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 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:


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.

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 1 of 2: Global Cohorts
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 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. Today's guest is Travis Moyer, Banyan Global Learning's Director of Programming and Marketing. He led the spring pilot of our Global Cohorts program — three separate classroom cohorts working through a shared four-week unit built around a single Big Question. This is part one of a two-part conversation — today we cover the Global Cohorts pilot, and Travis is back next episode to talk about the AI governance framework he's been building.
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: Travis Moyer, welcome to the program.
Travis Moyer: Thank you, Seth. Really happy to be here with you.
[00:00:28] (approx) Seth: It's interesting with you working at our company, Banyan Global Learning, the work that we do has always been at this intersection of new technologies and global cultures. And there's not that many people that I have on the podcast where I can talk about both of those things, but here you are. I can talk about both of them now. That's exciting.
Travis Moyer: It is.
Seth: Yeah. Which one do you want to start with? Do you want to start with the global cohorts program that you've been working on or AI governance? What's — how you feeling this morning?
Travis Moyer: Let's — hmm. Let's start — let's start global. Let's do global cohorts.
Seth: Cool. So this is a program that was born out of our 18-year history working with Tsai Hsing School in Taipei, Taiwan. Can you tell the story of how this program came about and the types of problems it was looking to solve?
Travis Moyer: Yeah, I mean, that's — it's a long story. You know, over the 17 years we've been delivering cultural-first education, content-based education around English instruction. And so we've always been exploring diverse cultures, trying to take students to unique places. Obviously, as the technology improved, we expanded those opportunities. And, you know, we started doing live virtual field trips. Gosh, I mean, I don't — we've been doing them for so long. We were doing them when it was, you know, 3G — that was enough, when 3G came out on the cell phones, to take our phones out and be on the street and be able to take students into places that some might say were mundane when you first hear it, but typically there'd be field trips to museums, various places of learning — kind of obvious places that real physical field trips would happen. But when you're trying to explore other cultures, it's often the mundane locations that are really fruitful. And so we would take them to places like a Starbucks — because number one, there's different cups there, based on each city — but also there'd be people there you can go and talk to, order something. If you go to a grocery store — the grocery stores here in Atlanta or where I lived in Los Angeles are very different from each other, and certainly different from where our students in Taiwan would shop for food. So right off the bat, there was this exploration where we were trying to reach other places.
And alongside that, we were also, like any school, trying to find collaborations, collaborative partners. This goes back decades — from our teachers, from when we were students. I don't know if you did this — did you do pen pals? Written pen pals?
Seth: Yeah, yeah. I think from within the US — I think there was a school in Ohio or something that we had a pen pal program with, and we were matched individually with a student. There were probably one or two exchanges throughout the year, through the physical mail, obviously. But I remember it — I don't remember a ton from what I did as a kid, but I remember that.
Travis Moyer: Yeah, yeah. I don't think I did an international one, but this has been happening for a long time. Teachers recognize the power of connecting students from different locations, even within the United States. There's this inherent benefit that you get, and we get as adults — this is why we travel and want to see different places. So collaborations are always a thing for any school. And because we were taking people from different places, or taking our teachers and using them to take Tsai Hsing students around the world, it made sense that we would do our own collaborations and find our own partners, just like most teachers would do — sometimes there are services, but you kind of find someone and try to build something. It was, over these 17 years, the combination of what we were doing with our live virtual field trips and the general experience of teachers doing collaborations and running into hiccups, some difficulties. And we were sort of like — well, why not create our own version that tries to solve some of these problems, and again leverage our experience taking people around the world? That's the heart of the way we teach and what we teach. So it seemed like a really logical fit, over a number of years, of what we were doing.
Seth: And so what were some of those problems we were looking to solve?
Travis Moyer: Well, the first one that jumps out is the logistics of it. Number one is finding a partner classroom. There are some free websites where you can try to match, but it's a search, and you find a classroom that's interested, and maybe they're not at the same level, maybe they want to explore something different. But let's say you do find one that matches — then there's the coordination of exactly what activities you're going to be doing, can we bring the classrooms together at some point, all the teaching parts of it. And then as it's going, we all know in classrooms there are always fire drills, class canceled for various reasons — things happening in a given school day. And so sometimes your partner, or you, can drop the ball or not be able to make it, do the thing you agreed to do. That's the biggest hurdle — you get this friction between the two parties because they're doing lots of other things. And then, you're also limited to the two classrooms themselves. I say that only because what we developed is a way to not only bring the classrooms together, but — because of our history doing this global education, this global citizenship, this broadening of cultures — we've built in ways where the experience can be beyond the classrooms themselves. That's not often a hindrance when two classrooms get together, but it limits their scope. So what we're trying to do is give a classroom the infrastructure to join a cohort very easily. We supply the partner schools, and we provide not only the connection, but the experience that's beyond just the two of them talking internally to each other.
Seth: So take us through this experience. We've identified that partnerships are somewhat faulty — if one member drops the ball, the other is left holding the bag, all the time gone into planning and executing the partnership can be wasted, and it's not a great feeling. We've created cohorts to absorb one party dropping out and have multiple cohorts running at once — so even if everyone in your cohort drops out, we still have another cohort to put you with. So that's solving one of the problems. Take us through the experience, though — what is the program, what is the experience, from the point of view of the students, the teacher?
Travis Moyer: Yeah, and this is probably my favorite thing to talk about, because we ran this as a first-time pilot in the spring — we ran it three different times, three different cohorts. I was the one that delivered it, and it was really fun to experience. I didn't know what we were going to get — the students are designing things and doing work, and I don't know what they're going to produce, or how it's going to compare to the other classrooms, until it happens. And what happened was really cool. At the heart of this, and what we've experienced in our history and in all the teaching I've done — both in the physical classroom and with Banyan — students thrive when they're able to share something about themselves. And when you add this piece of awe, which is something that's at the heart of what we do, it opens them up even more. So at the heart of this is giving them opportunities to talk about themselves. And the awe piece comes from seeing not only their partners, but places around the world. So basically, the unit we piloted in the spring was festivals. The question is: what do festivals reveal about the culture of the people who celebrate them? So — anyone watching here, think about a local festival you had when you grew up.
Seth: We had one in Santa Barbara, California, called Old Spanish Days — we called it Fiesta. The official word is Old Spanish Days. It was a combination of daytime celebrations of old Spanish culture, like flamenco dancing and music, and at night it kind of just became a big street festival. The reputation kind of outgrew the original purpose and it just became a big party. Honestly, a lot of locals try to get out of town during Fiesta because it's kind of a mess. Michael Jordan famously ran a basketball camp at UCSB, coincidentally during the week of Fiesta, because he wanted to go downtown and party with Charles Barkley and everyone else. But — yeah, that's the big one in Santa Barbara. That, and summer solstice.
Travis Moyer: Okay. For me, growing up in Indiana, the one I remember most is the Apple Butter Festival. A lot of towns have a food, harvest-based festival if your community has an agricultural sector. They're making apple butter, and it takes all day long — they have these giant witches' vats, and a wooden stir that's like fifteen feet long because you're so far back from it, and you're stirring, and then you pass it off every fifteen minutes because it's so heavy. It's family, it's fall harvest. Just those two things — Indiana and apples don't necessarily go together, but there's an element of food harvest, very important in Indiana's agricultural sector. And fall festivals are kind of a theme around the world — there are all different versions. And yours, of course — the cultural history there in Santa Barbara. So you're going to get food, music, dancing. And the way this begins, really, is asking students about their festivals — what's your favorite festival, just like we just did — and letting them share what's important to them. And at that point, because we have teachers around the world who've gone to festivals at different places — the Dragon Boat Festival in Taipei, Taiwan; here in Atlanta, I went to the Renaissance Fair. Have you ever been to a Renfair?
Seth: I've not directly. I've stayed at a hotel that was overrun with Renfare people, so I feel like I caught the vibe, but I've never actually been to one. One day, it's on the list.
Travis Moyer: But not enough to go yourself. It's really great — and there's a part where, when I go there, I interview people at the Renfair for this cohort's experience. So in the Dragon Boat Festival, our teacher is there recording and talking to people, and those things are ultimately shared with the students. At the Renfair, for instance, I'm interviewing a guy in line and asking him why it's important, and he was really honest — it's a place where like-minded people, when they arrive, know that everyone there is open and friendly and interested in the same things, and they make new friends right away. There's no strangeness, even though the people there are typically a little more eccentric, depending on what they're wearing. So we show them festivals like that from around the world, and we start identifying what are the elements of a festival — because even though your Santa Barbara festival, or the Renaissance Fair, or the Apple Butter Festival, are all different at heart, they have some things in common: a symbol, usually music or traditions, often a main event — for Apple Butter, it's the actual canning after they've mixed it all day. We identify all those pieces. So the students have thought about their own festivals, they've seen festivals around the world, and we also show them ahead of time — I know who's in the cohort, so if the two of us were in a cohort with a school in, say, Canada, I've already gone and found out the festivals at your location. I'd already know about your Santa Barbara festival and the festival in Calgary, Canada. And I'd show the students their partner schools' festivals — so they start to get to know them a little. And we identify the pieces of a festival, and finally we give them a chance to describe their own festival — what would it be about? This is open-ended, they don't really know yet what the final product for this four-week experience is going to be — but they're sharing about themselves, and getting excited. Some of them, for instance — I had one kid who wanted to do a spam festival because he loved the history of spam.
Seth: Like the email?
Travis Moyer: No, not the email. The food. There's this — I don't know if you know the history of spam in World War Two?
Seth: No, I know that they love it in Hawaii.
Travis Moyer: Yeah — this kid researched it like crazy, and there's this element where it was essentially an essential item that helped soldiers survive — made for travel, because it could be canned and not refrigerated, and was apparently essential in our victory in World War Two. So he's a history buff, and he wanted to make a festival about that. These are the little things where kids get to go and share a little bit about themselves. And the thing is, this is only four classes — so each week these students share a little, create a little piece, and there's some feedback. Whatever they're creating for that week is posted somewhere — a Padlet, a collaborative bulletin board, or another service — so each week these classes see all their students' festival ideas, get a chance to find the ones they like most, make a comment or ask a question — like, why would you want to do a spam festival? That's built into each class. Then the next week, we take the elements of a festival — the symbol, the music, the final events, the food — and take their ideas and say: now take your general idea and build it out with these festival elements. They go a little deeper. And then ultimately, in this particular unit, we take their written festival ideas and use AI to visualize them. I think this is a really cool use of AI — there was one class of high schoolers who were actually very skeptical, which is a whole other interesting topic — AI skepticism in younger students — but we take their ideas and turn them into a short video. So these kids have thought about this, gotten excited about their marshmallow festival, their basketball festival, their spam festival — and then all of a sudden I show them the actual festival, as if they're walking into it, first person. It's really cool — their eyes light up immediately.
There was one example in particular — I love talking about this. The students in Ukraine —
Well, there's a couple things here. Number one: what were the themes across all the students' festivals once they were done? Because the original question was, what do festivals reveal about a culture? And there were actually some universal themes that started to appear. In one cohort, we had students from Ukraine — students who weren't in a physical classroom anymore because of the war, scattered throughout the country. Some of them were separated from their family. Maybe you already know this, but I'd ask you to guess — what do you think their festivals would be about?
Seth: I mean, if they're separated from their family, it would be about family, right? Family culture — like the culture they might be afraid is being threatened, being erased.
Travis Moyer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That one was a gimme, Seth, since I kind of fed it to you with "separated from their families." But yes, they were that — they were almost universally about culture and the diversity of culture, because — and this I learned just by spending time with them — the extremely diverse cultures that are in Ukraine, from the eastern part of the country to the western, and family as well. There was one particular girl who did a family festival — a siblings and cousins festival, she called it. It brought them together, they played games, cooked food, just were with each other. And when she saw it visually, she got teary-eyed, and her voice was — but with smiles, you know? It was really amazing. It was lovely. But that's the reaction — I think the cool thing is we use all these different pieces, videos from around the world, trying to get them to share their own experiences, using AI for visualization to take it to the next step. And all of that, I think, is what creates this awe element. And then they have a lot of fun watching each other's videos — the classrooms in Ukraine see the other students' festival videos, they do a pitch — sixty seconds on why you should come to their festival — and then they can ask each other questions about their festivals. And in the end, we look at all the festivals together as a class, and we see, like with Ukraine, when we looked at the names and videos, they all had this certain theme. What was interesting in that same cohort was a classroom from Minneapolis, and almost all of their festivals had the naming of their own city, the river, as an essential character in their design — a unique element of city pride they all had. Compare that to the students I mentioned in Calgary — a group of students in Calgary, Canada — all of their festivals were outdoor related. These were students who didn't live in the city, they were kind of outside Calgary, in wide-open Canadian spaces — the Stampede is their big festival, horses, outdoor activities — and all their festivals revolved around that. So they're able to see, I think, whether it's metacognition or not — they spent this time on their own festival, and then they can see how their classmates are similar, which creates a sense of connection and community. And then they can compare or contrast with students in other locations and ask themselves why that is — what are the reasons these students felt this way, does that excite me, do I want to go there? And I mean, that's what we want — that builds empathy, that builds cultural citizenship, global citizenship. That's what it's all about — and so not all these questions get answered, but they're posed, and students get an opportunity to learn globally, learn about themselves, and compare with other students. And it was really beautiful to see. In the other three cohorts, there were similar things that happened — there were just these general themes that appeared, and I don't know how it's going to happen — I have to wait until week three, when their festivals are all done, before we can say, huh, that's interesting that they all did this or they all did that.

OUTRO (recorded separately)
That's a wrap on part one of our conversation with Travis Moyer. One thing worth sitting with: in the Global Cohorts pilot, a class of Ukrainian students scattered by the war built a festival almost entirely centered on family and cultural diversity, without anyone telling them to make it about that. 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 — next episode, Travis is back to talk about Banyan's AI governance framework: five pillars built around one idea, that thinking has to stay human for learning to occur.