Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast

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:

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


Creators and Guests

Host
Seth Fleischauer

What is Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast?

Make It Mindful is a podcast for educators and school leaders who think seriously about how learning is changing and want to explore what to do next. Hosted by Seth Fleischauer, founder of Banyan Global Learning and former classroom teacher, the show covers three territories: what AI actually changes about teaching and learning, what it takes to help students connect meaningfully across cultures, and the human conditions — belonging, awe, trust, emotional regulation — that learning depends on regardless of what else changes.

Guests include district administrators, researchers, clinical psychologists, curriculum designers, and classroom practitioners. Conversations are long-form and honest. Produced by Banyan Global Learning.

Travis Moyer — Part 2 of 2: AI Governance
INTRO (recorded separately)
Pre-intro sponsor block (verbatim):
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.
We are proud to feature Svitlo School - a free, extracurricular online school in English, that has educated more than 3,000 Ukrainian children since 2022. Children learn from native English speakers in the UK, US and across the world. Visit SvitloSchool.com to learn more about volunteering.
Intro proper:
Welcome back 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. This is part two of a two-part conversation with Travis Moyer, Banyan Global Learning's Director of Programming and Marketing. If you're just joining us, part one covered the Global Cohorts program Travis piloted this spring; today we get into the AI governance framework he's been building — five pillars centered on the idea that thinking has to stay human for learning to occur.
Post-intro sponsor block + guest lead-in (verbatim):
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 Travis Moyer.

CONVERSATION (clean, cuts applied, timestamps approx)
[00:00:00] (approx) Seth: Thank you for that thorough answer. I often am looking, when I ask people about what they do, at two main things — basically what it is, and why it works, and why it's important. I guess that's three. And you hit all those, so thank you. You mentioned AI, and I do want to get to AI, because this is another thing you're currently working on. I wanted to start with the question of why is AI so fascinating to you personally.
This has happened to both of us — I think a lot of educators who think deeply about how changes are impacting education, this forward-looking institution — the changes happening now might not only suggest what the future looks like, but also dictate what we do now to prepare students for those changes. There's this whole practice of how are things changing and how do we best prepare students for it. Obviously, though, in knowing you and talking with you about AI, it's like a personal passion that has grabbed you — has grabbed me too. I love thinking about this stuff, I love talking about this stuff. But I'm wondering what it is for you, this personal passion behind AI.
Travis Moyer: Yeah, it is — passion would be a good word for it. I've always been interested in very diverse areas of knowledge. My background is in biology — that's what I got my degree in — and then I've been an educator pretty much ever since. After graduation, I worked in a hospital for a number of years as a microbiologist. But for the past — I'm approaching 20 years in education now. As an educator, I'm a lifelong learner, always prided myself on that, always trying to learn new things. What struck me early on with AI was its ability to expand my capacities, my capabilities. If, for me personally, being interested in a lot of different things comes with a downside — it's sometimes difficult for me to focus intensely on one thing, or explore projects in depth, when I'm being pulled by interesting topics outside. So I think that was the heart of it — I was broadly interested in lots of things, and I realized pretty quickly two things. One is that AI had the ability to help me dive deeper into the things I was interested in. And number two, I really saw early on the potential of what AI could do — not necessarily the impact, because the impact is something I wrestle with every day as we design this stuff — what's the proper use of it, what's its ultimate impact on human society, huge questions — but I just knew right away, I could see this can integrate into every type of job, into your daily workflows, right away. When ChatGPT came out initially, ChatGPT-3, one of the first things that caught even news attention was the chat with a historical figure — this was before it was making documents and doing more generative work, just the chatbot itself.
Seth: Gosh, that feels like a bygone era. Remember that.
Travis Moyer: Right, right. I remember the first person I went to chat with was Abraham Lincoln, and I was blown away. And immediately, then, Ben Franklin —
Seth: Mine was Ben Franklin too.
Travis Moyer: Right — thinking about how that can be put into a classroom — immediately, every single subject could have a historical figure you talk to. All these capabilities were interesting to me personally, and I have two young kids who are in school, so I think about them too. But one of the amazing things about being at Banyan, and the work we do at Tsai Hsing and beyond, is that we have this capability to try new things as soon as they appear — a blessing most teachers and classrooms don't have, for good reasons. So it was this wild leap in technology, and there were immediately use cases for it professionally and personally. I just saw the writing on the wall, and we're not even close to being all the way there yet. It's still something that excites me every day.
Seth: And so here we are three-plus years later, almost four years later — and what we work on is AI governance, not AI policy, but AI governance. Explain to me why that — why is that the need that's being unaddressed?
Travis Moyer: Yeah, so what we are seeing — and again, when I say we, I'm seeing it from my own children's schools, in the news, but also in the work we do, the people we talk to, district leaders, principals, teachers, even at our own school — the number one issue is that AI is being used significantly by students, and it's also being used by well over half of the teachers out there. But for teachers, they're not getting much training, according to the national surveys. And governance, or the policy behind the use — it's so new, and policy is often built slowly. So what you have is this drift between usage and a lack of coherent, shared language for teachers in different classrooms. I think that's the biggest thing — you have all these teachers who say they're using it, and they don't have the training for it. And when you look at an actual school, you'll have one classroom that's banned AI, and the classroom next door embracing it with no guardrails — same grade level, same subject. Or a kid in AP Lit whose teacher says all the writing needs to be unaided, no AI use at all, and another teacher saying there's AI assistance on some levels. There's a lot of problems there — from a school level, having classrooms doing different things, not having coherent language between them, that's a big problem. AI governance is really about creating that shared language. It's a combination of instructional purpose and instructional principles. If you have governance without instructional purpose, that's what we call policy. And if you have instructional principles without governance, that's just good intentions. So AI governance is this thing that talks to everything in between.
Seth: So what I'm hearing is: there's policy, and then there's the way that policy gets rolled out, implemented, and enforced, or where the flexibility is within the policy and how that flexibility is dealt with — the way you manage the policy, that's where governance comes in. One thing you talked about is the inconsistency of experience across classrooms. I'm wondering if you think that in and of itself is a problem, given that different subject areas and classrooms might want to deal with AI in different ways — versus what would allow for variety of experience between classrooms, but still feel like sound AI policy and governance.
Travis Moyer: Yeah, good question. That's one thing that draws a lot of educators into the space, or at least one thing they really love — there's this sense of autonomy. When you're a teacher in a classroom, you're the boss of the room — you decide lots of things, but there are things you don't decide, because you get checked on, whether it's the standardized test scores your students have to achieve. Those things are set — there's no wiggle room there. There might be wiggle room in how you teach it, but the actual objectives are there. So your question really centers on what the students need to learn — what are the learning objectives. Just a simple question — one we've figured out in education for a long time. And that's right, that's where, for AI governance — and kind of going back to your original question, what we have right now is lots of tools. When AI came out, it was really exciting, and obviously people wanted to monetize it, so these tools flooded the market. What's really happening now is that we have this governance problem that is wearing a tool costume. Districts were reacting — they were buying these tools without governance, doing professional development without alignment — and establishing governance is that connective tissue. So, our work on AI governance — we have a framework, five pillars, and in the center of those five pillars is our instructional integration — that's the idea that thinking must stay human for learning to occur. That's at the heart of all of this. So: what are the objectives, what are students actually learning — we have that at the center because it determines everything else. When we talk about governance, policy, vendor vetting, procurement — all of those things need to know what the good is for the students. And the good rests with what thinking needs to stay human. This is the AI question we're battling right now. Schools and districts, on some level, need to decide what learning needs to remain human. There's a lot of research that can point us in the right direction, but there's going to be variability between districts and schools — but there are going to be skills. If it's fundamental grammar skills — I type something up now and I get the little red wiggly line if I'm missing grammar — that's an essential skill students need to practice. So if you can identify the skills, which we usually can — they change, they're Common Core now, but you find the learning objectives — and then ask the question: can this be AI-assisted or not? And then we get into cognitive science. These are difficult questions, but I don't think there's one right answer. Whatever the answer is for that state, district, or school, they need to have that answer — that foundation. And if something can be AI-assisted, and there's a benefit to learning how AI can assist in that objective, then to me there's important learning there for students — learning how to use AI to reach the learning objective, and also have the technology skills to see where AI can enhance it. So these are going to vary, but every school — those two classrooms where one isn't using AI and one is — their learning objective should be the same, and there should be communication to identify which piece of this can AI be used for without sacrificing cognitive growth or the skills students are trying to learn. It's a hard question, but there are things that can be set — and if a teacher doesn't want to use AI, even though it is an AI-assisted classified skill, well, that's on them, as long as it's understood from the district or principal level that these are our objectives, these things are essentially human, no AI assistance, these things can be AI-assisted. Then at the classroom level, if a teacher doesn't want to use it, there's a shared language, and the parents will know that language — if a parent comes in and talks to the teacher, the teacher might explain why they're doing it this way, but at least everyone's on the same page — the principal knows the objectives, knows which things can be AI-assisted, and if they want the school to use AI more and a teacher doesn't want to, that's a conversation the principal has with the teacher about bringing that in. But it's all about the shared language, the shared objectives, and identifying that framework of human-essential, no AI at all, to AI-assisted objectives.
Seth: Yeah, I mean, I'm hearing a lot of things. One of them is this work around what thinking needs to stay human. I think, to a certain extent, any given district has done that work when they adopted standards — these are the things we want students to learn — so at least that's a starting point. But then when you add the component of how can AI assist, that's where it gets fuzzy and messy. And I don't think there's — obviously it's been out for four years — there's no data yet about, well, when we approached AI this way in school, the outcomes were this, because there are no outcomes yet. The best we have is a freshman who's now a freshman in college. So it sounds like the idea here is simply to get intentional about it, even if that intention is based on some best guesses about how we think this should go collectively, as a district, a school, a community — these are the decisions we've made about how we're going to approach this, these are the things we're going to do together, these are the places where a teacher, a school, a student has their own discretion about their AI use, and these are the areas where they don't — simply making that more of an intentional practice, so there's shared language, understood expectations, metacognition at all levels about why you're making these decisions. And then, as with any active experiment, you observe the impact of the choices you make, and potentially revisit them, with structures built in to revisit them regularly. Is that essentially the idea of sound AI governance?
Travis Moyer: Yeah, I think that's pretty much exactly it. No district is going to be exactly the same as a partner district — there are going to be different needs and wishes from parents. But this is why I brought up the governance problem wearing the costume of a tool problem — right now, the easy answer is, here's a tool, and then teachers come in and learn how to use the tool. But as you said, it's the cohesion from top to bottom. I still, in my own children's district, hear about AI-related things that aren't being told to us directly. At the parent level, I think most parents, if you asked them detailed policy about what's happening in their schools, wouldn't know. Do the superintendents know? When parents go to board meetings and demand answers, often the superintendents don't know — and that's because there hasn't been that shared language. You need something to measure against — if everyone's aligned and knows what we're supposed to be doing, we can start identifying whether classrooms are working or not, whether students are happy with the AI use or not, and measure and adjust. Governance is always going to be a moving target — it's not something you set and forget. Like FERPA, for instance — you don't just write your FERPA policy and you're done, it's an ongoing, regular check-in. Governance is going to be the same way — hard work at first, but once you have the structures and check-ins in place, and the review of your own policy — because technology's going to keep changing, especially with AI, new things happening week to week — any policy you have right now is probably going to be a little out of date next year. But when you establish these policies, you can also establish the frameworks to make adjustments regularly — quarterly check-ins on various things. It's having that framework from top to bottom that everyone agrees on and knows what's happening, so when there are problems, they're a lot easier to identify and address.
Seth: Yeah. I get this question all the time from other parents who may or may not have done some thinking around AI in education, but they learn I work on this stuff and ask me: well, what do you think should be happening? What should I, as a parent, be thinking about when it comes to AI in education? How do you advise your parent friends if they ask you that question? I always kind of stumble, because I have ninety-seven answers and I struggle to reduce it to the size it needs to be for a social conversation. I'm wondering how you reduce it — what are your top things you say?
Travis Moyer: Good question. Fundamental facts to me: one, this thing is only — it's a steamroller, it's only going to grow more powerful and integrate more directly into our lives. That's a fact. We mentioned some of the cognitive research — while there are different ideas, the fundamental research education's been based on, a lot of the cognitive science, is very clear for decades. Number one: difficulty in learning is where the learning happens — we need to be challenged, we all know that, that's the basic idea.
Seth: Productive struggle.
Travis Moyer: Yeah — and a lot of work too on the different kinds of cognitive load, and that if you can offload the non-essential tasks, it can make the learning of the essential tasks even stronger. Teachers have always struggled with this, maybe not in those terms, but again, going back to what's the essential thing I'm trying to get my kid to learn, and getting rid of the unnecessary. But there's also a lot of research showing that students relying on this can lose critical thinking skills — this cognitive offloading — if you offload the essential things, there's not only a lack of learning, but it can be a regression. Those two ideas are really frightening to me, because if AI is growing and becoming more tied into our daily lives and everything we're going to be doing, and yet there's this clear and obvious cognitive risk — other studies talk about memory, we know intuitively that if you learn something but recall it less and less, it goes away. So all these tasks we learned when we were younger — if we start giving them up to AI, where does that lead us? So, to your question — I think you've got to be prepared. Learning how to use AI as a tool is extremely important, and I think it's a separate question from AI in the education setting — I think what it means is there needs to be, like there was shop class — we don't have shop class anymore — there needs to be an AI class. Part of this AI governance framework identifies when a skill can be AI-assisted, and then there are AI skills you need to know to use the AI to assist you. So there's a whole branch of education that's going to come out of this — prompt engineering was the phrase a number of years ago, how do you write a proper prompt — but it's going to go way deeper than that. So what I try to do with my kids is show them the things it's capable of, show them interesting ideas they have that they can make a reality with. We have a garden, and we built a web app that monitors the garden, lets them journal, take measurements, get weather updates for extra watering. These are things they like and enjoy, and we can explore it. For the Global Cohorts, they have an idea — my son likes writing stories, and taking those and making them visual just blows his mind. It doesn't derail him, it makes him more excited about wanting to write the story. So I think it's a matter of embracing the education side and how it's used in a classroom — parents don't have a direct immediate say in that right now, this is something we as educators need to work really hard on, researchers need to work really hard on, to identify this offloading that's happening. We designed classrooms originally to get students ready to work in a factory — what do we want our kids doing now, how do we want our classrooms to look? These are things policy people and educators need to be thinking about — parents too, they have a voice. There are profound questions in education, and then there's the day-to-day, what can you do with your child — and I think for the day-to-day, it's showing them what it's capable of, taking their ideas and turning them to life. Anything is kind of possible now — more and more every day. So I'm a believer in the future of it, that it's here to stay and it's super powerful — why not go explore those possibilities as best you can. The problems it might have — that's a longer conversation, I don't think anyone really knows, because we're still in the early stages. I'm tentatively excited but wary of the dangers — the cognitive stuff is a real and present danger for sure.
Seth: Yeah, it is a much longer conversation. I am about ninety episodes into it, and thank you for being the ninetieth. Travis Moyer, thanks so much for stopping by today.
Travis Moyer: Yeah, appreciate the time, Seth. Take care.

OUTRO (recorded separately)
That's a wrap on our conversation with Travis Moyer. If you're working through your own school's AI policy right now, Travis's frame is worth stealing — governance without instructional purpose is just policy, and instructional principles without governance are just good intentions. We'll have links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Banyan Global Learning — find them at banyangloballearning.com. Thanks for listening to Make It Mindful, and we'll see you next time.