Across schools globally, a familiar pattern is emerging: students may meet academic benchmarks, yet still struggle to participate, express ideas clearly, or engage meaningfully in learning. At the same time, educators—already balancing significant demands—are being asked to personalise support at a level that is difficult to sustain through traditional approaches alone.

This session explores how AI is being used in real classrooms to support students more holistically—including confidence, voice, and social-emotional development—without adding to teachers’ workload. Integrated into everyday practice, these approaches help educators better understand and respond to student needs while fostering more inclusive, engaging environments.

Drawing on implementations across international schools, we will demonstrate how conversational AI and adaptive systems can increase participation across all students—regardless of personality or learning needs—while strengthening communication and reasoning, and providing actionable insight into engagement and progress.

Grounded in practical classroom examples —ranging from interactive student dialogue and real-time feedback to teacher-facing insights and the ability to design customised learning experiences— we will explore how schools are beginning to move beyond fragmented pilots toward more sustainable, school-wide approaches. Attendees will leave with a clearer sense of what this can look like in practice, along with a few realistic, high-leverage ideas they can adapt and try within their own context.

Explore how using Toddle AI or School AI chatbots can help your students brainstorm or gain understanding about an upcoming unit. In this case study, students interacted with 4 AI chatbots from different service learning client groups to find out more about the type of clients they could help. In this session we will explore how this method of unit introduction could apply to you!

AI has changed what students can produce, how they engage with work, and what it means to learn — and schools are responding in real time. Research tells us that AI can cut both ways: it can offload thinking entirely, or, when people genuinely own the work, it can intensify cognitive demand in ways we’re only beginning to understand. How we structure the classroom determines which of those outcomes we get. This session is about finding out where we are in that journey — individually and collectively — and building a clearer picture of how this technology is shaping us, our students, and our practice.
AI can meet any student where they are — in their language, at their level, on their terms. That’s a genuine unlock for engagement. But what a student does with that personalized access is the deeper question. The same tool that opens a topic up can just as easily close the thinking down — and to choose to offload thinking to AI is to choose to say no to a specific kind of learning. The distance between a student who is deeply invested in a problem and a student who has offloaded it entirely can look surprisingly similar from the outside — and navigating that gap is something even experienced professionals struggle to do for themselves. This session explores how we build the structures and strategies that help students, and ourselves, tell the difference.
This session won’t deliver a tidy set of answers — and that’s the point. The landscape is shifting too fast for fixed solutions. What we can do is walk the problem space together, sharpen our questions, and start building the kind of flexibility in ourselves that we’re going to need from our students. The challenge isn’t just supporting student agency — giving students choices within the structures we define. It’s building toward genuine ownership, where students understand what they’re learning, why it matters, and can navigate for themselves when the tools, the options, and the expectations keep changing.

A short series of provocative, moderated mini-activities resulting from my research—adaptable for any learning community—invites participants to explore in real time where and how creativity is boosted, shaped, or even limited through the use of AI in the classroom. Together, the group examines moments when AI genuinely enhances imaginative thinking, as well as situations where it may unintentionally narrow possibilities or reduce original thought.

Admissions’ AI Policies: Who Benefits, Who falls Behind, What Counselors Need to Clarify

A recent survey shows that 92% of students use AI tools to generate text, while contrastingly another reports that 39% of applicants avoided AI entirely due to ethical concerns. As colleges roll out AI policies, students and counselors are navigating a new area around equity and interpretation.

Are students who avoid AI being rewarded for integrity—or quietly disadvantaged? Have admissions offices changed how they evaluate applications? What has become more important than before?

Pioneer Academics developed the white paper of the current trend of AI’s impact in college admission, and will share the cutting edge insight at the session.

AI is transforming schools, but much of the conversation focuses on classroom use, detection tools, or student shortcuts. This roundtable reframes the discussion by asking a different question: Where does AI genuinely belong in schools?
Drawing on experience in systems architecture and school operations, this session explores how AI can responsibly improve productivity in administrative workflows, data management, reporting, and operational systems — freeing educators from repetitive tasks without weakening the teacher–student relationship. Participants will examine how to distinguish between productive automation and pedagogical erosion, and leave with a clearer framework for using AI to strengthen school systems while protecting meaningful learning.

In this session, I will share a model lesson demonstrating how AI can be meaningfully integrated into planning and assessment within the PYP classroom. The focus will be on how educators can begin with clear learning goals and success criteria, and then use AI as a tool to design engaging learning experiences and create aligned assessment strategies.

The session will explore how AI can support teachers in:

• Designing purposeful, inquiry-based lessons
• Creating formative and summative assessment tools
• Generating differentiated next steps based on student performance
• Supporting IEP goals and personalized learning pathways
• Segregating and organizing assessment data for clearer insights
• Identifying learning gaps and planning targeted interventions

Participants will leave with practical strategies to make assessment more efficient, data-informed, and responsive — while keeping student agency and authentic learning at the center.

In this model lesson, participants will experience a classroom-ready approach to developing AI literacy through intentional scaffolding. Using techniques from my “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course, we will move through a structured learning sequence that connects intuitive reasoning to intelligent systems. From there, the focus shifts to how AI systems are trained, how data influences outcomes, and where bias can surface. Participants will see how purposeful scaffolding strengthens student understanding of AI and leave with practical strategies they can adapt for their own classrooms.

Making Thinking Visible (MTV) Routines create a learning environment in which thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted. These simple, yet highly effective, structures can be used in any subject area, and at any grade level. This presentation will explore how classic MTV routines can be updated and enhanced, providing a scaffold for students to engage with AI in a way that promotes critical thinking, metacognition, and agency. This interactive session will demonstrate how AI can function as a thinking partner, helping students articulate, challenge, and refine their own ideas. Participants will experience redesigned routines such as See–Think–Wonder, Claim–Support–Question, and I Used to Think… Now I Think…, each adapted to foreground student thinking before and after AI interaction.

The presentation will emphasize ethical and inclusive classroom practice, showing how AI-enhanced routines can support multilingual learners, equalize participation, and make learning processes, rather than products, visible. Participants will reflect on how these routines align with inquiry-based pedagogy and the growing need to assess thinking rather than output.
By the end of the session, educators will leave with practical, adaptable strategies and a clear framework for using AI not as a shortcut, but as a tool that amplifies learning, deepens reflection, and keeps student thinking at the center of the classroom.

This session dives into one of its most powerful applications of AI in our classrooms: Creativity. Drawing from his book “AI-Enhanced Processes”, Alex McMillan will explore how the Think–Generate–Edit process helps students and educators use AI as a creative partner rather than a shortcut. Through research-based insights, classroom examples, and before-and-after transformations, participants will see how AI can expand imagination while keeping human thinking at the center. Expect a hands-on, reflective session that builds directly on the ideas from his keynote and invites you to reimagine what creativity looks like in AI-rich classrooms. You can get the session material on Alex’s site: AIEnhancedProcesses.com. Subscribe while you’re there to get his newsletter focused on process-based education with AI as an impactful collaborator.
Note: this session does not advocate for a particular set of tools nor does it show users how to use tools; instead, it focuses on a mindset and approach to leveraging AI to enhance creative thinking. This is a session Alex has run several times and remains an attendee favorite.