Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Rebecca Winthrop - senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Disengaged Teen - about the four modes of student engagement her team identified across a decade of research, and what those modes reveal about how generative AI is reshaping students' relationship to learning. Her framework, grounded in work by researcher John Mar...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Phil Evans - a career educator who works on schoolwide adoption strategy for the International Baccalaureate and hosts his own podcast, Education by Design - about what school is actually for, and how personalization, agency, and systemic coherence pull against each other in practice. The conversation leans on Brookings researcher Rebecca Winthro...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Lesley Hatton, Senior Programme Officer at Nord Anglia Education, about Global Campus — the platform connecting nearly 90 schools across Nord Anglia's international network, and what it takes to design cross-cultural connection at that scale. The conversation draws on 2023 research with University College London that identified four "connection p...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Judy Paulick — associate professor of teacher education at the University of Virginia — about a question her field has never really studied: what home visits mean to the families receiving them, not just the teachers making them. Her team has just begun data collection on a new W.T. Grant Foundation-funded study following 25 teachers and 75 famil...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Christina Rose - co-founder and chief marketing officer of RIVET, which funds micro-grants for youth-led social innovation in 66 countries - about what actually changes in a young person when they're trusted with real resources, and what schools might take from that. RIVET's model draws on Christina's two decades in cause marketing, including wor...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Travis Moyer - Banyan Global Learning's Director of Programming - about AI governance: the difference between AI policy and AI governance, and why so many schools have bought AI tools without building the shared language to use them well. Moyer has written previously that tech policy should start with human values rather than device restrictions,...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Travis Moyer - Banyan Global Learning's Director of Programming - about Global Cohorts, the four-week virtual exchange program he piloted this spring with three classroom cohorts, and what happens when students design their own festivals for an international audience. Moyer has written previously about designing for flow and deep engagement in vi...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Dr. Alfonso "Fonz" Mendoza Jr. — Teaching and Learning Coordinator at Kami and host of My EdTech Life, a 373-episode podcast that has reached more than 8,500 educators — about what AI actually does and doesn't do for teachers, and what it means to find meaning in work when automation keeps changing what work looks like. This is a crossover episod...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Katie Hurley Wales — Executive Director of Brighter Children, an all-volunteer nonprofit that funds primary education across India, Colombia, Honduras, Kenya, and Guatemala — about what venture philanthropy actually looks like in practice, and what it takes to build schools that outlast the funders who supported them. Brighter Children doesn't br...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Dr. Grant Atkins and Dr. Caroline Miller — a researcher who studies how educational technology gets implemented and whether it works, and a former high school teacher who left the classroom just as generative AI was beginning to reshape how students write — about the current backlash against ed tech and what's actually driving it. The conversatio...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Dr. Katherine M. Heavers — a high school biology teacher, evolutionary biologist, and co-author of Transforming Teaching Through Relationship-Building and Self-Reflection: Finding Our Way In — about what it actually takes to build authentic relationships in a classroom. Heavers draws on her doctoral theory of the "telling break" and 12 years of r...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Dr. Maggie Broderick — academic program director of the Master of Arts in Social Emotional Learning at National University's Sanford College of Education — about teacher dispositions, the classrooms inside schools where marginalized students find belonging, and what's happening to teacher attrition when emotion labor goes unsupported. Maggie's cu...

In this episode of Make It Mindful , Seth talks with Rushton Hurley — founder of Next Vista for Learning and Director of Innovation at Junipero Serra High School — about the annual showcase that brings student projects from Serra in California together with student projects from Parklands College in Cape Town. Rushton's claim, sharpened over years of running the Creative Solutions for the Global G...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Mitch Weathers and Sarah Oberle, Ed. D. — a middle/high school teacher-turned-author and a primary educator who completed her doctorate studying working memory — about why executive functioning looks fundamentally different in grades K–3 than it does anywhere else in school. Their new co-authored book grew directly out of feedback that K–3 teache...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Jessica Werner, Ph. D., founder and CEO of Northshore Learning, about why teacher burnout is better understood as a systems problem than a personal one — and what happens when schools try to fix it without addressing the foundations that are already shaky. Jessica draws on her doctoral research in Uganda, where a policy expanding secondary school...

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth Fleischauer talks with international school consultant Chris O'Shaughnessy about narrative therapy — what it is, why it matters, and how its techniques can quietly transform the way educators approach empathy, resilience, and cross-cultural understanding. What begins as a conversation about storytelling opens into something much bigger: a practical framewor...

In this episode of Make It Mindful , Seth Fleischauer talks with child development expert and author Deborah Farmer Kris about awe — what it is, why it matters, and why it might be the missing piece at the center of meaningful education. What begins as a conversation about a single emotion opens up into something much bigger: a research-backed framework for understanding how wonder drives curiosit...

In this episode of Make It Mindful , Seth Fleischauer welcomes Christian Pinedo of AIEDU to explore what artificial intelligence actually means for the future of education. Rather than focusing on tools or hype, the conversation digs into how AI is exposing deeper challenges in the education system—from outdated assessment models to the need for systemic change. Drawing on his experience at Stanfo...

Ryan Nuckolls-Rosa, Executive Director of Dramatic Results, joins Seth to talk about what it takes to build classrooms where students feel safe enough to create, collaborate, and think critically. They unpack “art scars,” why belonging is not a “nice-to-have,” and how arts integration and human-centered design can help students see themselves as problem-solvers early—especially in Title I contexts...

Justin Reich (MIT) on “local science,” AI hype cycles, and why schools need to do less. Justin Reich returns to the podcast with an “applied historian” lens: not dismissing generative AI as just another hype cycle , but insisting we treat early classroom uses as experiments—because history says our first instincts about new tech in schools are often wrong. We talk about what Reich learned while ma...

What happens when the “direct service” model—pull-out support, isolated practice, and heroic effort—doesn’t translate into real independence for students in real classrooms? In this episode, Seth Fleischauer is joined again by Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan —speech-language pathologist, executive functioning specialist, and host of the De Facto Leaders podcast—to talk about what breaks down when clinicia...

In this short bonus episode, Host Seth Fleischauer reflects on a question sparked by a recent conversation with Stephanie Frenel of SchoolOps AI : why do schools so often default to quantitative data and shy away from qualitative insight? Drawing on his own teaching experience and conversations with fellow educators, Seth explores how numbers feel safer, more objective, and easier to defend—while...

School leaders are drowning in data—test scores, surveys, observations, behavior reports—but starving for insight. In this episode of Make It Mindful , Seth Fleischauer is joined by Stephanie Frenel , founder and CEO of SchoolOps AI , for a deep conversation about what it actually takes to make sense of complexity in schools—and how AI can support that work without stripping out the human judgment...

In this episode, Seth speaks with Valérie Besanceney , an international educator, author, former Executive Director of Safe Passage Across Networks (SPAN), and current International Advisor on Transitions, Care, and Mobility Services for the Council of International Schools (CIS) . Her work focuses on helping globally mobile students—and the educators and institutions that support them—navigate tr...

In this short follow-up episode, Seth revisits a moment from his recent conversation with Karle Delo about student use of AI. While recording that episode, Karle mentioned catching a student actively using AI to cheat on math homework during her workshop—an anecdote that raised a question Seth forgot to ask in the moment: When she paused the workshop and asked students why any of this matters, wha...