Meeting the Future with Courage and Care: Reflections from the CAIS Heads and Chairs Conference
Earlier this week, I had the privilege of joining school leaders from across Canada at the annual Heads and Chairs Conference hosted by the Canadian Accredited Independent Schools (CAIS). This year's theme, The Future of Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, sparked conversations that were equal parts challenging and energizing, the kind that make you reconsider assumptions you didn't even know you held.
The keynote speaker, futurist and business strategist Iliana Oris Valiente, painted a vivid picture of the forces currently reshaping our world. She described three "tectonic plates" in motion: geopolitical realignments, exponential advances in technology and what she called widespread human overwhelm. Each force is significant on its own; together, they're fundamentally shifting the landscape of education and work.
Valiente was candid about the disruption ahead. The traditional pathway—school to university to stable career—is becoming less predictable. Entry-level positions that once awaited university graduates are increasingly managed by AI, and the economic equation that long connected education to job security is being rewritten before our eyes.
But here's what struck me most: this wasn't a talk about decline. It was an invitation to reimagine a future of possibility.
Valiente drew an important distinction between the generative AI we're already seeing—tools that create text and images—and the next wave of agentic AI, which can take autonomous action and make decisions. This evolution, she explained, is transforming not just how organizations operate, but which human capacities will matter most in the years ahead.
And this is where the conversation turned hopeful.
Intelligence alone, Valiente argued, will no longer be enough. The qualities that will truly distinguish humans in an AI-saturated world are deeply, wonderfully human: agency, creativity, collaboration and judgment. The ability to navigate ambiguity. To act wisely when there's no template to follow. To bring discernment to complex problems.
These aren't futuristic skills we need to invent. They're capacities we're already nurturing at UTS through inquiry-based learning, authentic problem-solving and reflective engagement with the issues that matter. Every time our students wrestle with a challenging question, work through disagreement to find common ground or revise their thinking based on new evidence, they're developing exactly what the future needs.
Valiente also spoke movingly about cultivating our students' inner lives. As machines grow more capable, she said, humans must become more human. Emotional regulation, empathy, sustained focus—these are emerging as essential skills for both leadership and wellbeing. And they're learned not through content delivery, but through meaningful human experience: collaboration, community, and yes, the resilience that comes from both challenge and failure.
What resonated most powerfully across the room was her call for a "new grammar of education." The old grammar, built on standardization, memorization and preparation for knowledge-based work, needs to evolve into something richer: an approach grounded in personalization, curiosity, and formation for life itself.
In this new paradigm, teachers aren't merely transmitters of knowledge. They're developers of humans. They're the essential, caring and skilled guides who help young people make meaning, exercise sound judgement and learn to act with integrity in an uncertain world.
Sitting in that audience, I felt a deep sense of gratitude and reassurance for the strength of our UTS school community. We have the extraordinary privilege of teaching students who are both intellectually curious and genuinely caring. Our responsibility and our opportunity is to ensure that as technology evolves, our approach to learning continues to serve what is most enduring: the capacity of our students to think deeply, to feel genuinely, and to act wisely in service of others.
The age of AI is upon us. But so too is the age of human possibility.
I know our students are ready for this moment. They are curious, capable and compassionate. Our job is to walk alongside them, helping them discover not just what they can know, but who they can become.
Let's meet this future together, with both courage and care.
