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 teachers had been handed materials written for older students and told to make them work. The episode makes the case that what happens in the primary years isn't just preparation for real learning — it is real learning, and most schools treat it as invisible.

Together, Seth, Mitch, and Sarah explore what the three core executive functions — working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility — actually look like when a child is five versus eight versus twelve, and why the developmental arc across those years matters for how teachers structure everything from transitions to independent work time. Sarah draws on her years teaching emerging readers to describe how cognitive load quietly derails decoding, how visual clutter competes with attention, and why playing music with lyrics during work time is, as she puts it, "really cruel." The conversation gets genuinely interesting when Seth pushes back on inhibition — asking whether what looks like off-task behavior might just be a child doing exactly what they need — and the discussion that follows is one of the more honest treatments of classroom compliance versus developmental reality you'll hear on an education podcast.

Key Topics

• The three core executive functions: working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility
• Why K–3 materials can't simply be adapted from K–12 resources
• Cognitive load and how instructional design either protects or depletes it
• The developmental arc from preschool through third grade and what changes around grades 3–4
• Classroom environment design: visuals, acoustics, physical layout, and attention
• Routines as an executive functioning tool, not just a management strategy
• When off-task behavior reflects unmet developmental needs vs. instructional design failures

Links & Resources'
Executive Functions for Every K-3 Classroom by Mitch Weathers and Sarah Oberle, Ed.D. (K–3 focus) — https://organizedbinder.com/product/ef-k3-book/

• Executive Functions for Every K-3 Classroom by Mitch Weathers and Sarah Oberle, Ed.D. (K–3 focus) — https://organizedbinder.com/product/ef-k3-book/
• Executive Functions for Every Classroom (Mitch Weathers' first book, grades 3–12) — https://organizedbinder.com/product/executive-functions-for-every-classroom/
• Mitch Weathers' website: OrganizeBinder — https://organizedbinder.com/

Guest Bios

Mitch Weathers works with educators on applying executive functioning research to classroom practice. His first book focused on grades 3–12 and was widely used in school professional development. His new book, co-authored with Sarah Oberle, extends that work into the primary grades (K–3), an audience he intentionally left out of the first book because, as he says, he's not a primary teacher. He writes and consults under the OrganizeBinder brand.

Sarah Oberle, Ed.D. is an early childhood educator who spent years teaching emerging readers before pursuing doctoral research on working memory. Her classroom experience — figuring out through trial and error why some things worked and others didn't — eventually met the research, and the alignment gave her a framework for anticipating where instruction breaks down before it does. She brings that practitioner-to-researcher perspective to the book.

About the Host:
Seth Fleischauer is a former classroom teacher and the founder of Banyan Global Learning. Make It Mindful explores how people, cultures, technologies, cognitive processes, and school systems shape what happens in classrooms around the world.

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 access flooded classrooms without providing additional support, and connects that experience directly to what she's seeing now in U.S. schools facing school choice expansion, teacher shortages, and the pressure to adopt every new initiative at once.

Together, Seth and Jessica explore why measuring teacher wellbeing is so difficult and why qualitative judgment still matters, how cultural context shapes what counts as a behavior problem and what motivates students, what schedules and workloads quietly signal to teachers about how much their effectiveness actually matters, and why adding initiatives on top of weak foundations accelerates burnout rather than solving it. Jessica also shares a specific example from a school in Colombia where an American teacher adapted her math instruction to work with — rather than against — the social, collective culture of her students, offering a concrete picture of what culturally responsive intervention looks like in practice.

Key topics:

• Teacher efficacy as a component of job satisfaction and retention
• The limits of quantitative measurement for wellbeing
• Cultural differences in student motivation: intrinsic vs. extrinsic
• Schedule design and its unintended impact on teachers
• Addition without subtraction: the workload problem
• School choice policy and the costs of rapid enrollment growth
• Neuroscience basics that translate directly into classroom management
• School-student "match" as a framework for the future of school choice

Links & Resources:

• Northshore Learning — coaching, school partnerships, and on-demand courses for educators: northshorelearning.org
• Jessica Werner on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jessica-werner-ph-d-818032163
• Northshore Learning YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCznAU47jszmmJyFBWd_1Lvw
• Hidden Brain podcast with Shankar Vedantam (recommended by Jessica): hiddenbrain.org
• Justin Reich, MIT Teaching Systems Lab — referenced by Seth on "addition by subtraction" in schools: https://makeitmindful.transistor.fm/episodes/76-experiment-with-humility-teaching-in-the-ai-evidence-gap-with-justin-reich

Guest Bio: Jessica Werner, Ph.D.

Jessica Werner is the founder and CEO of Northshore Learning, where she works with schools in the U.S. and internationally to support teacher effectiveness and student behavior through personalized coaching, group training, and on-demand professional development. Her work is grounded in neuroscience and centers on what actually allows teachers to feel effective — and what systematically undermines that feeling over time. Jessica holds a Ph.D. in education, with doctoral research focused on the implementation challenges of Uganda's universal secondary education policy, and has over 20 years of experience as a classroom teacher, professor of education, and consultant.

About the Host: Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators. See banyangloballearning.com.

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 framework for helping students separate fact from interpretation, build emotional muscle in measurable steps, and find common ground even when values genuinely clash.

Along the way, Chris draws on everything from gym metaphors to the Enneagram to a sociology study involving voluntary self-electrocution to make the case that the oldest human art form — telling stories — might also be one of the most powerful tools in a teacher's toolkit.

Together, Seth and Chris explore the neuroscience of narrative, the taxonomy of resilience, and what it looks like to introduce intentional discomfort into a classroom — including the surprisingly radical act of letting kids be bored.

Key Topics Discussed:

• What narrative therapy actually is — and why it's less about therapy and more about learning to hold your own story at arm's length
• The description → evaluation → interpretation framework, and how a photograph of a woman in a wedding dress teaches you more about assumptions than any lecture could
• Why our brains prefer a complete story to an accurate one — and what that costs us
• The "gym as intentional inefficiency" model: how to introduce beneficial discomfort in measurable, safe steps
• Dr. Wong's taxonomy of resilience — cognitive, behavioral, emotional, relational, and motivational — and why giving students language for these differences is itself an act of empowerment
• What to do when cross-cultural conflict isn't a misunderstanding — it's a genuine clash of values
• The Enneagram as a tool for digging beneath belief systems to find the shared motivations underneath
• Why boredom might be the most underrated creative catalyst in schools — and the sociology study that proves people would rather electrocute themselves than sit with it
• Awe as an emerging opportunity in education (Seth's answer to Chris's lightning round question)

Guest Bio:

Chris O'Shaughnessy is an international school consultant whose work takes him into schools across cultures and contexts around the world. Drawing on a background in sociology, he helps educators build the skills — empathy, resilience, cross-cultural communication — that don't show up on a standardized test but determine everything about how students navigate the world. He is based at chris-o.com.

Host Bio:

Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of the Make It Mindful podcast. His work focuses on global learning, cultural competency, and the evolving role of technology in education. Through Banyan Global Learning, he develops live virtual learning experiences that connect students to new people, places, and ways of thinking.

Episode Links:

• Chris O'Shaughnessy's website: chris-o.com
• Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World — Michele Borba
• Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy — Emily Bazelon
• Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
• The Homework Machine podcast — Justin Reich, MIT Teaching Systems Lab