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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.
Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning
Episode Transcript — Jessica Werner, North Shore Learning
[INTRO]
Seth (00:00) Support for Make It Mindful is brought to you by WorldSavvy, 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. Hello everyone, and welcome to Make It Mindful, insights for global learning, the podcast where we explore how students learn, who they're becoming, and how emerging technologies and global experiences reshape teaching and learning. I'm your host, Seth Fleischhauer, former classroom teacher and founder of Banyan Global Learning.
Seth (00:47) You'll often hear the term teacher wellbeing framed as a question of resilience or self care, but today's guest, Jessica Werner, founder of North Shore Learning, brings something different to this conversation that is a bit more uncomfortable, but also more useful. The idea that teacher wellbeing is really about teacher effectiveness. Jessica's work focuses on what actually allows teachers to feel effective in their work and what systematically undermines that sense over time. Drawing from her doctoral work on increasing school access without proper change management or supports, and from her consulting work with schools in the U.S. and internationally, Jessica helps us unpack why burnout is often a rational response to misaligned systems, not a personal failure. The conversation also focuses on her current work at a school in Colombia, which is the location from which she recorded this episode. In this conversation, we talk about how schools try and often fail to measure wellbeing, why qualitative judgment still matters, how culture shapes behavior and motivation, what schedules and workloads quietly communicate to teachers, and why adding initiatives without strengthening foundations accelerates burnout rather than solving it. This is a grounded systems level conversation about teacher retention, cultural context, and the limits schools need to reckon with if they want good educators to stay.
Seth (02:38) This episode of Make It Mindful is brought to you by Banyan Global Learning. At Banyan, we've spent the last two decades designing live global learning experiences for schools. And right now we're building something new — Global Learning Live, a program that combines live virtual field trips with international student collaborations. Students don't just visit other places. They meet real people, work on shared problems, practice digital competencies, and learn how to communicate 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 Jessica Werner.
[INTERVIEW]
Seth (03:17) Jessica, welcome to the podcast.
Jessica Werner (03:20) Yay, thanks for having me.
Seth (03:23) Thank you so much for being here. I understand you live in Minnesota. You are currently in Colombia with your daughter on a work slash experience for her, but you're supporting schools down there internationally, which is something I'd love to dive into. But just for a little bit of background, you and I have talked about what your work is. And I think it kind of boils down to the idea that you support schools and teachers supporting diverse learners. But when you kind of boil that down, it's about what actually allows teachers to feel effective in their work. Would you say that that's a good summary of where you're coming from? And if so, why is that so important?
Jessica Werner (04:06) Yeah, that's a great summary. And it's important because effectiveness is a component of job satisfaction. And right now we are having mass burnout in teachers. So job satisfaction is hugely important. It's relevant to keeping people in schools.
Seth (04:24) So that efficacy is arrived at, I'm sure, in many different ways. When you're doing work with schools and teachers, what is the approach that you take to get any given group of teachers to feel effective in their work?
Jessica Werner (04:43) We work really individually, honestly. We do a lot of group trainings, but even within that, we like to do assessments before, during, after. How are you feeling? What are you learning? Do you feel more effective? But a lot of that efficacy gets measured qualitatively just in our one-on-one work with teachers.
Seth (05:05) And when you're measuring it qualitatively — I actually really enjoy the discussion and really parsing out qualitative versus quantitative data. When I have used qualitative data in the past, I've used the framework where I try to be as objective as possible, but then I'm also using some analysis and kind of pairing those two things of the objective part along with the analysis. Is that how you gather your qualitative data, or what are people doing in order to measure this efficacy?
Jessica Werner (05:43) To be honest, we're not trying to measure. We're just getting a general sense of efficacy. Data is important to us, but it's also just a piece of the larger picture. We don't measure it quantitatively very often. This is a hard thing. Efficacy, you can measure on a scale. Well-being is a lot more challenging. And that's kind of where we're at right now, because teacher well-being is a really new construct. So I would say some of the ways you can — and I'm talking about this with the school I'm working in currently in Colombia — what are KPIs? That's such a business way of thinking about this. I don't love it, to be honest. And the school doesn't love it either, but the board loves it. So what are the KPIs that we need to do to measure well-being and efficacy? And so just generally, some of the ways you can keep those in mind are looking at data around retention. Are you retaining teachers? I think teacher absences are a really easy way to start taking the temperature on well-being. People who are absent more, especially for illness — we know that when the body is stressed, we are ill more often. So those are some really hard quantitative numbers people can look at to measure efficacy. But I think really to understand, you have to talk to people. You have to see their expression. You can't measure an expression. You can't measure fatigue. I'm unapologetically more qualitative than quantitative, but I would like to find some kind of mixed methods way to start measuring well-being for teachers. There are efficacy scales. I choose not to use them. Again, I like to read the person, but if I have somebody who's a tough read or if there's a question around how things are actually going, then we can pull out a scale or I can give a one-to-five. How are you feeling? But I find I don't always get objective answers that way. It's really in the conversations. And that's what makes us different. And that's why boards are struggling right now just to measure some of the things that come around teacher well-being because it's tricky. It's a tricky thing to measure.
Seth (08:01) For sure. And it's a tricky thing to intervene on too. Because what you're talking about is a very personal approach. So whatever the solution is could vary by person, could vary by person by day. Right? So how do you set up an approach that's going to work? Personalization is a great concept, but there has to be some systems behind it in order for it to not just kind of go off the rails in this direction or that, in order to get reproducible results. There has to be an approach that's somewhat systematized. So what is that for you?
Jessica Werner (08:40) For us, we know the data on what are the main causes of burnout. And so some of them — the number one cause is student behaviors and increase in student behaviors. That's a really easy intervention for us to target with teachers. And we do that with full group trainings or we do that individually. But we know that that's current data. We also know feelings of efficacy around not being able to motivate student learners, especially secondary school learners, is causing people a lot of stress. And so that's a targeted intervention we can do if we perceive that that's one of the things people want to work on. There are some things that come through that are systemic, and we can't change them as consultants. The teachers don't, they likely don't have a lot of impact on those things. But in our work, we can report back to the administrators, to the boards and say, these are things that are within your control that are trickling down. So those are some of the pieces. Like I said, we know what the main causes of burnout are, so we usually start there. Either by observation — is this something the teacher is struggling with — or it's self-reported by the teacher. And sometimes it's reported by the administrator.
Seth (09:55) And what are some of those things that trickle down from the board? You mentioned student behaviors and motivation. I do want to dive into that, but I want to kind of get the complete picture of these main causes for burnout. What are some of the common systemic issues that are not a teacher's responsibility to solve, but obviously they're impacting the teachers in a big way?
Jessica Werner (10:14) I think schedule is a huge one. I hear schedule complaints all the time. I've never seen a perfect schedule and I see a lot of administrators trying to make one. The school I'm working at right now has a really unique schedule where every third or fifth day in the cycle, the group of teachers from the grade level spend the full day together and the students in that grade level have specialists all day long. So I've never seen a schedule like that before.
Seth (10:40) That's cool.
Jessica Werner (10:42) I think it's cool too. Do all the teachers love it? No, they don't love it. And I think — and I know it was created with the idea of, let's create this time for PLCs and grade level planning. But even a schedule is impossible to make perfect. Or at least to make something that everybody likes, right? You're always going to disappoint someone.
Seth (11:01) Sure.
Jessica Werner (11:03) Even if we had four day work weeks, not everybody's going to like which day is off. It's just inevitable. So schedules are a big one. I hear about them everywhere. And then load — the amount of classes you're teaching. Again, everybody would prefer to have fewer classes and fewer preps, but it's not always the reality based on the schools. And some of those things come from the top and it comes from this is how many students we have, and this is how many of them need to take social studies. And so those are the things that are outside of the teacher's control.
Seth (11:38) Yeah. Okay. So you've painted a picture here of teacher burnout. You're coming in to help with some of these issues. We were chatting before we started pressing record here about the idea of — do you assess what is specific to this school versus what is specific to this culture? If you're traveling internationally, obviously here you are staying in Colombia for a month, but you have a lot of other cultural lenses through which you have seen education. So when you arrive at a place, you're noticing these things that seem the same, but also that seem different. How do you navigate these cultural differences when you're trying to design effective interventions for improving this sort of thing? We had the example before we started recording of students in Colombia being sort of louder and more boisterous than maybe some of the students are used to in the United States, but whether or not that's actually a problem is something that you need to kind of navigate your way around without stepping on toes or seeming like you are out of touch with the culture. How do you approach stuff like that?
Jessica Werner (12:46) Carefully. It's a work in progress, and we can't be cultural experts in every single culture. So any visit we make involves a lot of pre-work. I probably had 20 conversations before I got here with local teachers and administrators, with foreign hires. I did send out a survey where I collected a lot of data from the teachers. It was done in English and Spanish. So I got a lot of information before I arrived. But when you're here, it's different. You're seeing it in real time. But I'll give an example. The students being more boisterous — it's a collective culture. So people are community-based. They are very friendly and social with each other. They're very social. And that translates in the classroom. I see that in the classroom. If our baseline is learning needs to take place, it can take place given those factors. You can have a social classroom and still have students learning. That's entirely possible. So that's where we're trying to see — how much is enough that you can still have the learning take place and where does it become a challenge? And actually I saw a great class yesterday. It was a math class. It was a sixth grade math class and she had them working — I think she was really smart. She was an American teacher working with mostly Colombian students and they were doing Amplify, which is an online math curriculum. I mean, it's not super engaging like any online math curriculum is, but she had them in groups. Knowing that they want to socialize, and this is important to them, she has them doing the math in groups. And so it wasn't a quiet class, but they were engaged the whole time. And then at the end of class, she said, OK, you can work with a group, or you can work on your own, and you can work wherever you want. So you don't have to sit in your desk. You don't have to sit in your pod. And she let them have the freedom to move around. And I thought that's a really good example of working with the culture and giving them this opportunity to be social while also holding the line for learning.
Seth (14:57) Yeah, that is a great example. I'm wondering if you have an example about the second piece that you talked about, which is motivation, which I think is super fascinating because motivation will come from values and values are obviously cultural. When you think of American students, the common modern approach is to tap into intrinsic motivation, to try to find something that the students are really passionate about, expose them to enough things that they can find that passion, and then really nurture that passion. That is a very Western way of thinking of things. But that might be different. For example, we work with students in Asia where extrinsic motivation is kind of baked into the system. We try to kind of inch it towards a more intrinsic thing, but we have to face the cultural realities, which is that they live and breathe within a culture where a lot of extrinsic motivation is the default. Do you have a story or an example of how you approached one of these questions of motivation in a culture that was different from what you're used to that might be surprising or that revealed something about the culture you were working with?
Jessica Werner (16:15) I feel like we're living right now in my work in this school. So we learned really quickly when talking with groups of teachers, teachers individually, that these students are very extrinsically motivated by pressure from their parents, not only around grades, but also around social pressure — not to be disrespectful, to be good students, to portray the family well. Okay, this is interesting and this is important and we can work with this when we're talking about things like motivation in the classroom and expectations for behavior, knowing they don't want things to ever get to the point where mom and dad find out about it. Whereas in the States, sometimes that's the first line of defense — I'm gonna call home. So we're trying to help these kids maintain their dignity and save face and also knowing, if it gets to the point where mom and dad need to be involved, that might be just what we need to change the situation. So we're just kind of trying to learn. But extrinsic motivators was something I've been talking about a lot. And everybody's motivated differently. And I think everybody's goal — we have this goal of intrinsic motivation, but I think humans are extrinsically motivated. It's the reason why you don't run a red light. It keeps us within social constructs that make for a civilized society. But learning in each culture, what are the things that matter here is really important to our work. And then we try to build off of them.
Seth (17:49) Yeah, it's interesting. Because I do think that extrinsic motivation has gotten a bit of a bad rap. And obviously in the traditional system, it was only that. So I think what they're trying to do is swing the pendulum a bit in the direction of intrinsic motivation. But it's really clever and important, I think, to identify which cultural extrinsic motivations exist and then leverage those to your advantage, without maybe sacrificing some of those more lofty progressive goals. So that's two of the things you mentioned. I'm wondering — and then you mentioned one creative solution around scheduling. I'm curious, why do the teachers not like that? Every third or fifth day to have a grade level meeting — why is that not working for them?
Jessica Werner (18:47) Well, it's not everybody. For example, students came back last Tuesday from four weeks off. And so the teachers who did not have their class on Tuesday, who that was their scheduled day, were actually a little disappointed because they thought, this is a really important day for us to set the tone for this semester. So that's just one example. It just happened to fall the way it goes. It happened to fall on a day that was not convenient.
Seth (19:17) Got it. Okay. Are there any other creative scheduling solutions that you've come across or that you've helped devise with schools that you work with?
Jessica Werner (19:26) Yeah, I love it. And I love that this school gives teachers a full day to plan. I've actually never seen that before. Most schools I work in don't have any kind of reserved planning time during the school day. It's usually assumed they'll do it before or after school. But another school we've worked in in Iowa had it structured so that every day, every grade level team had like 30 minutes within the day to plan together and form a PLC if that's what — I think that was the original intent and it didn't really happen. But just having that intentional time, it would have been a complete scheduling nightmare to make that schedule. I don't know who did it or how. But every day they knew they would get to regroup together. And it was an important time to talk about things that are upcoming, students — how is so and so for you today? He's having a rough day. All right, let's be mindful in seventh period. I thought that was really creative and I don't know how, like I said, somebody who's very thorough and organized created that schedule because that was a tough one.
Seth (20:27) And what about teacher workload? One of the ideas that Justin Reich, when he was on the podcast recently from MIT Teaching Systems Lab, he was talking about addition by subtraction and that there's very rarely things that are taken off the plate of teachers or taken out of schools. Generally it's just that things are added on. Coming out of the pandemic where all of a sudden technology was a necessity while people were learning from home, yet none of it really left after people got back into the classroom. There are all sorts of things that are being asked of teachers. You're talking to a district or a board — what do you communicate to them in terms of workload?
Jessica Werner (21:13) It's really hard to take away, but it's easy to keep adding on. So one of the things I tell people is before you add anything else on, you need to make sure it's the right thing. And if you're adding something, you're also adding a level of support. So you don't just add, you add with the support. It needs to be embedded, either with some coaching or some training or something else gets modified. But I think what I see is — right now, it kind of makes me crazy. Everybody's trying to do everything. And so many new things are coming in in real time, especially around AI. Everybody's trying to adopt all the things. There's new curriculums that you can buy and implement. You could have a field day on new initiatives right now. What I see schools needing to do more than any of those new things is get the foundation solid. We're talking about adding things on with foundations that are not solid — with student behavior problems, with student learning needs. We are not solid in our foundation. So if anything, instead of adding on anything extra, really digging deep into what needs to be solidified that you're already doing.
Seth (22:23) And do you find that there's consensus even around what that foundation is or looks like?
Jessica Werner (22:33) No. A lot of things get taken for granted, I think, at an administrative level, which is easy to do if you're not in the classroom all the time. That learning will take place, that behavior will be decent, that progress will happen. I think those things get taken for granted. But those things can be impeded when things like behavior issues are unresolved or student learning needs — you have undiagnosed different needs students have, diagnosed, undiagnosed — the teachers trying to juggle all the things. And I think in some schools, it's hard to reflect back and see that part of your foundation of behavior management is not okay. I think for some schools, that's a really hard look in the mirror, especially for a lot of our private schools we work at. That's admitting something that is difficult. But really the reality with every single school I work in right now, which is many, is that that behavior foundation can use work.
Seth (23:38) Yeah. You bring up a point around — most teachers, at least in the United States, they're not in it for the money. They're in it because their heart is in it and it means a whole lot to them and who they are as people to define themselves as teachers who are doing their best work for their students. Yet people who work with teachers are often in the position of holding up a mirror and highlighting some of these things that might be regarded as deficiencies, or at very least are things that have room for improvement. You talk about efficacy yet you're also talking about improvement. How do you balance those two ideas? I feel effective as a teacher, but I also acknowledge that there are things that I need to get better at.
Jessica Werner (24:31) Yeah, I think growth mindset can always be and should always be a part of teaching and learning. And a lot of people understand that I am always growing, even when I feel like I have things in a really good place, I'm still growing. So I don't think those things need to be mutually exclusive. And that's kind of where the conversation is going around working with teachers. This is for everyone. This isn't just for you and your class. Everybody is looking for this kind of continuous professional improvement. And I think when you frame it that way, it's less intimidating and it feels less like a deficit.
Seth (25:09) I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about something that's very distant in your past, which is your dissertation, but it has to do with a current dynamic in schooling, especially in the United States. I think there might be some movements like school choice movements in other countries, but I don't think there's anywhere that's quite as fierce as what's going on in the United States where parents are having the opportunity in many states to take their public school money and apply it to schools that they want to go to, that may not be within the traditional public school system. Virtual schools are a big part of that. Also in some cases private schools, charter schools obviously have been a movement for a long time. And people don't often think about the other side of that, which is a school that all of a sudden opens its doors and has a bunch of new students in their student population. From a school point of view, butts in seats means dollars. So I think a lot of schools are looking at this as a great opportunity to increase their revenue. But you found that there are some real costs to growing too quickly. And I was hoping that you could kind of break that down for us, not just in the work that you did in your dissertation, but what you're seeing in schools nowadays as well.
Jessica Werner (26:32) Yeah, so my dissertation — and I did the data collection in 2010 — was on a policy in Uganda that had opened up access to secondary education to everyone. So previously, it was tuition-based, and then they opened it up to everyone, and they saw, I think it was like a 30% increase overnight of students entering the systems, mostly in the government schools. A great idea, in theory. Access is important. Education is obviously very important. From a policy perspective, nobody was arguing with this policy. It sounded good. I went in and I interviewed teachers down at the classroom level to see what changes had happened, what kind of PD they had received, what kind of extra resources they had gotten since universal secondary was made into law. And the answer was not much or none. The only thing that had changed is they had a lot more students. And these teachers were amazing. Nobody was complaining. I have to make this really clear. Nobody was complaining about it. They were saying, this is a good policy. This is a good thing. We're glad the students are here. My job just got a lot harder because I don't have any materials. I don't have enough classroom space. There's only one of me in a class of 90 or 100 students. And so it was an example of what policy looks like when it's implemented from the implementer's point of view. And so it's relevant now. It's so interesting because at the time I thought this is really unique to Uganda. But now that we're talking about school choice and we're working in several states who are on the edge of implementing school choice like Texas — it may become national policy as well. What does it look like when you increase access to all the schools, not just the public schools, as something people can afford? So I guess my takeaways from my dissertation were that, again, if you're adding on a new curriculum, if you're adding on a significant number of students, you need to also add on significant support. You need to make sure the facilities are appropriate for the students, you need to make sure the supplies are appropriate. Those are all the pieces that need to be thought through for implementation. Otherwise, the actual education isn't as effective.
Seth (28:56) Yeah, it seems like something that once you think of it is a bit of a no brainer, but it also is understandable how you might get caught up in the — yeah, yeah, we'll make this work. And we'll solve the problems as they come. But a lot of these problems are best solved when you think of them ahead of time.
Jessica Werner (29:16) Well, and one thing that really kind of meshes with what I do now is we are looking at a 44 million teacher shortage globally by 2030. So we're already looking at a global teacher shortage. We don't have enough teachers as it is. And I think some schools are thinking, oh, I'm just going to hire more. I'm going to be able to hire more staff. Are there staff to be hired? I don't know. It's gonna depend on regions. Already where I'm from in Minnesota, there are not enough staff to be hired. There are lots of international exchange programs where there are teachers from the Philippines coming and taking jobs in rural schools because there are not enough staff to be hired. So this is an important consideration, I think, for these policies.
Seth (30:08) I also want to address one other part of your work, which is that it's based in neuroscience. And we've talked about a lot of different things here today that obviously have psychological components to them. Student behavior, student motivation, wellbeing, efficacy. These are all psychological processes. I'm wondering, what are some of the most relevant findings from neuroscience that you add into your work, that you leverage for your work, and how can any given teacher benefit from expanding their knowledge of these psychological processes?
Jessica Werner (30:52) So first of all, I feel like the word neuroscience is kind of a big, intimidating, catch-all word. Really, all it means is, what does the brain need to be successful? What do we know about brains that tell us what they need to be successful? So for example, thinking about classroom management, we know that brains are more secure when they understand the expectations that they are being asked to meet. We know that. We feel safer. We feel more secure. We're less likely to go into fight, flight, or freeze. So the way that translates into the classroom is, have you set up your behavior expectations and taught them to the students? So that's just a quick little implementation of the neuroscience into our work.
Seth (31:37) It's time for the lightning round, and I have a series of questions that I stole from Adam Grant. Thanks, Adam, if you're listening. The first one is, can you recommend a piece of media? Could be a podcast, book, movie, TV — anything that you're interacting with right now?
Jessica Werner (31:55) Okay. It's about neuroscience, but I love Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam. It's my favorite podcast and I don't listen to very many, but he always takes these big neuroscience esoteric things and he makes it really practical and actionable.
Seth (32:10) I love that one as well. You know, I listen to — when I listen to podcasts, I'm obviously — I have a podcast. When I listen to podcasts, I'm looking for things that I can model within my own approach. And one of the things that he does is take these sort of beats and turns from there. And I thought of my podcast as, it has to be this one constant stream, but I do appreciate how he just sort of lets people answer some questions and then moves on to the next thing. So I actually just did that in this podcast. Amazing. What is something you are rethinking right now?
Jessica Werner (32:49) What am I rethinking? Well, I have a child entering high school next year and she will likely be going to a private school, which was something I had to rethink because we're pretty staunchly public school parents and family, but that'll be the place where her needs get met. And then her brother is going into middle school next year. And again, really different child, really different circumstances. He'll be in a public school. And I guess I'm rethinking — and this is a big question — how schools match student needs. And this is a new way of thinking. It was always you go to the school that your parents want you to go to, or that's your community school, or this is a school we can afford. But I want the future of schooling to be a match. And so I'm rethinking what a match looks like. And if that match — it's not going to be convenient for our family. I'll tell you that. Having two kids in two districts, one private, one public, we don't even have the same breaks in Minnesota. But what does it mean to be a good match for a student and what do you do when it's not a good match? How do you change that as a parent or what can the school do? And those are just big questions in my head right now.
Seth (34:02) And if I can ask a follow-up question to that one — you were able to, it sounds like, make a decision about a good match for your daughter. Without getting too personal, how did you have the confidence to feel like it was a good match?
Jessica Werner (34:20) Well, I cheated a little. It's a school that hires my group to work in it. So first of all, I know it personally because I've worked in the school. But what that did was I got to see — first of all, anybody who hires us, number one, they have growth mindset because you don't bring in professional learning. You definitely don't bring in coaching unless you're OK to hold that mirror up and say, all right, this is where we need to grow. And so all of my experiences in the school — and I was working with brand new teachers who had a lot of growth that they needed — but I just saw this openness, this growth mindset, and just being in the school allowed me to see the community that the school was. And for my daughter, that is the number one thing that's gonna be important. She needs a loving, close-knit community. She needs a smaller community with more adult eyes on her, so if she needs — she needs to know who she could go to if she needs anything. And so those were the factors that played into the decision.
Seth (35:23) Do you have any questions for me?
Jessica Werner (35:29) I want to throw it back to you. What are you rethinking right now?
Seth (35:35) Whew. What am I rethinking right now? We are working on international student collaborations and I've got a whole lot of ideas in my head that are swirling and that are being proven out by just running this pilot that we're running. The thing that I am thinking about right now is that a lot of schools, a lot of teachers have this inherent understanding of the value of an international student collaboration. It's something that you can just say that term and there's a deep understanding that this is something that's good for their student. And it's something that's good for the world. And you don't really have to communicate that — they just kind of know it. But there are a whole lot of obstacles to being able to do something like that. And a lot of them are logistical. A lot of them have to do with some of the things that we've talked about here today in terms of schedule and workload. So we're trying to make something that fits into their schedule, that is a light lift for teachers. And we also have a guess that a lot of these attempts at connection fail because one might stop working for one person and that one person will drop out. And so we are creating cohorts that have multiple schools in them that hopefully can mitigate the impact of uneven participation. But we don't know if that will make the collaboration too impersonal. If we make the groups too big, we've got to have smaller groups within it. And then there's administrative questions there about how do we facilitate the sharing of student work, all that kind of stuff. But what I'm thinking about is essentially there are these persistent problems that people deal with in terms of pursuing what they understand to be a really great experience like this. And can we solve those problems based on the 20 years of experience that we've had running them for a handful of schools in Asia? So we'll circle back. We will see if we can do that.
Jessica Werner (37:40) Well, congratulations on piloting something new. That's brave. It's always brave to try something new. So I hope it goes really well.
Seth (37:48) Thank you. It's exciting and nerve wracking. And by the time this episode comes out, it's going to be in full swing. So we will know more.
Seth (37:58) So you do a lot of this work with schools. The people that are listening to this, they may or may not have a leader who has the kind of growth mindset that is going to pursue someone like you to come in and really help the teachers address some of these things. For the self-starter, for the person who heard this podcast and is inspired and likes all of these ideas, but doesn't know where to start — where should they start?
Jessica Werner (38:22) First of all, I know it's intimidating to speak with your leaders about what you need, but this is actually really important. It's important to advocate for yourself. If not to your senior leader, perhaps it's a grade level leader, perhaps it's a counselor or it's somebody at school you feel confident that you can trust. All the principals I know want to do right by their teachers. They all do and sometimes they just don't know how to get there. So don't be afraid to let them know. Also, what we ended up doing in the last couple of months is we created some on-demand courses, knowing we would have teachers contact us and say, we want you at our school, but you're not going to be here because, you know, whatever reason. So we have about five or six on-demand courses you can take. And there are some different topics — executive function, motivating adolescent learners, that's a big one. Behavior management — again, if you're in a school and you know there needs to be a system-wide change but it's not happening quickly enough, check out our courses. That might be a good place to get some information. And also on our YouTube channel, we give out tons of free resources. Some of them are really short, like a minute. Others are a full webinar. But feel free. Those things are accessible so that people can take advantage of them.
Seth (39:43) And what is the website and where else can our listeners find your work?
Jessica Werner (39:48) So northshorelearning.org is the best place. We have our YouTube site. You can find our YouTube channel pretty easily. And say hello to me. I'm on LinkedIn at Jessica Werner. And I always like to meet new people who have heard me speak on podcasts or are interested in the work or have a situation you want to share. If you have a situation relevant to your context and I can help, I'm happy to try.
Seth (40:16) Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Thank you for sharing all of this expertise that you have.
[OUTRO]
Seth (40:22) If this conversation resonated with you, especially if you're wrestling with questions of workload, motivation, behavior, or what support really means in your context, there are a few ways to continue exploring Jessica's work. You can find her and her team at northshorelearning.org where they offer coaching, school partnerships, and on-demand courses for educators who want practical research-informed support. She also shares resources and thinking through North Shore Learning's YouTube channel and on LinkedIn. These are all linked in the show notes. As always, if this episode sparked new questions or helped you see a familiar challenge more clearly, consider sharing it with a colleague or bringing it into a conversation with your leadership team. This episode was written and produced by me, Seth Fleischhauer, and edited by Lucas Salazar. Thanks for listening to Make It Mindful, and remember, until next time, in order to bring positive change to education, we must first make it mindful.