2026 SAIS Annual Conference

In an era of rising costs and intense talent competition, a standard benefits package is no longer enough to sustain a thriving school culture. This session empowers leaders to move beyond "surface-level perks" and build a systemic Employee Wellness Program that anchors faculty retention. Using a holistic framework, participants will analyze how to support the educator experience through the four dimensions of wellness: Mind (mindfulness and creativity), Body (nutrition and physical/mental health), Relationships (connection and belonging), and Purpose (professional development).
Attendees will identify strategies to

• Audit and activate underutilized resources within existing insurance plans.
  
• Cultivate high-impact partnerships with local organizations for community-based support.
  
• Design a sustainable roadmap that transforms wellness from an individual burden into a shared institutional priority.
  

Leave this session with a practical toolkit to reimagine hiring and school culture through the lens of comprehensive well-being.

Two schools. Same challenges. Same resources. One pivots in 18 months; the other is still stuck three years later. The difference? Leadership metabolism.
In this session, we'll explore why some leadership teams efficiently convert challenges into action while others stall in committee cycles, initiative overload, and energy crashes. You'll learn to diagnose the health of your school's leadership system, identify the "metabolic killers" that slow even talented teams to a crawl, and apply practical frameworks for accelerating decision-making, sustaining momentum, and building rhythms of execution and reflection.
Whether you lead a team now or aspire to, you'll leave with concrete tools for building a senior leadership culture that moves with purpose, recovers quickly, and adapts.

This interactive workshop helps educational leaders navigate the integration of emerging technologies like AI while preserving the human connections that make learning communities thrive. Drawing on Global Online Academy's 15-year history as a global nonprofit consortium, participants will explore two complementary frameworks that guide values-aligned technology adoption and support students' sense of belonging.


Participants will reflect on their school's current strengths and growth areas and explore how small shifts in educator practice can either reinforce or undermine belonging in the classroom. The session draws on practical examples from GOA's work as an innovative hub connecting students and teachers worldwide.

The workshop culminates in collaborative empathy mapping, giving leaders a structured way to center the experiences of students and teachers in technology decision making and to leave with actionable tools for supporting faculty through thoughtful, community-centered technology adoption.

Explore tangible ways to build an Artificial Intelligence Task Force that transforms early conversations into cohesive, schoolwide direction across academics and operations. The session outlines the intentional steps used to launch and sustain a schoolwide task force; define its scope; and engage subcommittees representing academics, technology, human resources, communications, student support, governance, and more. Examine how this collaborative structure informed the development of a mission-aligned AI Position Statement designed to provide clarity and consistency for students, faculty, and families. Explore how leadership sequencing, shared ownership, and ongoing communication supported trust, alignment, and adaptability across the school community. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for structuring AI leadership, engaging stakeholders across departments, and developing guiding documentation that can evolve alongside emerging research and practice.

The adult community is the foundation of a successful school. Building an intentional professional growth system ensures you spend more time supporting, growing, and deepening engagement with the teachers and staff you want to keep at your school, instead of spending time, money, and effort on constantly recruiting and onboarding. 


Move beyond outdated, "check-the-box" professional development to drive retention and the success of your entire school. Join this interactive case study session to explore how two forward-thinking schools (St. Mary’s Episcopal School and Porter-Gaud School) have built dynamic, scaffolded professional growth systems. Learn how they foster feedback-rich communities where educators feel valued and supported, using intentional goal-setting processes that align teacher professional growth with strategic goals and thoughtfully onboarding new faculty members. This session will demonstrate that a culture of continuous learning, supported by personalized growth systems, is the most powerful retention tool for schools.

This interactive workshop will dive deep into the “how” of self-regulated learning in students, equipping educators with research-backed strategies and practical tools to empower learners for lifelong success. We will delve into recognizing our own abilities to understand, process, and regulate our learning as educators and, most importantly, how to transfer these abilities to our students so that they may be better equipped to navigate the ever-changing landscape of education. The strategies discussed will be applicable to learning at any level, in any subject matter. Together we’ll explore tangible techniques to make metacognition, goal-setting, and self-evaluation cornerstones of your classroom practice.

In today’s competitive, value-driven educational landscape, independent schools must not only provide exceptional learning experiences, they must also clearly demonstrate their impact. One powerful way to do this is by connecting measurable student outcomes in academic growth and well-being to the school’s value proposition.
This session explores how to use academic and well-being data to illuminate student progress and tell a compelling school story. Drawing on findings from ERB’s Learning Growth Among Students in SAIS Schools and our new Student Well-Being in School Report, we’ll examine how national data sets can contextualize local school performance across academic, social-emotional, and broader well-being dimensions.
Participants will also hear from an SAIS school leader who will share how they have learned  to layer school-level data with national trends to create mission-aligned, meaningful narratives, reinforcing what makes their school distinct and valuable to families, trustees, and the wider community. This is data with purpose: insight-driven, strategic, and deeply connected to what matters most.

Independent schools are being asked to make faster, higher-stakes institutional advancement decisions with limited time and scattered information. This session offers a practical Enroll–Support–Advance playbook for using AI to turn your school’s data into insight and action. Participants will learn how AI can help combine admissions, financial aid, and community data to spot under-reached local markets and better align enrollment outcomes with demographic and socioeconomic goals. We will also show how AI can help schools build a more complete picture of student success and improve student support by analyzing patterns across multiple academic and well-being indicators. Finally, we will share workflow designs for AI-assisted admissions application reading and AI-supported donor prospecting and next steps, freeing institutional advancement professionals from tedious legwork and empowering them to deliver on the human value proposition of their schools.