2026 SAIS Annual Conference

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.