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Technology as Burnout Mitigation: Leadership Strategies for Sustainability and Risk Management
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1 |
Thursday, December 04,
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
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Future-Ready Workforce and Adaptable Organizations |
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Summary: Burnout among school employees is reaching a breaking point. Explore how to leverage technology solutions to reduce burnout, streamline operations, and create more sustainable workloads for independent school employees. From automating low-value tasks to improving communication, data management, and instructional support, technology—when implemented thoughtfully—can relieve pressure points across departments. Learn how to evaluate existing workflows, identify opportunities for technology to offload administrative burdens, and use ATLIS benchmarking data to frame conversations about resource allocation, staffing, and support. Join fellow heads, division directors, and tech leaders to approach burnout as a strategic and operational challenge with clear, actionable solutions.
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Block: 1 (Thursday, December 04, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Christina Lewellen, Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (ATLIS)
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AI Policy Lab, Part 1: Foundations & Analysis
AI Policy Lab
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1 |
Thursday, December 04,
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
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Future-Ready Workforce and Adaptable Organizations |
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Summary: Join us to examine real-world AI policy examples using case studies, evaluating sample policies for effectiveness and relevance. Learn the essential elements of a full-school implementation framework for responsible AI. Then use AI to prototype updates to your school’s mission, vision, and portrait of a graduate so these foundational documents remain relevant in a world of abundant AI. These updates are the prerequisites for crafting coherent and intelligent policies during Part 2 of the AI Policy Lab. Get an introduction to AI “personas” and prompting techniques.
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Block: 1 (Thursday, December 04, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM)
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Category: AI Policy Lab
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Type: AI Policy Lab
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Presenters: Christian Talbot and Amber Berry, Middle States Association
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AI-Enhanced Practices in Special Education: Flexible Pathways for Teaching and Learning
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1 |
Thursday, December 04,
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
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Ethical Innovation and Inclusive Design |
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Summary: How can educators use AI to build more inclusive, personalized, and responsive learning environments—especially for students with diverse learning needs? Join us for a practical, equity-centered introduction to AI in special education. Explore how to use AI to support strengths-based planning, adapt instruction, and promote whole-learner growth—while maintaining ethical responsibility and pedagogical integrity. Engage in live demonstrations, classroom examples, and collaborative turn-and-talks to reflect on how AI might fit into you instructional context and how to use it to amplify—not replace—human judgment and learner voice.
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Block: 1 (Thursday, December 04, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Armine Movsisyan, Ed3 DAO
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Leading with Confidence in the Age of Generative AI
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1 |
Thursday, December 04,
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
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Ethical Innovation and Inclusive Design |
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Summary: If you're curious, cautious, or even overwhelmed by generative AI, join us to get a better grasp. Through a mix of accessible explanations and extensive hands-on practice, build a working understanding of how tools like ChatGPT and Gemini function, how they’re already being used in schools, and what they mean for leadership, communication, and strategic planning. Demystify large language models, effective prompt design, and the ethical dimensions of AI use—focusing on relevance to independent school contexts. Begin shaping an informed, mission-aligned response to AI at your school and leave with a curated set of resources to continue your learning.
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Block: 1 (Thursday, December 04, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Brad Rathgeber, One Schoolhouse; Sarah Hanawald, Association for Academic Leaders
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AI for You, Academic Leader
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1 |
Thursday, December 04,
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
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Future-Ready Workforce and Adaptable Organizations |
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Summary: Find out how to integrate AI into your workday as a school leader. Learn to use generative AI not just as a tool for efficiency but also as a thought partner—one that can help sharpen your messaging, articulate your vision, and model reflective leadership in a time of rapid change. Get hands-on practice and explore real-world examples. Whether you're designing professional learning, writing parent updates, or reflecting on strategic challenges, generative AI can amplify your capacity while ensuring you focus more of your time on the relational and human-centered work that matters most. Discover how to turn possibility into practice.
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Block: 1 (Thursday, December 04, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Brad Rathgeber, One Schoolhouse, and Sarah Hanawald, Association for Academic Leaders
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The Co-Lab Approach: Leveraging Educator Agency & Collaborative Intelligence
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3 |
Thursday, December 04,
7:45 PM - 8:45 PM
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Future-Ready Workforce and Adaptable Organizations |
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Summary: To make pedagogically-informed decisions about AI in education, educators need more than just prompts, policies, or products—we need hands-on experience. Discover how to design PD that prioritizes ongoing experimentation with real classroom use cases—from lesson design and differentiation, to feedback and metacognition. Push back on the one-and-done style of AI PD that leaves educators without the insights or incentives to continue innovating on our own. Learn from our experiences leading the AI Co-Lab, a network of hundreds of independent school educators who engage in monthly experimentation to evaluate the power, potential, and pitfalls of AI use in our classrooms.
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Block: 3 (Thursday, December 04, 7:45 PM - 8:45 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Maureen Russo Rodríguez, St. Mark’s School (MA); Nate Green, Sidwell Friends School (DC)
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Thought Over Tactics: Teaching with AI That Deepens Thinking (Part 1)
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3 |
Thursday, December 04,
7:45 PM - 8:45 PM
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Empowering Learning Through Tech |
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Summary: Join us for practical, research-informed strategies to integrate generative AI into classrooms in ways that enhance—rather than outsource—student learning. Building on the core principle that AI use must be intentional, purposeful, and aligned with learning outcomes, explore how to design lessons, assignments, and class discussions that emphasize process over product. Examine how to foster critical AI literacy, design appropriate use guidelines, and motivate students to use AI as a thought partner, not an answer generator. Discover how you can respond when students over-rely on AI and get adaptable tools for policy building and classroom implementation.
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Block: 3 (Thursday, December 04, 7:45 PM - 8:45 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Ava Sirrah, Boston Consulting Group
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Student Safety in the Age of Deepfakes: Policy, Compliance & Crisis Response
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3 |
Thursday, December 04,
7:45 PM - 8:45 PM
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Ethical Innovation and Inclusive Design |
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Summary: As deepfake technologies rapidly evolve, independent schools face new digital risk that combines reputational, legal, and psychological harm in unprecedented ways. From AI-generated nude imagery of students to voice clones impersonating school leaders, these tools exploit trust and compromise safety. Join us to focus on one of the most urgent and disturbing uses of this technology: non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). Explore policy language, incident response considerations, and examples of best practices schools are adopting. Leave with greater awareness of the threats schools face, legal responsibilities related to NCII, and practical considerations for responding to incidents and educating your community.
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Block: 3 (Thursday, December 04, 7:45 PM - 8:45 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Justin Perillo, NAIS; Evan Harris, Pathos Consulting Group
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AI Policy Lab, Part 2: Policy Implementation & Action Planning
AI Policy Lab
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3 |
Thursday, December 04,
7:45 PM - 8:45 PM
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Future-Ready Workforce and Adaptable Organizations |
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Summary: Join us to connect AI policy creation to strategy and implementation, so the focus shifts to stakeholder engagement, decision-making frameworks, and shared understanding. Building on your work from part 1, develop AI policies for student and faculty handbooks using structured prompting sequences. Work in teams to prototype department-specific AI use cases, ethical guidelines, and transparency requirements while addressing bias, access, and academic integrity. Leave with actionable plans for policy rollout, including executive sponsorship strategies and techniques for building community buy-in around responsible AI use.
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Block: 3 (Thursday, December 04, 7:45 PM - 8:45 PM)
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Category: AI Policy Lab
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Type: AI Policy Lab
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Presenters: Christian Talbot and Amber Berry, Middle States Association
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AI Stands for Accessibility and Innovation
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4 |
Friday, December 05,
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
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Ethical Innovation and Inclusive Design |
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Summary: Join us to engage in hands-on exploration and discuss the benefits and responsible use of AI in education. Discover exciting applications of generative AI and prepare to use them immediately to make your teaching more efficient and effective. Focus on ensuring accessibility and mastery, engaging our students in meaningful ways, and inspiring joy across the curriculum. Explore a range of turnkey tools available now. Take the opportunity to play in the “AI Sandbox” and leave well-prepared to implement seamless student accommodations for your neurodiverse populations, enhance educational outcomes, and provide an enriched classroom experience for all students.
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Block: 4 (Friday, December 05, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Jen Tuten, Marin Primary & Middle School (CA)
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AI Agents & Emergent Learning: What’s Ahead & What We Can Do Now
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4 |
Friday, December 05,
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
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Future-Ready Workforce and Adaptable Organizations |
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Summary: Explore the emerging world of AI agents—systems capable of acting with autonomy and adapting over time—and consider how they might shift the roles of teachers, learners, and curricula in the years ahead. Examine how current AI tools can already help us reimagine pedagogy today, enabling more responsive feedback, richer student voice, deeper differentiation, and new models of collaboration. More than a tool for efficiency, learn to view AI as a catalyst for transformation—one that invites us to rethink what learning looks like and what learners need most in an AI-shaped future.
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Block: 4 (Friday, December 05, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Vriti Saraf and Armine Movsisyan, Ed3 DAO
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Future-Ready Learning: Aligning Curriculum with Tomorrow’s Skills
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4 |
Friday, December 05,
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
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Empowering Learning Through Tech |
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Summary: As AI reshapes the world of work, education must shift from content coverage to skill development—especially in areas machines can’t easily replicate. Grounded in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, explore the top competencies students need to thrive in an AI-enhanced world: analytical thinking, adaptability, creativity, critical thinking, resilience, and tech literacy. Join fellow academic leaders, instructional coaches, and tech-integrated educators to examine how your current curriculum measures up against the skills forecasted for 2025 and beyond. Share insights, compare strategies, and learn from what other schools are doing to integrate future skills and AI into real classroom experiences.
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Block: 4 (Friday, December 05, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Ashley Cross, Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (ATLIS)
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Bridging the Confidence Gap: Empowering Educators for AI Integration in Independent Schools
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6 |
Friday, December 05,
7:45 PM - 8:45 PM
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Future-Ready Workforce and Adaptable Organizations |
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Summary: Join us to delve into current support structures needed to help educators confidently integrate generative AI into classrooms. Draw from recent NAIS survey data to identify educator confidence and training gaps in dealing with generative AI (including regional and demographic differences) and get actionable recommendations for school leaders to address this confidence gap.
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Block: 6 (Friday, December 05, 7:45 PM - 8:45 PM)
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Presenters: Amada Torres and Grant Stringer, NAIS
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Purposeful Planning for Equitable Access to AI: A Community-wide, Student-Led Approach
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6 |
Friday, December 05,
7:45 PM - 8:45 PM
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Ethical Innovation and Inclusive Design |
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Summary: When ChatGPT launched, Lakeside School grappled with how generative AI should intersect with our mission and values. What started with faculty PD accelerated when students proposed Andromeda, a custom AI platform. The equity-focused work of the students inspired school leadership to provide opt-in access to a paid ChatGPT account for all ninth–12th grade students. Get insights into the student-led initiative and our intensive preparation this fall. Share real-time learning—from navigating faculty concerns about academic integrity to onboarding students and communicating with our broader community. Explore approaches you can adapt, regardless of where your school is with AI adoption.
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Block: 6 (Friday, December 05, 7:45 PM - 8:45 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Jamie Britto, Lakeside School (WA)
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Thought Over Tactics: Teaching with AI That Deepens Thinking (Part 2)
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6 |
Friday, December 05,
7:45 PM - 8:45 PM
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Empowering Learning Through Tech |
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Summary: Join us for practical, research-informed strategies to integrate generative AI into classrooms in ways that enhance—rather than outsource—student learning. Building on the core principle that AI use must be intentional, purposeful, and aligned with learning outcomes, explore how to design lessons, assignments, and class discussions that emphasize process over product. Examine how to foster critical AI literacy, design appropriate use guidelines, and motivate students to use AI as a thought partner, not an answer generator. Discover how you can respond when students over-rely on AI and get adaptable tools for policy building and classroom implementation.
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Block: 6 (Friday, December 05, 7:45 PM - 8:45 PM)
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Category: Workshop
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Presenters: Ava Sirrah, Boston Consulting Group
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