools in Way Kanan Regency, Indonesia. Data comprised 33 semi-structured interviews, approximately 120 hours of non-participant observation, and 47 institutional and policy documents collected from October 2024 to April 2025. The corpus was coded thematically and subsequently interpreted through SWOT–TOWS analysis. Findings identified three recurrent managerial practices: digitally mediated academic supervision, structured ICT mentoring, and technology-oriented school planning. Teachers mainly used presentation software, curated videos, messaging applications, and simple interactive tools, while independent content creation remained limited. Professional-practice changes involved pedagogical diversification, wider participation in professional learning, and more deliberate ethical filtering of digital resources. The SWOT–TOWS synthesis showed that principal commitment, religious school culture, peer mentoring, offline resources, shared devices, and incremental adoption enabled schools to respond to uneven digital confidence and infrastructure constraints. The study proposes adaptive digital principalship as a context-sensitive model for supporting feasible teacher development.