SAIL Surrey Academy of Innovative Learning 25-26

Surrey Academy of Innovative Learning’s 2025–2026 focus is to build educator and student capacity to use generative AI thoughtfully, ethically, and creatively—especially within the STEAMX Humanities 8–10 cohort. In these courses, teachers and students co-develop routines and shared language so AI supports inquiry, reading, writing, and project-based learning while fostering curiosity and critical thinking.

Students engage with “Learning with GenAI – Guiding Principles” throughout the year as they use AI for brainstorming, drafting, feedback, and reflection. Together, they practice academic integrity, respect intellectual property, and take personal responsibility for when and how AI contributes to their learning—strengthening self-awareness and ethical decision-making aligned with BC’s social-emotional competency.

SAIL’s interdisciplinary, inquiry-driven model positions learners to use digital tools authentically across programs. As AI becomes part of daily life, shared practices ensure students treat AI as a thinking partner, not a shortcut, deepening assessment, digital citizenship, and independent, critical thought.

Our Guiding Principles for Learning with GenAI

To support consistent practice across courses and programs, SAIL uses shared guiding principles for student use of generative AI, adapted from the UBC “Learning with GenAI – Guiding Principles” document. These principles are referenced in course syllabi and revisited in advisory, core classes, and student-led conferences.

Learning with GenAI Guiding Principles.pdf

Our Next Steps

In the coming school year, SAIL will embed GenAI routines into student learning plans and conferences, inviting learners to articulate how AI fits into their personal learning strategies and goals. Staff will continue to refine shared language, exemplars, and classroom resources that model responsible AI use, including short student-facing versions of the guiding principles that are co-created and displayed in classrooms and online spaces.

During the 2025-2026 school year, teachers participated in an SFU professional development workshop to explore artificial intelligence (AI). Teachers learned about what AI actually is and how it works. The workshop covered how it can be (or is being) used by both teachers and students, today and in the future.

 For further exploration, teachers will be exploring assessment with AI during their summer Pro-D days, so they may continue to support students to embrace AI in a responsible way.

In the STEAMX Humanities 8-10 class, students had the opportunity to work with AI during their current events discussions. Their teacher explicitly gave instructions on ways AI could be used to help them understand and research on more complex topics in order to help them actively learn from each other and help them participate more confidently in discussions.

Students also were given explicit ideas and scaffolding of how to use AI responsibly during the research and planning process of their inquiry projects. At the end of the year, students participated in a survey to help teachers understand the next steps for the 2026-2027 school year. Here were some of the insights gained from the survey:

1. Impact of AI on inquiry and current events

Overall, students report that AI has had a limited impact on how they approach inquiry and almost no role in current events, with many choosing not to use it because they value forming their own opinions and worry about bias or “soulless” answers. A smaller group, however, do use AI in current events to quickly clarify unfamiliar terms, summarize dense articles, explain long discussion questions, or help them organize their own thoughts into clearer written responses while still contributing original ideas in class. Others use AI in similarly narrow, task-focused ways for inquiry—such as summarizing complex texts, organizing notes, generating outlines, or helping with citations—while still doing their own reading and analysis. 

2. What students want from teachers

Students consistently ask for very clear expectations about when AI is allowed, when it is not, and what responsible use looks like in Humanities and current events. Many want concrete teacher modeling and examples of “appropriate vs. inappropriate” use, while a substantial group prefer that teachers discourage or strictly limit AI—especially for analysis, art, and opinion-based work—so that original thinking and research remain central. A number of students also say that current guidance already feels clear and supportive, and they mainly want continued communication and occasional feedback on how they are using AI.

3. Underlying attitudes and tensions

Student attitudes cluster into three broad camps: strong skeptics who see AI as harmful to media literacy, deep reading, and even the environment; pragmatic but cautious users who see it as a useful tool for specific tasks; and students who feel current practices strike a reasonable balance. Many express concern that normalizing or promoting AI could increase dependence, erode research and writing skills, and shift learning toward speed and efficiency rather than thoughtful engagement with texts and ideas. At the same time, some students appreciate that AI can reduce workload for repetitive tasks and support accessibility, provided expectations remain anchored in their own thinking and voice.

Next steps for next year

• Clarify and codify boundaries: Create and share a simple, student-facing framework that distinguishes acceptable AI uses (e.g., organization, citation help, limited summarizing) from non-acceptable uses (e.g., generating current event responses, full analyses, or creative products), and adjust by grade level.

• Model “good use” in context: Build in a few short, explicit lessons where teachers demonstrate strong and weak examples of AI use in Humanities, including how to prompt, how to cross-check, and how AI can introduce bias or flatten nuance.

• Protect core thinking spaces: Design certain tasks (especially current events, discussion, and key inquiry checkpoints) as “AI-free” or “low-AI” zones, so students can practice independent reading, argument, and synthesis without technological shortcuts.

• Invite critical AI literacy: Use some of the more critical student perspectives as starting points for inquiry into AI’s impacts on media literacy, environment, labour, and democracy, aligning this with social studies competencies.

• Monitor and iterate: Check in mid-year with students about how the guidelines are working, and use their feedback to tune the balance between leveraging AI for support and safeguarding genuine, student-driven thinking.