Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning is a podcast for globally minded educators who want deep, long-form conversations about how teaching and learning are changing — and what to do about it.
Hosted by former classroom teacher and Banyan Global Learning founder Seth Fleischauer, the show explores how people, cultures, technologies, cognitive processes, and school systems shape what happens in classrooms around the world. Each long-form episode looks closely at the conditions that help students and educators thrive — from executive functioning and identity development to virtual learning, multilingual education, global competence, and the rise of AI.
Seth talks with teachers, researchers, psychologists, and school leaders who look closely at how students understand themselves, build relationships, and develop the capacities that underlie deep learning — skills like perspective-taking, communication, and global competence that are essential for navigating an interconnected world. These conversations surface the kinds of cross-cultural experiences and hard-to-measure abilities that shape real achievement. Together, they consider how to integrate new technologies in ways that strengthen—not replace—the human center of learning.
The result is a set of ideas, stories, and practical strategies educators can apply to help students succeed in a complex and fast-changing world.
# Transcript — Katherine M. Heavers
*Timestamps after each cut are approximations (approx).*
---
## [INTRO — recorded separately]
[00:00.000]
**PRE-INTRO SPONSOR BLOCK**
Support for Make It Mindful is brought to you by World Savvy, partnering with K-12 schools, districts, and community leaders to prepare youth to thrive in a complex, interconnected world.
Make It Mindful is proud to feature Svitlo School, empowering the future social, political and business leaders of Ukraine to become confident global citizens.
---
**INTRO PROPER**
Welcome to Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning, the podcast about how students learn, who they're becoming, and how new technologies and global experiences reshape teaching. I'm Seth Fleischauer, founder of Banyan Global Learning.
My guest today is Dr. Katherine M. Heavers — a high school biology teacher and co-author of *Transforming Teaching Through Relationship-Building and Self-Reflection: Finding Our Way In* — who spent 12 years earning her doctorate in the philosophy of education while teaching full-time, and whose theory of the "telling break" forms the backbone of the book. In this conversation, Kate argues that everything the most effective teachers do — building trust, creating emotional safety, leading with vulnerability — is a craft. Not a gift. Which means it can be taught to anyone.
---
**POST-INTRO SPONSOR BLOCK**
This episode of Make It Mindful is brought to you by Banyan Global Learning.
At Banyan Global Learning, we design structured live experiences that connect classrooms to the world.
Banyan Global Cohorts is a 4-week journey in global competence. Classrooms join an international cohort of 3–4 schools and meet weekly during regular class time for facilitated, 45-minute sessions built around a compelling Big Question.
Students explore global contexts through virtual field trips, exchange ideas with international peers, and create a final digital artifact that expresses identity, perspective, and connection across cultures.
If you're curious about what this could look like in your classroom or school, we'd love to talk. You can find us at banyangloballearning.com.
And now here's my conversation with Kate Heavers.
---
## CONVERSATION
[00:00.946] **Seth:** Kate, welcome to the podcast.
[00:03.554] **Katherine M. Heavers:** Thank you so much, Seth.
[00:06.114] **Seth:** I am very excited for this conversation. We met not too long ago. It was about a month or a couple even a couple weeks at Princeton Reunions. I was at my 25th. We were at an ed tech event. Of course, they were talking about AI because what is anybody else talking about right now in education besides AI? Well, I'll tell you what, whatever we're talking about today, because we might actually avoid the topic. but I had such an amazing conversation with you also last week when we touch based again. And I'm just super excited to have you here and to know you. Thank you for being here.
[~00:35] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for the gift of this podcast to the world. I have started listening as you promised your former guests have already done and I can't wait to listen to all 80 something, if I'm not mistaken. So thank you so much for having me.
[~00:59] (approx) **Seth:** good plug. Thank you. Come back anytime, Kate. so I'm gonna start by asking about your book, because I you've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about it. I I have this like a cynical view of like modern books where I feel like they are a good idea with 200 pages wrapped around them. I'm wondering, A, is that true? And of your book or is your book different? And B, what is the good idea that the pages are wrapped around?
[~01:35] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** Well, first I want to tell you that I'm not going to be avoiding the topic of AI at all because it's not possible to talk about education without it. And Val Kearns and I, my co-author, we had been talking about teaching for a good decade while she was a teacher where we taught here in central Jersey.
[~01:44] (approx) **Seth:** Damn. We were so close.
[~02:03] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** And it was November of 2022, if I recall. I must have just been reading the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which said, you know, read all about it. ChatGPT is here. And the very first paragraph of that article said something about Chat GPT. And then the next one said, the paragraph before was written with Chat GPT, right? And I thought, wow, wow.
[~02:27] (approx) **Seth:** Scandalous.
[~02:30] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** the next month, December 4th, 2022, I emailed Val. She she kept the email and I said, let's write our book. So we've known for a long time, based it was really based on our anti-racism work, where we were doing PD with teachers, teaching them all about how they can change their brains. I was the science, I teach biology, she was the social science, she was teaching history at the time. And together we knew that we are not your average readers. And because we know that full-time teachers can't actually read all the books on their nightstand, Val and I had the idea that we would give them some chapters to read. They could read them out of order, and that we would split the book into two parts. The first part being how to strengthen your classroom relationships, and the second part how to look inside and then shine out. In other words, the role that self-reflection plays in a teacher's life. So grounding it in your cynical, it's just, you know, 200 pages. I actually have the copy here. And so I would say first that one of the most important things that people may or may not understand is that the brain is neuroplastic. And so what I love about this book is that it's a social studies teacher and a science teacher where we each would write about a topic. I would brainstorm on a Sunday. I would email Val and say, Val, we're writing about authenticity. So go ahead, honey, write about authenticity. So she would and I would. And it's just a special book because we quote ourselves, you know, it says VK. Here's what Val Kearns has to say. And then there's KH, that's me. And then every other paragraph in the entire book is written just like you and I are doing now, Seth, where we hop our computers. We had a perpetual Zoom link. We would look in one another's faces, reversed of course, and actually write sentence by sentence. And then we decided what pieces we would excerpt from our own writing. You can imagine Val had to cut most of my writing. You know, she was like, Kate, this book can't just be your journal. We have to really get to it. so I wanted to just read one piece to you and then tell you the heart of the whole thing.
[~05:19] (approx) **Seth:** Okay.
[~05:19] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** When I was a child, this is from page 38 in the chapter called Building Trust. When I was a child and there was truth to what a person said to me, I felt honored and seen. I vowed to earn my students' trust and be worthy of it and be a truth teller too. We entrust into the hands and hearts of our students our own truth. at great risk. Our students too, in ways they cannot even know, need us to be those they can trust the most.
I wrote a dissertation in 2012 for Rutgers University in order to earn my doctorate and the very long title of a degree called Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education. And I did this over the course of a 12 year period while teaching science full time. It was the most incredible 12 years of my life. My professor and my thesis advisor, Dr. James Girelli, Jim for short, was an incredible teacher and philosopher. He still is. And he taught me that if I was going to change people's lives, I was going to have to be a theorist while at the same time being a practitioner. So theory into practice. No practitioner should be negligent, should they should be so schooled in the theory that every choice they make is backed up. And as you can imagine, having studied ecology and evolutionary biology, being trained in science, science is my first way of knowing, right? The word science means a way of knowing. So this book came about because I knew that no one was reading my dissertation. And my dissertation, my dissertation was important, is important, but it was not in the format that anyone would ever sit down to read. It's like 196 pages, all you know, the whole chapter two of like what are all my sources? And right, like so I knew that to get my theory of the telling break out to the world, it was going to need to be in book form and it was going to need to be in a practical guide right in a like handbook type thing.
[~08:02] (approx) **Seth:** Ha ha ha.
[~08:16] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** Without self-awareness, we have no self-regulation. But we're humans in a classroom. And if you do a follow-up question and you happen to say, Kate, what's the telling break? I will say to you that the telling break is the moment when a teacher breaks out of the Charlie Brown, no, no, no, this is a teacher, right? Breaks out and says, Did I ever tell you about the time I studied lemurs in Madagascar? Right. And then suddenly you're on a sojourn. You're on a trip with your teacher down a path. It feels magical. You're in the you're in the neuroscience of storytelling. There's so much now coming out in the research about storytelling. And I interviewed students who told me all of a sudden it felt like a break. It felt like a moment in time where my teacher was a person. And I was a person, and I could move out of those little white lines, those blue and white lines on the paper, and I was alive again. I forgot that I was in a classroom. So this theory, which I personally love, because you know, I thought of it, called the telling break. It's a conceptual model of the telling break. No one knew about it except for my brother, Nate Heavers. The reason I'm bringing him up is because he's the only other educator who has, for the last decade since I wrote my dissertation, used the telling break, thought about the telling break, taught about the telling break. Because you know, if there is no content, if there is no stream of consciousness or lecture or something, then there is no break. So there has to be that space, right? In between the content. There has to be that time for the brain to. And honestly, the closest thing I can tell you is that it's like depolarization and repolarization of a neuron, right? So the reason why we have to slow down and be at human pace, right? To me, it's walking pace. It's the it's the pace of a ribosome making proteins, those proteins reaching out for the dendritic connections. this book is a journey for teachers who don't have time to read the theory. And in our conclusion, which we call Sojourners Together, we write Demonstrating our true authentic selves will help us to gain the trust and respect of others, to work together in ways that allow for the opportunities that can only come with vulnerability and risk taking.
We know that working alone may result in a product delivered more quickly. So does using a model that can do the thinking, quotes, air quotes, thinking for you. But it seldom produces the best product. As Garrison said in Garrison, Jim Garrison, the philosopher, acknowledges the importance of shared dialogue in developing a person for the better. When he states changes in identity are not a matter of willing oneself to change. It takes critical self-reflection and the kind of intelligence that can only come from shared inquiry. So I don't need to read any more of this. I need to tell you that Val helped me become anti-racist. She said, look at the bias and the stereotyping, and we have PD that's trying to change our brains, but look at all this bias that we're not addressing. Teachers need to know. Who they are, what they're doing, what they're saying, they need to learn self-awareness, they need to learn the science of why it's so hard to change your adaptive subconscious brain. They need to know they can change, and the way that they're going to actually change is in relationship with colleagues who care about them, who are willing to hold whatever it is they've got to share. We wrote this book out of our friendship. If you read it at some point, even just excerpts. Read how we decided to be friends because Val doesn't trust. And I'm one of those Uber trusters. My problem is I trust immediately. And Val was like, Ooh, who is this Kate Heavers? And I was like, Val, let's be lifelong friends. And so if you read about that relationship, how we came to our friendship, you'll see the book was born from our friendship, anchored and grounded in theory, made for any level teacher, a pre-K through a college professor. So thank you so much for asking me about it. And you've probably heard enough. You don't even need to read it now, but I hope you will.
[~13:17] (approx) **Seth:** I mean, that's part of what I was doing. I was trying to make it so that nobody actually had to read it. You could just tell us all about it. You tell us the secret sauce right here. no, just kidding. it's it sounds like there's it is it is not just 200 pages wrapped around a good idea, but maybe five pages wrapped around 50 good ideas. I there's a lot there, and I'm gonna try to like pull pull at some threads. you're talking about authenticity, you're talking about storytelling, you're talking about the need to know oneself in order to be able to practice authenticity, to create meaning and learning in relationships with other people, and to the the necess the necessity of internal work to be able to even show up and be authentic with others and therefore forge authentic connections. And that all of this, we didn't talk at all about learning, but that all of this can help the learning process because we are social learners, right? And I I think my question and it it's funny too because you you were talking about the the telling break and that's something that I stumbled on to, you know, just through trial and error very, very early on in teaching, where I'm like, these kids really want to know about me. And I like talking about myself. That's the that's the that's the the the secret. I I probably shouldn't admit out loud. But I also recognize that like, you know, you as a teacher, you know you know when you have them, right? Like you you know when you've got twenty-six sets of eyes who are truly engaged the way that I was engaged in your conversation when you were presenting at Princeton a couple of weeks ago. And you know when you don't have them. And when you have that telling break and you talk about your lemurs in Madagascar or whatever it is, you feel the the mood, the vibe shift in the classroom. And all of a sudden you have them again if you had lost them. my daughter had a teacher last year. So funny. She thought that they all thought that they were tricking him into telling stories. His whole thing was that the curriculum was embedded in the storytelling, right? Like now she wants to watch the Odyssey, this Christopher Nolan movie that's coming out this summer. She's like, can't wait for it to come out. She never would have been stoked about the Odyssey, right? Like he was able to bring in his own personal anecdotes. He also, you know, he was an avid coffee drinker. So I think he was always at like a level 11 when it came to the amount of like enthusiasm he was bringing to it. But she just absolutely loved that class. And she's a great example of someone who she will love your class if you connect with her. Right. If if you bring your passion, if you if you understand yourself well enough to know what you're excited about and build around that, whether it be the content or these telling breaks, just that introduce your own personal life and and work on the relationship building part of things. you are a biologist by trade. you studied evolutionary biology and you comment these things I think a bit differently than other people do. Although I hear that your mentor wanted you to be both a practitioner and a theorist. So you've got some educational theory back there, but I'm wondering about this biologist lens. all like and maybe, maybe it is as simple as asking, like, how does a biologist think about authenticity?
[~18:23] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** that's beautiful.
[~18:40] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** Well, at the root of the word authenticate is author. So this idea of being the author of your own life. I can't say it's for sure just a human idea, but it makes me immediately start thinking about how much our genes dictate our choices and our outcomes. And we love this word. We love Brene Brown. I mean Big hearts for Brene Brown. I've read everything that woman has written, including The Atlas of the Heart, which is just such a must read for teachers. And in her book, Daring Greatly, which I read in 2015, she really breaks it down for why risk taking and being vulnerable are so important in the in the classroom. So I would say that. Authenticity is a name for A way of being that includes honesty. And honesty is very dangerous because honesty might give away the best hunting grounds. It might give away a secret that's going to give an edge to your tribe. but I do believe that honesty is the way toward intimacy. So for intellectual and emotional. And even spiritual intimacy, honesty is your way in. So the name of our book is Finding Our Way In. We believe that as teachers, I mean, I I've taught first graders maybe twice in my life, and it's like never again. I've taught college students, they're fine. They're just they're fine. but the age I teach from 14, the ninth graders in in biology to the 17 and 18 year olds in Human anatomy and physiology, this age can sniff out a liar in second splat, like a bloodhound. And teenagers can sniff out an inauthentic person so fast. she's fronting. She's capping. There's no right. Like they can just tell when you're not for real. And I would say it's a great advantage in a classroom to be able to hold steady to who you are. And it is a great advantage if you're like the leader of a population of people, maybe like I'm thinking I'm thinking 200,000 years ago, by the way. I'm not thinking currently. It's the way that you gain trust. And without trust, you have nothing. Because why should anyone learn anything that I say and like take the time to make the neural traces in their brain if I'm not trustworthy? Where's my cred? And so the way that, you know, gosh, I'd love to meet your daughter and see if I could teach her something with or without a story, right? The way to gain trust is to show that you are comfortable in your own skin. And that was one of the, that was one of the descriptors of teachers who do this. it just so happens that he's my, you know, singing director too, now that that we're not at the same school, but that idea of being comfortable in your own skin, being authentically you and not trying to be anybody but yourself is what gravitates. humans to other humans. Right. So and I believe the reason is that when you're comfortable with yourself, There's this intuitive piece for the for the witness of this that you're not beating yourself up. And if you're not beating yourself up all the time and you're just accepting yourself as you are, you know, you're not trying to be perfect. You just you are how you are, then the person with you knows they're safe because you're not trying to look for where they're not enough. It's a it's a feeling of enoughness, and so. When you are authentic in the classroom. you make it safe and you make it allowed to be becoming. Okay. We're all learners. Yes, I have the title of teacher. We're all becoming. And and that's what Megan Laverty says. I'm pretty sure, pretty sure I probably said this on the panel. Megan Dr. Megan Laverty at at Teachers College Columbia. I I I learned her quote years ago. I got to see her once in real life. She's a philosopher for education. She said to teach is to intervene in another's becoming. And and so, you know, whether it's a podcast, because right now, I'm teaching you and you're teaching me. I'm learning from you, you're learning from me. We're teaching people we don't know who will listen to this in some unknown time. And so So biology gives us the neurons, right? You wanted me to answer this question about the authenticity of biology. Biology gives us the neurons. And those neurons with their nissile bodies that make the gray matter gray, their job is to make those highways in our mind so that the pathway of telling a story is smooth, so that the pathway of telling the truth is smooth. For example, I don't stumble when a student asks me an inappropriate question. I simply say that is not appropriate for this time and place. And therefore I will not answer that question. And I don't berate them. You know, how can you ask me such a question? That's so inappropriate. How dare you, et cetera? I just say, I'm in place. Inappropriate for this time and place. But one day, when you're 40 and I'm 80, fine. You know. So I think that. Thinking about learning as ribosomes building proteins so that dendrites can reach out to axons reminds us to take it easy. We're in this biology. No tech in the world is going to change the fundamental 3.8 billion years of of life's history, you know, in some split second. We are stuck with our slow. process of rewiring our brains. And and we do that best when we feel safe and we feel safe when we feel we can trust the people we're with. So that's that's how I would circle it back to authenticity.
[~26:04] (approx) **Seth:** Yeah, I think you brought in a lot of biology there. And I I I like that because even at Princeton there were two biology departments, right? There was molecular biology and then there was also evolutionary biology. And you brought in both of these here, but I I as as a psychologist, another soft science, you know, talk about evolutionary biology as a s the softer of the two sciences. you know, I'm really intrigued by the idea of of the correlation between between trust and honesty. And when I think about culture, like building culture, whether it be within a classroom, within a company, it it all comes down to expectations, right? Like when people have expectations of a situation and then those expectations are met, they feel safe and they feel that the world is predictable, right? There's so much going on that is outside of our control that our brain is constantly looking for ways to. feel some sort of control over it, even though control is an illusion, but we're trying to we're trying to gain as much of it as we can. And when we have people who are honest and who speak what they mean, even if that is the honest response that I'm not going to tell you my honest response right now, and here's why, that breeds trust, it breeds predictability, right? It's it's about meeting expectations. When you have an expectation that is dashed, For whatever reason, either because that expectation wasn't communicated clearly in the beginning, or maybe it was communicated clearly, but then it was gone back on. Maybe the person didn't do the internal work that they needed to do in order to be able to express what the expectation actually was going to be because they didn't know how they were going to respond to this given situation. But when that expectation is dashed, you dash the trust and then you Create hesitancy. You create there is no flow anymore. You cannot simply show up as yourself because you don't know if that is going to be okay right now, because you don't know if this expectation is going to be met. And I think that is millions of years old. I think that is, you know, the the clan of 50 people needing to know that that person is going to. Be on the night watch when they say they're going to be on the night watch. Like it is about survival. there's plenty of metaphorical survival that happens now. And that's why our our evolutionary brains kick in for these types of of experiences to make sure that that we do find safety with people that we find to be safe. That's all what we gain from this internal exploration. From the ability to know oneself and present one's authentic self. I'm wondering in the classroom, what are the costs of showing up authentically?
[~28:22] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** The first cost is being misunderstood. And even being disliked. I think in September there are plenty of students who find my way of being so different that it's almost jarring. They write about it in their metacognitive papers. Who is this lady making a stretch and meditate? What is that? What is this singing bowl? Why is she so much? But I can't really frame it as cost, Seth. There's no there's never been a downside. The more me I am, the more they them they are, right? Like it There is no downside. I do think people think I'm odd. But what people think is just their business.
[~30:30] (approx) **Seth:** Beautifully said. I I wanna switch gears a little bit. We're talking about psychological safety, yet learning itself can be uncomfortable. How do you square those two things?
[~30:44] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** Well, my rule about this is is that I always tell my students why we're doing everything we're doing. Nothing is a mystery. And I explain to them every choice I make. So I explain to them what cognitive disequilibrium is, and I explain to them how their discomfort points to their lack of practice. And I walk them through a planned 10 months where they will be. Forced to do uncomfortable things. And reliably, every June, I get these thank you letters, metacognitive papers, you know, spoken in person, feedback where they say, I can't believe what a community you built of our class. You built a community where I feel safe to work with any other person here. And I can't believe how many friends I have here. This is going to be the class I remember. And this is because I put their names on, I write their names before I even meet them. I study their faces and I write their names on the back of playing cards because those shuffle so well. And I write their first and last names and memorize their names before I even meet them. And then I just put them into groups and I study them like I study the lemurs, like I was saying when I met you. You just observe everything. So I put people together and I watch what happens. Like the way you would put chemicals together in chemistry and watch what happens. And you can see sometimes how one personality makes another one shut down. You just see how they how they work together. You can see where they're being clicky, where they're leaving someone out. And I just observe. I just observe. Just like the evolutionary biology training that I have. and so yeah, there's struggle. They don't want to have to speak in front of the class. They don't want to have to cite their, you know, cite their sources. Everything is a struggle, Seth. Everything is a struggle. Why does this have to be so hard? Why do we have to write this down? Why do we have to everything? They want to know why they have to do it. And I mean, it requires infinite patience, but there's a method to the To all the madness. And I just explain. This is how your brain works. This is what you need. I understand that it's it's developmentally appropriate for you to think I'm cringe. And on and on it goes. It goes it's it's it's a beautiful and pretty predictable process at this point where I know I don't say to them, I know best, because that's annoying. I just factually say, here's why we're doing this. And then later on, why did we do this? this is why we did this. It's just that same pattern over and over and over. But nothing's a mystery. And I don't say ever because I said so. That is the worst teacher response ever. Ever. So no. My answer is yes. Right, right, right. But but I have a sign. I have a sign on my wall. I made this quote myself: my my process. So if something doesn't work for you, or you're a student in my class and you're not ready to speak out loud or you're not ready to answer, you're allowed to say pass. And you're allowed to say, My brain, my process, this isn't working for me, doc. I need this. Right. And I just say, yeah.
[~34:43] (approx) **Seth:** in a in a classroom where you've built trust does that really work, right? Because other conversation. But if you trust them, they trust you, then that can be the case.
[~34:56] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** Yeah. For for example, do we have time for one example on this? I have a new student. I teach multi-level, multi-level. So honors biology, biology, English language learners who are now being called multi language learners. And I have a new student who just came two weeks ago. He doesn't speak any English, and he didn't want to do the work because he doesn't know any English. So I took him aside because my colleague was working with some other people and we just we just used his phone we used Google Translate and we drew a plant cell and I would write the English and then he would type into his phone, got the Spanish, and then he would write out the Spanish by hand. We're talking the most basic side by side. I'm the paraclete walking by this beautiful human. He was ready to do nothing. And even my colleague was like, you know like What are we going to do? We got all these people. How how can we what can we do? And I just decided all these other people can wait. They've all had my time all year. This person needs to feel like he matters and that he is as precious as all these other people. My time went to helping this child word by word, literally word by word today. and so I would say the other students watching, they know. They don't even need to ask. Why is Dr. Heaver spending all the time in one person? They don't need to ask. They've been told each of you is infinitely precious. Your guardian sent you here to be treated with love and respect and to learn. And so I am super explanatory, probably to the point of ad nauseum. But that's my final answer.
[~36:48] (approx) **Seth:** Hmm. All right. Lightning round. I'm requesting shorter answers for these three questions that I borrowed from Adam Grant. Thank you, Adam, if you're listening. what is something you're rethinking right now?
[~37:02] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** My own personal use of AI.
[~37:06] (approx) **Seth:** Okay, say a little bit more.
[~37:09] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** My seventeen year old niece. And I had a conversation on Sunday where she told me she had used AI in the fall as a junior. And then she took an ethics class in the spring of her junior year and her ethics teacher. Changed her mind. She started going to office hours for math help instead of using the AI thought, right? And she said, Aunt Kate, I found myself saving a little time. And then I wondered what I was actually saving. I realized I was robbing myself. So full transparency since we were talking about authenticity, you'll have to tell me when it's not lightning anymore. I took ChatGPT off my phone and I got rid of my account because I had been paying 20 bucks a month to have my own account. Chatty knew a lot about me. And I'm not saying I'm never going to use AI again. I still have to teach my students how to use it and so on. And obviously, when I ask S-I-R-I to play a song, I'm using it. But I I'm no longer going to offload my cognition. And it was a lightning round of use. Three and a half years of exploration. I'm good.
[~38:35] (approx) **Seth:** Hmm. Fascinating. recommend a piece of media.
[~38:44] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** I only watch Dreaming in the summertime. So I started watching Grace and Frankie. And my really good friend, she's a writer for the engineering department at Princeton. When I told her I had started watching Grace and Frankie, she said, Kate, I'm jealous that you haven't seen it yet because you're on the beginning of something lovely. And I needed an escape, but I needed a wholesome escape because my mom is dying of dementia. And I needed to see other people staying alive through pain.
[~39:29] (approx) **Seth:** Beautiful. Do you have any questions for me?
[~39:33] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** Yes, I really do. So when we were talking on Wednesday, September 3rd, and you said, I want to be known and famous, whereas my father Paul never had that desire. I'm wondering if you what you really meant and really like think about this now. Are you sure it was that you wanted to be famous? Or is it more that you'd like to work and achieve world peace?
[~40:13] (approx) **Seth:** as I look up a picture of my dad over here. I'm surprised I said the word famous. That's I don't think that's necessarily a word that I I something I strive for. I do like attention, I will be honest. I like your attention right now. I like I like everyone's attention. Sometimes. Sometimes I want to be by myself. I think as I've thought about this in my career and in my life, No, everybody wants impact. And there's a question of like that like deep impact with a single person versus like shallower impact with many people. I enjoy being up in front of a room full of people. I enjoy earning those eyeballs and riding that wave of attention so that I can uncover some truth even in the moment that maybe I came in with a certain plan, but in response to what I'm feeling have arrived at something new and different. Kind of like what I'm doing right now. I don't think I want a a room I I don't think I want fame that's bigger than like a room full of people. You know, like like I think that's my like upper limit. I want to be respected. I want to be respected in my field. I want people to love this podcast. I'm really proud of this podcast and the people that I've gotten to know here and the conversations that we've had. I want this podcast to be inspiring for people and I know that it is. I also know that I haven't done the work that I need to do to make it like super popular. But every time I have someone on, I think I earn another listener. and I also know that there are while this podcast started off as a podcast for educators, there are a lot of parents that really appreciate knowing about education in this deep kind of way. And really, we're on here talking a lot about just life in general, right? It just happens to be through the lens of education. So I yeah, I I I want all of those things. I think that in certain ways my dad wanted those things as well. but he was a little bit more of a hermit and didn't even necessarily want that room full of eyes. Maybe he wanted like a dinner party size room full of eyes. whereas I'm I want more like keynote speaker size room full of eyes. so yeah, that is that's I think that's where I'm at with me and fame. That was very vulnerable that I just that was that was a lot. Thanks for thanks for pulling that out of me, Kate.
[~43:16] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** I've been a keynote speaker once and I'll do it again too. So anybody out there, what I wanted to say is it comes back to the human brain, Seth, because It's really how we get our source of of joy. And I think we're very lucky people that we know our sources of joy. And when you talk about that room, I think I'm the only one who secretly loves back to school night. I love to talk to the parents and I know I'm the only one. I know I'm the only one. I never tell my colleagues, so hopefully, you know, they won't all listen. I guess we should try. But I love feeling connected to other humans and I love listening to them too. So it what you know when I give the give the floor to a student many, many, many times a day, we're all listening. I feel so lucky I get to listen to that person too. I love to listen and I love to talk.
[~44:11] (approx) **Seth:** Yeah.
[~44:11] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** So it what you know when I give the give the floor to a student many, many, many times a day, we're all listening. I feel so lucky I get to listen to that person too. I love to listen and I love to talk.
[~44:25] (approx) **Seth:** Beautifully said. Well, you're a great podcast guest then, because that's what we do here. I will link to your book in the show notes. Is there anywhere else you would like me to send my listeners?
[~44:37] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** Well, you already mentioned Adam Grant. Have you seen Adam Grant and Brene Brown? They are teamed up now. And when I go on LinkedIn, I see them teamed up. And that's my favorite new place to see short but very powerful snippets. It was Adam Grant who taught me that the and the do not need to be corrected. There was a time when I would correct my student speech and I would say, Let's work on those ums and uhs. And Adam Grant said it's a signal to your listener that something very important is coming up and that they need the time to pause. It signals to your brain, the listening brain, if I say or or whatever my word crutch, they used to call it word crutches, because it gets your brain ready and you tune in even more. So I would say, re Brene Brown. And listen to Adam Grant and Renee having conversations that are much shorter than this one, but very valuable.
[~45:44] (approx) **Seth:** Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for being here, Kate. Really appreciate your time.
[~45:49] (approx) **Katherine M. Heavers:** You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
---
## [OUTRO — recorded separately]
That's a wrap on our conversation with Dr. Katherine M. Heavers.
Kate's central claim is that she isn't extraordinary — that everything she does to build trust, create safety, and lead with love in a classroom is learnable, and that anyone can be trained to navigate uncertainty, take risks, and be vulnerable with students. That's a direct challenge to the way most people think about great teachers, which is that you either have it or you don't. If she's right, the question isn't whether to hire the right kind of person — it's whether your school has the conditions that make this kind of teaching possible for anyone.
We'll have a link to the book in the show notes. Thanks for listening to Make It Mindful, and we'll see you next time.