2026 SAIS Annual Conference

Your teachers love the mission and the work and care deeply about students and community. But many are quietly asking, “Can I keep doing this and have a life?” In this session, go deeper with the research and data collected from SAIS motivation & engagement surveys and focus groups. Unpack what's driving burnout and attrition in our schools. Bring your toughest challenges into the conversation and learn from colleagues who are finding real solutions around workload, compensation, and sustainable career pathways.

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.

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.