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 Marshall Reeve, finds that students who take initiative in their own learning not only feel better, they out-achieve achievers - a finding with direct implications for an era when AI can produce the proxy products that schools have long used to measure learning.

Together, Seth and Rebecca explore what it means that engagement modes are states and not traits, why self-awareness about which mode you're in may be the skill that matters most in an AI-saturated classroom, and why the resistors - not the achievers - are actually closest to explorer mode. Rebecca distinguishes cognitive stunting from cognitive bypass: the concern isn't students using AI to speed up work they can already do, but students outsourcing cognitive work they haven't yet built. She unpacks her task force's central finding - that "teach-not-tell" AI use narrows risk while "wide AI use" accelerates disengagement - and argues for a burden-of-proof model before new AI tools get scaled. And she makes the trust problem concrete: anti-plagiarism posturing turns teachers into police, ruptures relationships, and produces exactly the kind of environment that research says is worst for learning.

Key topics:

• The four engagement modes: Passenger, Achiever, Resistor, Explorer
• Why states - not traits - is the crucial distinction
• Metacognition as the lever for mode-shifting
• Cognitive stunting vs. cognitive bypass
• "Teach-not-tell" vs. "tell-not-teach" AI use
• Why trust - not detection - is the right lens for academic integrity
• The pre-mortem methodology behind the Brookings AI task force

Links & Resources:

• The Disengaged Teen by Rebecca Winthrop and Jennifer Wallace - https://www.thedisengagedteen.com/
• Brookings report: A New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect (2026) - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-direction-for-students-in-an-ai-world-prosper-prepare-protect/
• John Marshall Reeve's work on agentic engagement - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00405841.2019.1702451
• Dr. Amy Berry's research on student engagement - https://www.amyberry.com.au/
• Dr. Trevor Soponis - https://mim.bepodcast.network/episodes/67-building-sustainable-professional-development-across-cultures-with-dr-trevor-soponis

Guest Bio: Rebecca Winthrop
Rebecca Winthrop is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of its Center for Universal Education, where she leads research on student engagement, learning quality, and education in crisis contexts. She co-authored The Disengaged Teen based on a decade of research across thousands of students and families, and recently chaired a global task force assessing the risks and benefits of generative AI in education across multiple countries. Her work focuses on how schools can shift from high-stakes proxy assessments to learning environments that build the capacities students actually need.

About the Host:
Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators - building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

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 Winthrop's framework distinguishing passengers, achievers, resistors, and explorers as different modes of student engagement.

Together, Seth and Phil explore the tension between personalizing learning for individual students and scaling any given approach across a whole system, why compliance-driven curriculum may be preparing students for a workplace that's already moved on to skills-based hiring, and what Rebecca Winthrop's engagement-and-agency framework gets right about the limits of always aiming for "explorer" mode. They also get into why coherence - not talent, and not curriculum - is what actually determines whether teachers share their best work: Phil contrasts a gifted teacher working entirely alone with a network of IB educators trading resources by the jump drive, simply because the second group had already agreed on a common framework.

Key topics:

• What school is actually for - market signal, individual capacity, or civic preparation
• The tension between personalization and scalability in education policy
• Compliance versus agency as workplace-readiness skills in the AI era
• Rebecca Winthrop's passenger / achiever / resistor / explorer framework
• Why coherent, shared systems - not individual talent - determine whether teachers collaborate
• The IB's schoolwide model as a case study in systemic coherence
• Self-knowledge and career choice at 22 versus 42

Links & Resources:

• Education by Design - Phil Evans's podcast: edubydesign.com
• International Baccalaureate: ibo.org

Guest Bio: Phil Evans
Phil Evans works on schoolwide adoption strategy for the International Baccalaureate, helping schools design and scale services that support IB implementation. He's spent nearly eighteen years teaching and working inside IB schools in the U.S. after moving from Australia in 2008, and in 2025 launched his own podcast, Education by Design, exploring how schools are architected rather than simply operated.

About the Host: Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

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 pillars" behind the program's design.

Together, Seth and Lesley explore how Nord Anglia's four connection pillars — self, world, experts, and community — took shape from that UCL research, and the test her team uses to decide whether a proposed activity (a long-requested "mathematics club," a Tanzania expedition, live drawing sessions paired with MIT and Juilliard) actually builds connection or just adds more schoolwork. They get into the harder part of running one platform across dozens of countries with different cultural and legal norms — what gets moderated, what gets held back for a specific school, and why something as simple as an image of a pig can be off-limits in some places. Lesley walks through the six student behaviors her team tracks, including the finding that students at Nord Anglia's most-connected schools score six to ten points higher than their peers on self-reported measures of those behaviors — and closes with what a school outside any international network can realistically borrow from the model.

Key Topics

• The four connection pillars: self, world, experts, community
• 2023 UCL research on intercultural competence
• Designing activities that build real cross-cultural connection (the mathematics club example)
• Content moderation across different countries' cultural and legal norms
• Collaborations with MIT, Juilliard, and UNICEF
• The six student behaviors and the most-connected-schools data
• Building global connection without an international network

Links & Resources

• Global Campus — Nord Anglia Education
• Nord Anglia Education
• Learning Explorations - Nord Anglia's podcast hosted by Emily Murphy: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/learning-explorations/id1673148486
• Seth's earlier Make It Mindful conversation with Emily Murphy on metacognition — https://www.banyangloballearning.com/podcast/45-metacognition-the-first-step-to-lifelong-learning-with-kayla-morehead-and-emily-murphy
• Why Distance Learning, Seth's other podcast — https://www.cilc.org/Members/Why-Distance-Learning-Podcast.aspx
• Banyan Global Cohorts
• World Savvy
• Svitlo School

Guest Bio: Lesley Hatton

Lesley Hatton is a Senior Programme Officer at Nord Anglia Education, where she works on Global Campus, the platform connecting students across Nord Anglia's international network of schools. Before moving into this role, she taught in international schools herself. Hatton studied at the University of Warwick and is based in Reading, UK.

About the Host

Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

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 work on the early launch of Bono's (RED) campaign.

Together, Seth and Christina explore RIVET's founding premise - that young people globally lack not ideas or drive, but access to capital - and the three-part framework Christina uses to describe what they actually need: financial capital, social capital, and imagination capital. They dig into why youth-led solutions to local problems tend to outperform top-down interventions, using the stories of Walter in Uganda and Stanley in Nigeria to show what that looks like in practice. They talk about patient capital, what it takes to bring skeptical communities along, and what both RIVET and schools are trying to do when they create space for young people to lead. The conversation ends somewhere Seth doesn't always get to go: a direct conversation about what education is fundamentally for, and why that question matters more than most schools are willing to admit. Walter's project, which started with a single $250 grant and a secondhand sewing machine, reduced teen pregnancies in his village by 65% within four years.

Key Topics

• RIVET's micro-grant model for global youth
• Financial, social, and imagination capital
• Youth-led vs. top-down social innovation
• Patient capital and redefining success and failure
• Cross-cultural community trust-building
• Connecting school curricula to real-world problems
• The three purposes of education

Links & Resources

• RIVET website: rivet.org
• RIVETED (RIVET's Substack): rivetorg.substack.com
• Katie Wales (Brighter Children) episode: https://mim.bepodcast.network/episodes/87-katie-wales

Guest Bio: Christina Rose

Christina Rose is co-founder and chief marketing and growth officer of RIVET, an organization that channels the collective consumer power of Gen Z and Gen Alpha into micro-grants for youth-led social innovation across 66 countries. She spent 20 years building brands at the intersection of profit and purpose, including work on the early launch of Bono's (RED) campaign and in strategic marketing at Thorn, the child-safety technology nonprofit founded by Ashton Kutcher. She holds a BA from Princeton University.

About the Host: Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators - building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

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, and that argument underlies the five-pillar governance framework he describes here.

Together, Seth and Travis explore what AI governance actually means as distinct from policy - the difference between rules and instructional purpose - and walk through the five-pillar framework Banyan has built around one central question: what thinking needs to stay human for learning to occur. They get into the classroom-level inconsistency this creates when one teacher bans AI and the one next door doesn't, why governance is a moving target rather than a document you write once, and what Travis actually tells other parents when they ask him what to do. The conversation closes on a specific, low-stakes way parents can start: showing kids what AI is capable of by helping them build something they already care about.

Key topics:

• AI governance vs. AI policy — what's the difference
• Banyan's five-pillar AI governance framework
• "Thinking must stay human" as the framework's center
• Why inconsistent classroom-level AI rules undermine trust
• Cognitive offloading and critical thinking risk
• Prompt engineering and the case for a dedicated AI class
• Practical guidance for parents navigating AI at home

Links & Resources:

• "Why Tech Policies Should Start with People: An Ethical Dilemma" — Banyan Global Learning blog, May 16, 2025
• "Artificial Intelligence in Education: AI Professional Development for Teachers" — Banyan Global Learning blog, August 5, 2025
• Banyan Global Learning AI Governance services: https://www.banyangloballearning.com/ai-governance

Guest Bio: Travis Moyer

Travis Moyer is Banyan Global Learning's Director of Programming, where he oversees new program development, including Banyan's AI governance work. He spent over a decade as an elementary and high school science teacher in the U.S., and with Banyan he specializes in live, synchronous distance learning. He holds an M.Ed. from Pepperdine University and a B.S. in Biology from Duke University.

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 — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

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 virtual classrooms, and that thinking shows up directly in how the program's activities are structured.

Together, Seth and Travis explore the origin of Global Cohorts in Banyan's 18-year partnership with Tsai Hsing School in Taipei, the recurring failure points of ad hoc classroom-to-classroom partnerships, and how running multiple cohorts in parallel solves for one partner dropping out mid-unit. They walk through the festivals unit step by step - how students share their own local festivals, study festivals from around the world, get matched with partner schools ahead of time, and eventually use AI to visualize a festival of their own design. The conversation lands on what happened when the exercise reached a cohort of Ukrainian students who'd been scattered by the war: without being prompted to, nearly every student built a festival about family and cultural preservation.

Key topics:

• Global Cohorts program design and origin
• Banyan's 18-year partnership with Tsai Hsing School, Taipei
• Solving classroom-partnership dropout with parallel cohorts
• The festivals unit: weekly structure and cadence
• Using AI to visualize student-designed festivals
• Ukrainian student cohort and displacement
• Place-based identity themes across cohorts (Minneapolis, Calgary)

Links & Resources:

• Banyan Global Cohorts program: https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts
• "The Flow State and Education: Deep Focus, Engagement, and Productivity" — Banyan Global Learning blog, December 20, 2024

Guest Bio: Travis Moyer

Travis Moyer is Banyan Global Learning's Director of Programming, where he oversees new program development, including Global Cohorts. He spent over a decade as an elementary and high school science teacher in the U.S., and with Banyan has specialized in live, synchronous distance learning. He holds an M.Ed. from Pepperdine University and a B.S. in Biology from Duke University.

About the Host: Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores.

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 episode, appearing on both Make It Mindful and My EdTech Life.

Together, Seth and Fonz explore the argument that teachers remain the ultimate technology in the classroom — not because AI isn't capable, but because the ability to read a room, improvise, and form genuine relationships with students isn't something that scales to a statistical prediction machine. They talk about the difference between cognitive offloading and cognitive stunting, the concern that students aren't just delegating skills they've developed, but missing the chance to develop them at all. Fonz pushes back on the language of "neural networks" and "learning," drawing on Dr. Emily Bender's stochastic parrots framework to argue that borrowing human vocabulary for these tools obscures what they actually are. They get into AI governance at the district level, including why Texas still has no state AI policy, what it looks like when a task force actually follows through versus when the conversation dies at back-to-school season, and why equal stakeholder representation (including parents) changes what a policy can do. The episode closes with Fonz's signature speed round, with finding meaning in the concept of NOW.

Key topics:

• The teacher as the ultimate technology in an AI-saturated classroom
• Cognitive stunting vs. cognitive offloading in student AI use
• Stochastic parrots and the danger of anthropomorphizing LLMs
• AI governance failures at the district level
• Trust between students, teachers, and parents in the AI era
• Finding purpose and meaning when automation reshapes work
• Generational differences in AI attitudes (Gen Z vs. Gen Alpha)

LINKS & RESOURCES

• My EdTech Life podcast — myedtech.life
• Kami — kamiapp.com (Fonz's current employer)
• Dr. Emily Bender — Stochastic Parrots paper — Bender, E.M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" FAccT 2021. https://s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/2021-bender-parrots.pdf
• Katherine Heavers episode — Make It Mindful https://mim.bepodcast.network/episodes/85-katherine-heavers
• Banyan Global Learning / Global Cohorts — https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

GUEST BIO: Dr. Alfonso "Fonz" Mendoza Jr.

Dr. Alfonso "Fonz" Mendoza Jr. is the Teaching and Learning Coordinator at Kami and host of My EdTech Life, a podcast now six years old and 373 episodes in. His work focuses on responsible AI adoption in K–12 education, cutting through the hype to examine what technology actually does for teachers and students, and what it can't replace. He is a Google Innovator, Adobe Education Innovator, and 2024 EdTech Digest Leadership Award winner for Best EdTech Author/Speaker or Podcaster.

ABOUT THE HOST

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 — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://banyangloballearning.com/