2026 SAIS Annual Conference

School leaders and educators often face challenging conversations but may struggle with avoidance or uncertainty. This interactive session presents a practical, three-step framework for approaching difficult dialogues with confidence and clarity. Participants will engage in guided practice using real-world scenarios common in independent schools, developing strategies for preparation, communication, and follow-up. Attendees will leave with actionable tools to foster constructive conversations, strengthen community trust, and address sensitive issues effectively, including sentence starters for each step.

Agentic AI – tools that plan, execute, and iterate autonomously – is arriving in schools now. When AI can complete a project, conduct research, and revise its own work, product-based assessment collapses. What remains is process: how students think, what decisions they make, where they intervene, and what they understand about their own cognition along the way.
This session examines what agentic AI demands of curriculum and assessment design and why it requires doing something most schools have not yet done: defining competencies with enough clarity and shared language that every teacher can articulate what they are developing, teach toward it deliberately, and assess it with confidence.
Two senior administrators from leading independent schools move beyond theory to practice, sharing their institutions' progress, honest challenges, and emerging frameworks for shifting faculty culture from measuring outputs to documenting and assessing learning processes. Participants will leave with concrete tools and a clear next step for their own schools.

Independent schools are facing a rapidly evolving legal landscape affecting employees, students, and school operations. This session will highlight the most important recent legal developments impacting independent schools, including employment law updates, accommodation issues, discrimination claims, faculty management, and emerging areas of risk.
Attendees will gain practical insights into how these developments are affecting schools today and what steps leaders should consider to ensure their policies, practices, and decision-making remain compliant and proactive.