How we design conscious, creative and caring virtual learning - Seth Fleischauer | S2E10 - Still Curious

Episode Transcript
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Seth Fleischauer (00:00):
When you're teaching over video
conferencing, there is anentertainment value to it that
is different from live teaching.
There is an aesthetic to it.
You gotta to come out the gate,making sure that you are drawing
them in, because if you don't,they're not going to be with
you.
I would say that the biggestdifference between a teacher who
excels online and who does not,is a mindset that they believe

(00:26):
they are sharing the same spacewith their students.

Danu Poyner (00:32):
You're listening to the Still Curious Podcast with
me, Danu Poyner.
My guest today is SethFleischauer, who is the
President and Founder at BanyanGlobal Learning, a provider of
live virtual programs thatprepare learners with future
ready skills in digitalcitizenship, world culture and
social and emotional learning.
In today's episode, we talkabout what's involved in

(00:53):
creating engaging virtual spacesfor social and emotional
learning, from virtual fieldtrips to meaningful assessment,
and what it means to be a cameraready teacher.

Tonight I'm doing a virtual field trip with
our sixth graders on Texas,zooming in on TexMex, food as a
representation of a fusion ofcultures.
The students are going to befinding and cooking their own
examples of fusion food andtalking about the why behind it,
why this particular food, howdid it come about, what were the
cultural factors?
What was the improvisation thatled to this being created in the

(01:26):
first place?

We discuss Seth's journey from teaching at the
progressive Earth School inManhattan to a high needs public
school in Brooklyn, how hisdesire to reform the failings of
the broken traditional systemput him on the path to becoming
an educator entrepreneur, andthe very different context of
setting up live virtual classesall the way back in 2003.

I did that as a part-time gig while I was
teaching full-time and drivingout to long island to use the
fancy video conferencing boxthat I had to use in order to be
able to make a connection.
Be out until midnight teachingand then, because it is Asia
time, so classes would end atmidnight.
And then I drive back to thecity and fall asleep and be up

(02:06):
at six to go teach again.

Seth shares how seeing his daughter's isolation
during the pandemic provided anopportunity to put some of his
personal educationalphilosophies into practice
closer to home throughhomeschooling, but also just how
challenging that has turned outto be even so.

I could go straight project-based student
choice, life is the curriculum,unschooling, whatever I wanted
to do.
Watching them respond to thatwas amazing.
Watching the rest of the parentsin the group recoil a little
bit, cause they were like,you're doing, you're doing
nothing.
So are you're doing nothing?

We also discuss navigating privilege,
discovering your core values,growth mindset and grokking, and
what it's like to be a real lifememe.

It's fun.
I'm the sad Mets fan.
The Mets are so sad

Seth has spent a long time thinking about what it
means to have space online tofind your place in the world,
and I appreciated his humility,openness and thoughtful
perspectives on reforming whatgoes on in our educational
institutions.
Enjoy, it's Seth Fleischauercoming up after the music on
today's episode of the StillCurious Podcast.

(03:39):
Hi, Seth, welcome to thepodcast.
Great to have you here.

Hi, thank you so much for having me.
I'm really happy to be here andgrateful for being invited.

Excellent.
I've got so much to ask you.
We have zero chance of gettingthrough everything, but I'm just
going to dive in if that's okayand we'll see where it goes.
So you're the president andfounder at Banyan Global
Learning, which runs livevirtual programs to help nurture
cultural literacy, educateresponsible digital citizens and
help connect mind and heartthrough social and emotional
learning.

(04:07):
You're an expert in videoconferencing, international
teaching, social, emotionallearning, and K to 12 online
education.
And you've also been a publicelementary school teacher.
What would you say is the mostimportant thing for someone to
understand about what you do?

Uh, I guess it depends on who we're talking to,
but for your listeners, it wouldbe, I'm extremely passionate
about what I do?
I lead with my heart.
lean on having best laid plansthat often get thrown by the
wayside as I chase things downrabbit holes and figure out what
is right for the situation.
That's how I tend to approach myprofessional life.

You describe your work as being at the
intersection of technology,language, culture, and social
and emotional learning.
That strikes me as a prettycrowded intersection.
What would I expect to seethere?

Well, you'd expect to see Banyan Global
Learning and it's work.
Our origin story is one of ateacher me who started a company
14 years ago now and starteddelivering daily distance
learning program to a client inAsia.
And, essentially built ourservices one by one at the

(05:14):
behest of what the clientneeded.
So much of what we do was inresponse to the needs of this
particular group of schools inTaiwan and China.
But then we pivoted and startedlooking domestically.
What we did there wasessentially story of great or
terrible timing, depending onhow you look at it.
It was around January of 2020that we looked at the domestic

(05:38):
market and thought, Hey, let'sspin off the most popular part
of our daily distance learningprogram, which is our virtual
field trips.
And let's start doing those.
Of course, then the worldchanged dramatically and we
responded to really, what was mydaughter's school community.
I saw the life just kinda bleedout of her very quickly when the
pandemic started and she was soisolated and I started running

(05:58):
these calls with her and herfriends that evolved into calls
between her and her classmates,and then eventually the whole
school.
Cause they didn't really haveanything up and running.
And I had all this experiencedoing learning over video
conferencing.
So I was this first access pointfor a lot of these kids at our
school to actually connect witheach other during the early days
of the pandemic.
I happen to have an uncle who isan expert in social, emotional

(06:22):
learning.
And he was able to really skillme up in what we were doing.
So those initial calls evolvedinto what is now our social
emotional learning program,which also includes digital
citizenship, which we basicallysee as SEL online.
That's what we've been doingdomestically.
And then we've folded it backinto what we're doing
internationally.
Our core purpose is to find yourplace in the world.

(06:43):
That's what we're looking to do,to not only do that for
ourselves, but especially forthe students that we work with.
We see that as an internal andexternal exploration, being able
to get to know yourself to theextent that you can look at the
world and understand where youfit into it.
That intersection language,culture, technology, social,
emotional learning, that's whatwe mean by that.

(07:04):
You need to have all of thosethings in order to be able to
flow with this negotiation ofwhere your place in the world
is, which is not necessarily aphysical place, could be a
digital place, could be a placethat constantly changes.
So that conversation withyourself and the.
That's what I mean by thatintersection.

Fantastic.
Such a great answer.
One thing I always ask on thepodcast is for people to explain
a key term of art as if to a 10year old.
I'm wondering if you couldexplain what social and
emotional learning is as it to a10 year old.

It's essentially doing the hard work
of knowing what your feelingsare and being able to express
them, but also knowing theemotions and the feelings of
others.
The reason that we want to dothis is so that ultimately we
can make the best choices,choices that are not only good
for us, but good for the.

I liked this phrase, finding your place in
the world.
I'm curious how you arrived atthat as the framing device for
what you're doing.

Yeah, it's interesting.
Arrived at, uh, it was more likeuncovered.
We actually did some workshopswith the leadership team at Bain
and global learning and doveinto the very question.
What is our core purpose?
We flirted with a bunch ofdifferent ideas, a bunch of
different ways to say all of thethings that we do and why we do
them.

(08:23):
It jumped into to some elementof what we were doing and I ask,
okay, well, why do we do that?
And I got an answer and I said,okay, but why do we do that?
And it was maybe six or sevenlayers of why deep that,
Courtney, has been working withus for about 10 years now, use
that phrase and it reallyresonated with all of us.
What's cool is that it, in manyways it means the same thing,

(08:46):
but in many ways it meansdifferent things to each of us.
I think that is a reallyimportant element of a core
purpose.
It's gotta be able to speakuniversally, but also
individually to everybody who isliving it out.

It's got a lot of layers, certainly and I really
like it.
You mentioned that the virtualfield trips are the most popular
part of what you were doing.
Can you tell me a little bitabout what happens in those?

Sure.
In the beginning we reallyleaned into that word field
trips.
So if you imagine a field tripthat happens on a school bus, we
were doing that, but withoutever having to leave the class.
And really leaning into themedium and what becomes
available when you break downthe four classroom walls and

(09:32):
connect to new people,undiscovered places, and fresh
ideas.
Now the new people that ispretty clear.
There are a whole bunch ofpeople who you would not have
access to if you were limited toyour physical space.
Undiscovered places, wedefinitely want to bring
students all around the world ifwe can, but also to slices of
life that they wouldn'tnecessarily have experienced

(09:54):
within their own communities andfresh ideas leans on this notion
that not every teacher is anexpert in everything that they
might want to bring into theirclassroom.
Having this technology availableto us to be able to bring in
experts and ideas that mightotherwise not ever make it

(10:15):
there, we think that is part ofthe real power of the
technology.
So in our virtual field trips,we take kids all around the
world, but we also have puppetshows that teach about social,
emotional learning, andnarratives that the students
interact with to solve problemsand exercise their digital
citizenship skills.

(10:36):
Some of our international tripsare really cool.
We've got a teacher down inBrazil who is an ex-pat, but
married a Brazilian has twoBrazilian sons to come along
with her on the trip.
It's all live.
So you've got je ne sais quois,this is element of, I dunno,
there's something to live video.
There's something to knowingthat what you're seeing is
what's happening right now onthe other side of the world and

(11:00):
our teacher, Jill down theretakes the students down the main
street of Isacare this littlebeach town that has a pretty
diverse culture.
The students are all looking forlittle representations of that
diversity.
So looking in the storefrontsfor different cultures
represented on this little mainstreet of this little surf town

(11:20):
in Brazil.
I would say that the secretsauce to what we do, what makes
these trips so effective is thatwe really seek to maximize
engagement and do that byleaning into the benefits of the
medium.
If we have a blended learningscenario where students actually
have a second device, we woulddefinitely create a lot of

(11:41):
interactive elements there, butfor everyone, regardless of
whether or not they have thatsecond device, we make sure that
there is a central purpose towhy they are on this trip.
They are trying to answer aquestion they are trying to
investigate in order to be ableto answer that question.
And it could be one that'sframed with a narrative.
It could be a more generalquestion looking for, you know,

(12:02):
that example of the studentsgoing along main street in
Brazil, they could be trying tosolve a mystery.
We really focus on thatquestion.
What are the students doinghere?
Watching video can be a reallypassive experience and we want
to make sure that it is not,that the students are actively
participating in what is goingon and having an effect on what
they see on screen.

Yeah, amazing.
I live in New Zealand.
I noticed you've got aQueenstown experience on there,
which leaped out at me.
You mentioned about yourdaughter and how you noticed
with the pandemic that the lifehad drained out of her.
Can you tell me a little bitmore about that and what
happened then?

Oh, goodness.
Yeah.
She's actually sitting rightnext to me right now.
She's she's

that

uh, yeah, I It was a crazy year, two years
going on three.
She's a really good student.
She's someone who really excelswithin the traditional system,
same way that I did when I washer age.
It wasn't until the pandemicwhen We were learning at home.
And that was an adventure for aformer public school teacher to

(13:06):
have a student at home to workwith.
In the beginning, I was justlike, oh my God, I can't wait
for this.
This is amazing.
I get to exercise these skills.
I get to see her everyday.
I get to have lunch with her.
This is going to be great.
Really trying to look at thebright side of what was going
on.
I quickly realized as I was notonly teaching her, but also
teaching, we had a learning pod.

(13:27):
So there were a couple of otherstudents there.
First of all, teaching five kidsat home is very different than
teaching 30 in a classroom.
And secondly, that a lot of theideas that I had about education
were starting to break down forme.
When I started being in globallearning in 20 oh eight, I was
like, I'm going to bringprogressive ed to Asia.
Here I go.
I got there and then I was like,no, I'm not going to do that.

(13:50):
They are not ready for this.
What's cool.
Is that in the last 15 years,we've really chipped away,
chipped away, chipped away atthe sense of what is acceptable
in the classroom, on the part ofthe administration and the
parents that school.
We've been able to createsomething that's much closer to
what I thought I was going tostart way back when, but it's

(14:11):
still more traditional than mypersonal educational philosophy.
That is based on this schoolthat I taught at in Manhattan in
2005 to 2008.
It was a progressive elementaryschool, that was a beautifully
diverse place that really leanedinto the element of student
choice.

(14:31):
I realized as I was creatingthese lesson plans for my
daughter at home during COVIDthat I had this opportunity to
actually do that.
That there was so much red tape,so many things that might stop
you from being able to lean intothat fully within a traditional
school setting.
But here I was with five kids athome on my day to teach them

(14:55):
where I could go straightproject-based student choice.
Life is the curriculumunschooling, whatever I wanted
to do.
Watching them respond to thatwas amazing.
Watching the rest of the parentsin the group recoil a little
bit.
Cause they were like, you'redoing, you're doing nothing.
So are you're doing nothing?

(15:15):
No, not quite.
I'm facilitating learning,trying to explain what that
means and what that looks likeand really trying to curate the
environment as much as I couldfor the kids.
One day my wife had to do thatday.
I couldn't cover that day.
And she's like, you gotta writea lesson plan for me or
something like that.
I'm like, honey, that's notreally what I'm doing with them.
So what are you doing?
I'm like, okay honey, gooutside.

(15:37):
Look at the first thing thatbrings you joy and come back in
and tell me what it was.
She walks outside, she looks atsome flowers, she walks back in,
she goes, okay, I'm going tohave them make flower
arrangements.
I'm like, there you go.
You did it.
So she had this whole day wherethey went out and picked flowers
and made these little flowerarrangements and it was
beautiful.
We had days where we went andpicked cherries and made cherry
pie, right?
Had them pit all the cherriesand then weighed them and did

(16:00):
all the math with the recipe ofmaking the pie and got to
actually taste the thing thatthey were creating.
Had to figure out how they weregoing to get up high, to get the
cherries off the tree.
All these little problems thatlife throws at you when you have
a goal to do something youhaven't done before.
We just tried to replicate thatover and over again.
And then when she went back intothe classroom, it was this

(16:21):
really weird feeling for me of,almost like a sadness around it
where, I was like, okay, nowshe's going back and doing a lot
of the same things again.
I wonder how many parents feelthat same way, where there was a
little bit of a helplessnessafter having the ability to
shape so much of what theylearned for so many months and
then to have them go back in andhave some of the same old, same

(16:43):
old come back.
So I started letting her likestay home a lot and just create
her own learning at home.
Sometimes it works out well,sometimes it doesn't.
Screen time's an issue, shereally wants to lean into some
silly games sometimes where I'mnot sure I'm doing this right.
There's a lot of thought andreflection and conversation that
goes along with it to make surethat it's something that feels

(17:05):
optimal.
But at this point, I'm lettingher do that.
I'm taking her on ski days.
I'm taking her along with mewhen I can to do some of my own
work.
In the early days of thepandemic, she was on some of
those first social, emotionallearning calls.
She was my cohost, because shewas learning from home.
I'm like, all right, Vieta, thisis how to put on a live virtual
program.
Here we go.
And that was amazing too.
I should say my son too, my sonis six.

(17:27):
He was in daycare just every dayduring the pandemic is a small
enough it stayed open.
And then he started at aMontessori school.
So watching his engagement withMontessori Has also really
shaped some of my thinkingaround how to optimize learning
for any given kid.
My philosophy has honed.
To the point where I believetraditional school should exist.

(17:48):
I'm not one of those people thatis like burn it all down.
But I think that ideallyeverybody should have a choice
to be able to pursue the type ofeducation that they think works
best for them.
My daughter is an open questionfor me.
My son's thriving at Montessori,my daughter, we just got her in
two other schools and we'redebating as like active debate
right now on what we're going todo with her education.

(18:09):
And it's hard.
Part of me, I wanted to put iton her to make the decision,
because I thought that shemight've been capable of that.
And she, one night, just brokedown crying because she didn't
want to leave her friend.
She didn't know what to do, butshe might want to go to be with
her brother at his school, butmaybe she wanted to go to this
other school.
I realized that, against myphilosophy of let the kid drive
everything, she needed helpmaking this decision.

(18:31):
So now we're weighing in alittle bit more on what we think
might be the best call, but it'shard.
It's hard to know what the bestcall is, which is a folly of
having choice.
Right?
One of the drawbacks is that youhave to live with your decision
whether there's good or bad, butmy personal life philosophy,
there are no bad choices, right?
There's just the lessons thatunfold for you in the roads that
you choose.

(18:51):
So we're looking at that as wemove forward, those are very
long answer to your question.

It's a great answer.
But the thing that strikes memost is the language that you
use to talk about these things.
It's very energizing language.
And you described homeschoolingas an adventure, which is not
the word I've heard many peoplewho've gone through that
experience use, but you alsotalking about expanding global
empathy through authenticexperiences that learners
wouldn't have had access tootherwise student choice.

(19:19):
I've heard you say society isthe greatest stakeholder in
education, and you're talkingabout making, learning more
student driven, where teachersare less gatekeepers and more of
a guide on the side, rather thana Sage on the stage.
This energizing language, wheredoes that passion and energy and
your philosophy come from?

One day at a time, really?
I've been inspired by some keyplayers along the way.
One of them was that experienceat the earth school in
Manhattan.
Just a super beautifulprogressive place that I had the
privilege of teaching at when Iwas a young teacher in my
twenties.
My first three years of teachingat a high needs public school in

(19:58):
Bushwick, Brooklyn, that washuge in bringing me outside of
myself and understanding theimpact education can have, I'm
still in touch with some ofthose kids all these years
later, as they're having kids oftheir own.
I'm an optimistic person ingeneral.
My spiritual life really helpswith that.
I have uh, practice aroundmeditation and healing that

(20:20):
really helps me look at fear ina way that really helps me
create good from it.
One of the biggest things thathappened in my recent personal
evolution was that I stoppedhiding from myself and I stopped
trying to bottle up my fears andinstead looked at them straight

(20:40):
on and looked at them for whatthey were here to teach me and I
was then able to create positivechanges a result.
So if you bring that into myprofessional life, nothing seems
too much, nothing seems toochallenging.
If something goes poorly, it'sjust a lesson.
Obviously that is a beautifulthing to say about education in

(21:01):
general, too.
Right?
That everything that happens infront of you, any trial or
tribulation, those things can beturned into something good.
I have another person who reallyinspires me, his name's Dr.
Trevor.
He's a friend of mine through afriend.
I met him in March 1st of 2020.
And he got me onto LinkedIn andLinkedIn is a place where I have
a really awesome community ofeducational radicals who are all

(21:24):
a bit more radical than I am,but really inspire me in the way
that they believe that somethingbetter is possible.
That was all happening at thesame time as I was teaching my
daughter at home and everybodyin the world had this time to
sit and look around and be like,is this working right?
This enhanced consciousness thathappened as a result of the
pandemic, I think is somethingthat the world direly needed.

(21:46):
The great resignation I think isan amazing exercise of power.
And, uh, people just lookingaround and understanding what
they have the power to do.
The choices that they can make.
The combination of that enhancedconsciousness that the pandemic
was bringing plus thisopportunity to teach my kid from
home, plus this opportunity tobe connected with all these

(22:07):
people on LinkedIn, mostly via,Trevor's network.
That mixed with my personalprofessional experience gives me
some real optimism for thedirection that I think things
can go.
The world is a scary place rightnow and just the science behind
it all makes it seem like it'spretty dire, but I think we're
figuring some really crucialstuff out, right in time for us

(22:27):
to make a last stand as aspecies.
Right.
Like I think that this newemphasis on mental health is one
that is so needed.
And finally de-stigmatize thisidea that you can take care of
yourself.
It's okay.
And we're now teaching that tokids who are four and five years
old.
That's amazing.
Imagine these kids, when theygrow up.

It really is a moment in time right now, where
there is a mood of possibilityand asking questions.
Many of the ideas have beenaround for a long time, but it
seems like they've had new lifebreathed into it.
So that's really interesting.
You mentioned that you startedBanyan about 14 years ago, which
is a very different technologytime to be starting a virtual

(23:07):
business.
I understand.
Back in 2003, you started Tigertutoring where you assembled a
small team of Ivy league tutorsand solicited money from elite
private New York schools totutor their high needs students.
Can you tell me about how thatcame about and how it worked.

It was a public school teacher making, I
don't know, not much for livingin New York city.
And I needed another income andobviously staying in education
made a lot of sense.
Had a couple of other alumnifrom Princeton where I went that
were interested in joiningforces.
And we went around to some ofthe prep schools in the area,
thinking that we couldessentially get them to pay for

(23:44):
the tutoring for some high needsstudents.
Cause we knew that there was alot of good financial aid
available to a lot of thosestudents.
One of the high schools likedwhat we had to say and set us up
with some of their students.
you know, It was three of usdoing tutoring, two, three
nights a week.
So it wasn't a huge operation oranything, but it was my first
adventure into entrepreneurship,I guess.

(24:05):
I didn't really see it as thatat the time.
I just saw it as like a way tohave some money to go out, to
eat every once in a while.
But it was great.
I'm still in touch with a lot ofthose kids actually.
Tutoring relationship, becauseit's one-on-one, is a really
close relationship.
You end up getting to know thesekids really, really well.
It was a great experience.
One that I had to stop when Istarted this other company, I

(24:25):
didn't have the bandwidth to doboth.
But I set them up with some ofmy tutoring friends to cover
that for them.
I started Banyan and I did thatas a part-time gig for a year
while I was teaching full-timeand driving out to long island
to use the fancy videoconferencing box that I had to
use in order to be able to makea connection and it became too

(24:48):
much pretty quickly, to be outuntil midnight teaching and
then, because it is Asia time.
So classes would end atmidnight.
And then I drive back to thecity and fall asleep and be up
at six to go teach again.
Eventually I moved to the westcoast for the time difference
and built it from there.

A lot of what I see is sharing what might be
described as un-schoolingstories, which is certainly
something that resonates with meand it's locating the problem in
institutions, but not wanting tothrow the institutions away.
So I guess you're more of aproponent of reform rather than
revolution.

Yes.
I'm a reformer, not arevolutionary because I believe
that there's still a lot of goodin the system.
I look no further than thepeople who are in it, many of
whom are wonderful people whoare doing the best they possibly
can within a system that seemsto be very broken and not

(25:41):
serving a lot of people.
I do acknowledge that being areformer is a position of
privilege.
This system is one that workedfor me, and that is working for
my kid and isn't activelyundermining them the way it
might be undermining some otherstudents.
I have a great Montessori publicschool that I was able to get my
kid into the lottery for that.

(26:01):
So.
Kind of dodged that bulletbecause I didn't think that he
was going to do very well in atraditional system.
I understand revolutionaries andI am friends with a lot of them.
I understand the sentiment.
I just worry about what happenswhen it all comes falling down.
And I see the powers that are atplay in America right now.

(26:23):
I just don't know who comes outon top in a situation where it
all crumbles.
That gives me pause.
I believe that You know, theradicals should have their
radical choices and then thetraditionalist should have their
choices as well.
And I believe that everyone,regardless of who their parents
are, what they believe or wherethey lie politically, they're
all entitled to a goodeducation.

(26:44):
What that means obviously is anactive societal conversation but
I do believe that people,including parents, I think that
parents should have someinfluence over what their kids
learn.
Even when that's not something Ipersonally want them to be
learning, I just think thatchoice is important.

Great answer.
Thank you.
I want to talk a little bit moreabout the founding of Banyan
global learning because youmentioned that you had the taste
of entrepreneurship, and Iassume that you were trying to
bring some of this educationalphilosophy into what you were
doing with Banyan.
How did that start 14 years ago?
You mentioned that you weredoing daily distance learning
and it grew really organically.

(27:22):
What was the need as it wasexpressed then?

It was some really good timing.
I guess I went and taught abroadat this school in Taipei in
2007.
And the school was in the midstof a bit of a rebrand.
They had become reallywell-known for athletics and
they wanted to pivot back intoacademics and to emphasize
English and technology.
In the midst of them doing thisrebrand, I came in and taught

(27:49):
abroad in-person over there andhad a wonderful time.
Loved the school, loved thepeople.
Taiwan is an incredible placeflies under people's radar.
At least in the U S it does.
Half the people in the U S thinkit's Thailand.
The other half of the peoplewill think that it's some
developing nation or something.
Don't understand that whenthings were made in Taiwan in
the eighties, they took thatmoney and they invested it in

(28:11):
infrastructure.
It's actually quite a developednation now and beautiful, and
people are kind, and the food isgreat and the transportation's
easy and it's a wonderful placeto be.
I loved my time there.
I really didn't like what I wasteaching.
It was basically what we wouldthink of is quote unquote,
teaching English, a lot ofgrammar and vocabulary.
I was like, where's the meathere.
I'm not feeling this.

(28:31):
But I knew that they were goingthrough this transformation.
And I knew that they wanted meto stay.
They asked me to stay on for theyear and I thought, how can I
stay without actually stayinghere?
I had some ties back in New Yorkthat were keeping me there.
And here was this new technologythat seemed like a really good
fit for that.
Amazingly, they were game fornot only going for it, but

(28:55):
creating the infrastructure attheir school in order to be able
to make it viable at that time.
So that's a couple of classroomsthat were formatted specifically
for this technology to workwell.
Little things to control theecho and microphones all over
the room and good projectors andscreens and things like that.
They put a little bit of aninvestment there and then

(29:17):
essentially used the opportunityfor this new program to also
showcase there different way ofthinking around education that
could differentiate them fromtheir competitors.
But also Use it as anopportunity to experiment with
curriculum and pedagogy.
The result 15 years later, itspeaks to what I was trying to
do when I first got there.

(29:38):
When I first got there, I wasessentially adapting a bunch of
curriculum for the space, and Ihad to learn what it meant to
even teach online and how to dothis well and what tools we had
and how we could make sure thatit was interactive.
There's a lot that you lose.
If you don't know how To makethat happen in a virtual space.
As we chipped away over theyears, now we have something

(29:58):
that is, I wouldn't call itproject based, but there are a
lot of projects.
We have a central text thatwe've written with the help of
my friend Caz.
Who's an amazing storyteller inHollywood.
And she helped us create somenarratives of these Taiwanese
adolescents that travel theworld.
And each chapter is about adifferent country or city.

(30:18):
And each chapter is also ajumping off point to a project.
The core part of the curriculumis a series of these projects.
Where we're going with it as onethat's even more project-based.
We're getting there slowly overtime.
I think that the experience ofrunning this company for the
past 15 years is a story of slowchange.
I've been really inspired by thetypes of changes that you can

(30:40):
make when you point in adirection and say, we're going
to get there eventually.
Get a bunch of people I'll takeone or each and just start
rowing in the same direction.
you can do some pretty coolstuff.
For many years, the approach wasjust throwing stuff at a wall
and seeing what sticks.
What we ended up with after thatwas a series of units that were
essentially very popular.
So it was just, oh, what did thestudents really like?

(31:01):
Okay, let's build on that.
We ended up with this hodgepodgecurriculum.
that was really fun.
Kids really liked it, but itlacked backbone.
We did this exercise maybe fouror five years ago.
Where I hired a consultant tocome in and look at our
assessments, because I just knewfrom my time at the earth

(31:21):
school, we're not usingassessments correctly.
We are assessing kids and we'reusing it as an evaluation.
We're not letting it inform ourteaching.
It's broken.
We're better than this.
How do we fix this?
So I brought in this consultantand she was like, all right.
So, what are you looking tomeasure?
And I'm like, we should probablyanswer that question.
Whatever I said to her at thetime was.

(31:43):
Sound right.
Didn't feel right.
It just felt like, okay, we haveto back all the way up and we
have to ask ourselves, what isit that we want to measure?
You measure what you value.
So really, it was an explorationof our values.
After a long process, two yearslong of talking to all the
stakeholders and doing thesereal deep reflections on not
only what we could do, what wewere doing, but what we wanted

(32:05):
to do, we came up with ourESLRs, expected student learning
results, which is essentially alist of standards, but they're
applied a bit more loosely thanthat.
Objectives is a good way tothink of them, but essentially
we've got three categories,language, culture, technology.
The language stuff is what youwould think of the stuff that I
was doing back when I taughtabroad there, we are teaching

(32:26):
English.
The culture stuff is essentiallyglobal citizenship and the
technology stuff is essentiallydigital citizenship.
We've got these three statementsthat then get broken into five
statements each that then getbroken into like 20 statements
each that then get broken intomore.
So we've got this huge resourcewhere each one of these things
is a lesson objective and eachone of these things traces all

(32:51):
the way back to something thatwe all know we care about.
In that way, we were able tocreate a real backbone to the
curriculum.
One that was customizedspecifically, not only for us as
an organization, but especiallyfor the students and other
students like them.
That I would say was a huge leapforward for us in terms of

(33:12):
having a curriculum that wasn'tjust one that the students
really enjoyed that they gotmeaning out of as a bonus, to
one that was meaningful from thestart.
That was probably the biggest,most significant change in the
15 years.

Yeah, I'm interested in what the students
like the most and also if youhave any examples of assessment
so that people can visualize howthis works.

The students still like our virtual field
trips more than anything else.
Tonight I'm doing a virtualfield trip with our sixth
graders.
There's three teachers who areeach cooking a fusion meal.
So they're each in theirkitchens.
And they're talking about whythey came up with this
particular meal, how they gotthe ingredients.

(33:55):
And then they're showingpreparation of it.
And then they'll maybe even makethe kids really hungry by eating
it in front of them.
This is part of a unit on Texaszooming in on TexMex, food as a
representation of a fusion ofcultures.
The students are going to befinding their own examples of
fusion food, and they're goingto be doing their own cooking
and talking about the why behindit, why this particular food,

(34:18):
how did it come about, what werethe cultural factors?
What was the improvisation thatled to this being created in the
first place.
There's stuff there aroundculture, there's always a
language component that they areusing in order to express that.
Then the technology piece,there's a lot of tech skills and
presentation skills that they'reusing.
That would be one example.

(34:39):
When the students get a bitolder in the junior high, one of
the great tools of assessmentthat we use with them is their
metacognitive blog.
It's essentially a once per weekthing that they're doing where
they're writing about whatthey're thinking about in their
other classes.
Training them up on how to thinkabout thinking, is one of the

(34:59):
Best ways that you can assessstudents in one of these more
progressive types of curriculawhere we really want to
deemphasize information recalland these broken old ways of the
traditional system and insteadfigure out okay, how do we know
that they got meaning out ofthis?
And what does that meeting looklike for them specifically?

(35:21):
So the metacognitive blog, Ithink is a really great example
of how to do that.

Have you ever found that any particularly surprising
reflections they have in thosekinds of blogs?

Absolutely.
Kids get surprise you every day,right?
Even M more traditionalassessments.
For a class full of students ata uniform school with 48 kids in
the class.
All the kids have to have thesame haircut, there's some very
traditional aspects to this.
And it's a collectivist culture.
But it's one that obviouslyembraces Western culture enough

(35:53):
to have this crazy program thatthey had for the past 15 years.
The most surprising parts arethe truly individual acts that
come out of their work;something that is really
deemphasized within the rest oftheir school day, but is part of
our real value add in terms ofconnecting them directly with

(36:14):
Western teachers, this idea ofbeing able to come up with
original ideas and feel likeit's okay to share them.
That second part is huge.
We really celebrate that.
Those are the moments where weknow it's working.

I actually interested in the kind of
teachers you have populatingthese programs.
Your jobs page says you'relooking for camera ready,
dynamic and charismatic teachertour guides, which has an
interesting kind ofcharacterization.
What can you tell me about them?

Yeah.
That particular job listing isfor virtual field trip
purveyors, people who are onsiteand can take us around to
somewhere in their locale thathas cultural value.
That's just the tour guide part.
The rest of it.
Yeah.
That's what we're looking for.
It speaks to the fact that whenyou're teaching over video
conferencing, there is anentertainment value to it that

(37:06):
is different from live teaching.
I'm someone who always broughtan entertainment value into the
classroom, regardless of whetherI was doing it online.
That was just my particularstyle.
In modern life, We have certainexpectations of what screens
bring to us.
They bring an entertainmentvalue that is different than
real life.
In real life, if you're sittingin a room with someone there's

(37:29):
this unspoken pressure that youfeel to actually pay attention
to them, right?
It's like, oh man, they can seeif I'm looking at them.
So I guess I'm going to look atthem.
I feel like it buys you a littlebit more leeway than it does in
the virtual space where yougotta to come out the gate,
making sure that you are drawingthem in.
Because if you don't, they'renot going to be with you.

(37:50):
The teachers that are able to dothat, we say camera ready.
There's gotta be anunderstanding of how to use the
camera.
Of how to lean in a little bit,when you want to make a point or
exclaim and throw your arms backwhen there's something
incredible happening.
There is an aesthetic to itwhere you want to have good
lighting, you want to bewell-framed.

(38:11):
You want to Look engaging.
Your background can have somebright colors in it, but not too
many, there's all these littlethings, uh, just about the
aesthetics of it that come intothe camera ready bit.
What we also mean by that is,specifically video-conferencing
camera ready, where this wasmuch more true before the
pandemic, but there were peoplebefore this who were like video

(38:32):
conferencing.
I don't ever want to do that.
Right?
Like people who are just like,that's uncomfortable.
Why would you want to seesomeone when you're talking on
the phone with them?
I would say that the biggestdifference between a teacher who
excels online and who does not,is a mindset that they believe
they are sharing the same spacewith their students.

(38:53):
And it's huge because you seewhen it's not happening and you
see when it's happening.
When it's happening, it's notvery different than if they were
actually in the classroom withthem.
It feels the same because youare in the classroom with them,
it's just a virtual classroom.
But when it's not happening, yousee people talking under their
breath, into the microphone asif everybody can't see them and
hear them, or shuffling papersand just unaware of what they're

(39:15):
bringing to the space, you know?
That's something that for themost part, you can't really
train it.
It's just kinda in their head.
So that's something that we lookfor as well.
And Then we just look for solidteacher chops, diverse
viewpoints, different lifeexperiences that can round out
who we are as a company and agroup of teachers.
We look for age levelexperience.

(39:36):
We look for ed tech, whichagain, used to be a bigger deal
than it was.
And then for this program we dolook for a certain amount of
international awareness.
It's a bonus that people havetaught abroad, but they at very
least need to understand worldevents.
They need to know where Taiwanis, and maybe know a little bit
about its relationship to China.
Although it's honestly somethingwe never really talk about in

(39:58):
the classroom.
We leave that to their localteachers.
They talk about their stuff andwe talk about the rest of the
world.
Recruitment became a whole loteasier for us in the pandemic
because the entire world, all ofa sudden has experienced doing
what we do, that's one thing.
And then the other part of thatis just sad, which is that a
whole bunch of teachers areleaving the classroom.
It sucks to know that we aresomehow benefiting from that.

(40:20):
But I see it as a way to keepthem in the classroom,
basically, just in a virtualone, but Yeah.
I've had a bunch of people applyor just like, Yeah.
I'm transitioning and it's justnot working for me anymore.
I understand it.
I did it myself.
I left the classroom 10 yearsago, 15.

On that point, having made that transition
yourself and knowing what youknow now, what advice would you
give to young Seth doing that?

I'm not a big regret person.
I don't regret any decision I'veever made.
I left the classroom because Ihad to.
I remember the moment when I waslike, I can't do this forever.
And that moment defined what Icould bring into the classroom
because I had felt that burnout.
I knew that I was never going tobe a hundred percent again and

(41:08):
that influenced the decision toleave.
I think I felt pretty bad aboutit at the time but I don't think
I necessarily should have.
I think I did the right thingfor me and for my students
because if I'm bringing lessthan a hundred percent I
shouldn't be there.

Are you happy

Um,

about that moment at all?

oh yeah.
Still in touch with that kid.
It was a kid who I'd workedreally hard with and he had
backslidden in spring rightaround this time of year.
I was working two jobs, I juststarted the company.
I was tired.
And when he backslid in a waythat felt like it was even worse
than when I started puttingprobably 15, 20% of my energy

(41:49):
into this one kid.
It was too much.
I remember sitting there in theclassroom and just being like,
there it is, that's burnout.
That's the feeling.
And still really care for thatkid.
He's got a kid of his own now.
But yeah, that was the moment.
And within two weeks I told themI was not just leaving, I was
moving across the country to gowith this other job full time.

(42:10):
I think it was the right thingto do, but it was hard.
That was professionally one ofthe hardest things I've ever had
to do for sure was leaving thatschool.
Then in terms of advice for me,like starting the company, that
those expected student learningresults, the SLRs that I told
you about, I would have beenlike, Hey, check these out Much
earlier.
That's kinda the only thing, therest of it has just unfolded the
way that it needed to.
And even that one thing, Ilearned so much in the meantime.

(42:32):
Again, not a big regret person.

That really comes through.
I'm curious, just to go back fora moment, to the point about
creating an online space thatfeels like the same shared
space.
One of the Interesting commentsI've heard from people who've
been hurtled into that remoteworking situation and people
trying to carry on business asusual but online is they feel

(42:56):
really, that there's animposition of having all of
these people they don't likefrom work now projected into
their living room, into theirpersonal space.
And it's got quite apsychological toll.
So that shared space phenomenonis really interesting; that you
could bring the virtual intoyour own physical space.
I'm just curious if you have anymore observations about what it

(43:17):
means to create a shared onlinespace.

Yeah, it's a similar exercise to just
building culture in general.
I heard a great quote, cultures,what you see when you walk past
or something like that.
If you don't actively build aculture, the culture will build
itself.
The things that you need to doin order to make people feel
loose and comfortable onlineThere are things that you need
to do in terms of figuring outwhat the group prefers around

(43:44):
protocols.
Do we share our camera?
Do we mute and unmute?
Which meetings or phone calls,which meetings are video calls.
Asking ourselves at any giventime, does this need to be
synchronous?
Does this need to be video,creating a virtual space doesn't
mean creating it whenever youcan at all costs.
There are certain situationswhere maybe it doesn't make

(44:05):
sense to have it be a video.
Maybe someone doesn't feel wellthat day or is in a space where
they can't do it or doesn'tnecessarily want to share their
background.
I would say before, you'reexpecting people to share their
home with each other.
You should really make sure thatyou are building that online
culture.
And that sharing of a home canbe part of the online culture.

(44:25):
So you can see me on video rightnow.
I have a plain white backgroundthat I often use virtual
backgrounds on.
I see you have a bookshelf, soI'm kind of spying on you and
seeing what you read.

so questioned (44:36):
what made you choose this space to be the
space that you set up yourcamera?
Was that out of necessity or didyou want the bookshelf in the
background?

that is a great question.
It is mostly necessity in that Ilive in a two bedroom apartment
and there's only one space thatI could use for this.
And I have put the bookshelf andthe white board and the desk and
things in it.
It's not really the best roomfor lighting, but it just has
worked out that the book case isthere and makes me feel safe.

Yeah, people's bookshelves has been one of my
favorite little quirks of thepandemic, right?
A lot of people that are sittingin front of bookshelves.
Little things like that, right?
I just invited myself into yourhome, but I felt like you were
kind of showing it to me.
So it felt safe for me to askthat question.
There's great options now interms of virtual backgrounds so
that if you are sharing yourperson, that you have the option

(45:26):
to share more or not.
We've done a whole lot of workaround trying to build a remote
culture.
Cause we were all based in LA.
I moved up to Portland, Oregonfour years ago.
Then when the pandemic hit,everyone just like we're all
over now.
We've got teachers in Minnesotaand Florida and California and
Oregon and Washington and tryingto build an office culture when

(45:48):
people don't share a zip code ishard.
There are a lot of differenttools that you can use.
Gathers a fun one to use, butreally, no matter what you're
using, there's a substance thatneeds to be addressed and what
that substance is going to bedifferent for every group of
people, depending on what yourcertain mix is of introverts
versus extroverts and people wholike to share and people who

(46:10):
don't.
We have a slack channel for ourcompany and one line of
questioning that we've startedto do, that's been pretty fun,
is, tell me about the blank inyour city.
What's the best restaurant,what's your favorite park?
What's something that localsknow that nobody else knows.
If you've got a friend from outof town, where are you taking
them?
Little things like that, thatpeople can respond to and share
a piece of themselves but alsowe can lean into the fact that

(46:32):
we are decentralized, and thatwe all have these different
lived experiences as a result ofwhere we are.
More generally for people whoare asked to join some sort of
virtual space, whether it be ineducation or in the professional
world, I think it's reallyimportant that people have a
choice at least some of thetime.
And that people bringconsciousness to why they are

(46:55):
doing things.
If you're having a video calland you can't tell me why you're
having a video call, then maybeit shouldn't be a video call.

I'd to hear a little bit more about young Seth
and his hopes and dreams andfears.
I know you're not a regretsperson but I'm curious to get
into your mindset when you werejust starting out.
Did you have a plan a for whatyou would be doing?

I was going to be a pilot.
That's the first thing that'sgoing to be.
Yeah.
I remember meeting a pilot whenmy grandpa was visiting and
singing in a hotel and there wasa pilot in the hotel and the
jacuzzi and he was talking abouthis job and I was just, that's
the coolest.
One of my ideas about educationright now is that the line
between, what is school, what iscollege?
What is the workplace, thisshould all be kind of blurred.

(47:36):
Looking at a more European modelof trade schools and people
deciding earlier on what theyneed to do.
You look at my own life.
There's no way I would have beena teacher.
I had a lot of other things onmy mind.
I was going to be a vet untilthey had me shadow a vet when I
was in like sixth grade.
And I was, well, that was notwhat I expected.
I wanted cute fluffy animals,not blood so didn't want to do
that anymore.

(47:57):
Then I went into college.
I was pre-med.
I was going to be a doctor.
I think I just wanted to helppeople is what it came down to.
And, Science got too hard.
I remember the day I droppedout, I went to like a first day
lecture of microbiology.
And I remember sitting therejust lost because when I was in
high school, instead of takingAP bio, I took astronomy at the

(48:19):
local city college, which isamazing.
Loved it.
And, ended up taking astronomyagain in college.
My professor was someone you mayhave heard of, Neil deGrasse
Tyson.
That was really cool.
So that day in microbiology, Ijust remember being lost and
then saw a friend of mine afterthe lecture.
And she was like, oh my God, didwe need that much of a review?
And I was like, I'm not pre-medanymore.
Then I was going to major inpolitics, but I realized that

(48:42):
what I liked about politics wasthe sociological component of
it, the human behavior aspect ofit.
And that led me to psychology.
I majored in psych and thenworked at the American
psychological association for ayear after college, transitioned
to the New York academy ofsciences, where I was running
educational programs.
There were six days of the yearwhere we actually worked with

(49:03):
students and those were by farmy favorite days.
And I was like, I think I wantto be a teacher.
But I actually was applying toNew York city teaching falls,
which is like teach for Americabut for New York city and to get
a master's in social work, thosewere the two things I was
looking at.
I ultimately decided that.
First of all, I could get amaster's and get it paid for and
get paid while I was getting mymaster's.

(49:24):
That was probably the biggestdeciding factor.
But then also social work as anempath, I thought I was going to
have a hard time bringing workhome with me.
I feared that I was not going tobe able to separate myself from
the work enough.
Ironically, some of those earlyschools that I worked at, I was
essentially an unlicensed socialworker.
I think a lot of teachers feelthat way.
So I did bring a lot of my workhome with me, but again, no

(49:46):
regrets love where I'm at.

Thank you for sharing that.
Along the way, I see you managedto become a real life meme as a
generic, sad Mets fan.
I don't think I've ever met ameme before, what's it like?

Yeah, here I am.
It's a really interesting typeof fame.
One that you have to tell peopleabout in order for them to know
about it.
It comes up every now and again,a friend will be like, I saw you
on ESPN, if I meet people andI'm talking about baseball, it's
probably the third thing I'llsay.
It's definitely something Ibring up.
It's fun and the Mets are justlike, I'm the sad Mets fan.

(50:19):
The Mets are so sad.
It's to be emblematic.
It's bittersweet, right?
Because I want to see them dowell.
I want to see my picture becomeirrelevant.
But I also really enjoyconnecting with people over it.
It's a lot of fun.

it's got a very expressive face in that picture.
You sound really over it at thispoint.
I have to say.

As a Mets fan, you get over it quickly.
There's always the next seasonof disappointment.
Yeah, there they're priming meright now for a hard fall.
They're doing great this season.

Given your stance on regrets and positivity and
looking forward, is there abelief that you've changed your
mind about over the years andwhat would that be and why?

The first thing that pops into my head is
that I used to think that corevalues were nonsense.
I thought that because Icouldn't find mine and I
couldn't find mine because Ifelt like I brought a different
part of myself into all thesedifferent scenarios.
Then I realized that one of mycore values was adaptability.
But in doing core valuesexercises with my company, I was

(51:19):
able to really discover my owncore values and now I see them
so clearly.
It's Interesting to me that theywere such a mystery for so long.
I realized the way that I makedecisions about who I want to
spend time with and what I dowith my time that these things
are dominated by my core values.

(51:39):
Kindness is a big core value ofmine, curiosity, which I see is
not just learning about thingsin the world but also having the
humility to really wonder aboutpeople especially in today's
polarized world that you don'tagree with.
And having the curiosity tounderstand their humanity is
really important to me.

(51:59):
Community is really important tome.
Leadership is really importantto me.
I really had to grow my way intoit.
I think I had one too manycomparisons to Michael Scott and
the two thousands where I waslike, they mean that as a
compliment, but I'm not takingit that way.
Cause I was trying to be like,Hey guys, I'm cool.
It's okay.
I'm your friend.
People need a leader, right?

(52:21):
People need someone whooccasionally is going to make an
unpopular decision because noone else can.
It's something that took a longtime for me to believe that I
could be and to see that I hadvalue as, and I'm still working
on it to be honest, but I'vereally come into myself more and
more as a leader andunderstanding my role and

(52:41):
understanding that it's one ofmany roles.
It's not better or necessarilyeven more important than a lot
of other roles.
Everybody's got to have a handleon that oar, and rowing in that
same direction or else itdoesn't work.
That's been another thing thathas evolved for me personally,
and then a growth mindset.
That's another core value ofmine.
That's one that I didn'tnecessarily have until I went

(53:02):
through some physical injuries,back and hip problems and
started doing some rehab onthose injuries and discovered
the intersection of emotional,physical, mental, and spiritual
healing.
There's this great book called,The body keeps the score', about
how our body holds on to traumaand pain.

(53:23):
I remember rehabbing my backinjury and being on the massage
table and just.
And being reminded of somethingthat happened in childhood.
That sent me down a path ofreally trying to uncover what
the real thing is here.
Another huge change in my lifeis, I've been sober for about
four years.
I used to drink, notdestructively.

(53:44):
Part of the reason why I drankso often, because everything was
fine.
I was a happy, drunk.
I didn't.
Treat anyone poorly?
I didn't let it affect my job inany negative way or my family
life.
But I was using it as a way tohide from myself.
I was not feeling my feelingsand once I stopped drinking I
started feeling my feelings in away that really allowed me to

(54:05):
grow and that I was stuntedbefore then.
I've made a lot of reallyamazing changes in my life since
then, having to do with adoptingthis growth mindset, right?
It's not a brick wall.
It's a hurdle.
That's been incredible for me, areal blessing for me.

Thank you for sharing that.
I'm going to look up that bookas well.
The body keeps the score.
My friend used to say that themassage therapist would really
touch her in the feelings.
I know that experience as well.
It's fascinating.
And that burnout really, youhold in the body as well.
We've talked a little bit aboutprivilege and what I want to ask
is you're a Princeton graduateand you've had what might be

(54:44):
called the front row experienceof life in many ways.
How much of what you're doing ispredicated on that privilege.
And how you thinking about that?
The reason I ask is a littlewhile back, I did a podcast with
someone who specializes inchronic disadvantage.
And then we talked about howmany people don't have the
opportunity to experience thejoy of curiosity based learning

(55:06):
and student choice, becausethey're so occupied with the
grind of just getting throughlife and surviving.
In that scenario, education is ameans to an end and primarily
about its use value.
That comes through thatunderstanding in the way That
some of your marketing for lingoloop is presented as well.
So I just wanted to ask you howyou thinking about that and
reconciling it.

(55:26):
You're very reflective and I'mcertain that you've reflected on
this a lot.
And I suspect we'll all be alittle richer for hearing those
reflections.

Well, you're too kind with that last part,
but yeah, I appreciate thequestion done a lot of thinking
about it.
I understand that I'm a personof privilege.
I did not always understandthat.
Going to Princeton, I was theson of a social worker and a
music teacher amidst thispopulation of the world's most
powerful people.
Right.
It's all relative but as a moremature person, I understand that

(55:58):
being a white male is obviouslya huge amount of privilege that
I try to balance with gratitude.
Just having consciousness aroundReally everything but especially
my own impact on a room on agiven group of people based on
my race and my gender, my ownracial identity, what that means
to me.
I think that the biggest thingthat I do, I think the biggest

(56:21):
opportunity that I have is thatmy company is setting the tone
for my group of teachers.
We brought in some experts to dosome workshops with us.
It's been a little over a yearnow where we've been hitting
this head-on and making it partof our consistent professional
development and really exploringracial identity and what that

(56:42):
means to each one of uspersonally, but then for us, we
have our work that we do withstudents in the U S and Canada
that are the one-off and shortunits in world culture, digital
citizenship, social, emotionallearning, but the stuff that we
do with the students in Asia,there's a whole lot there in
terms of how we approach thatwith a conscious mind towards

(57:02):
our own racial identity, asopposed to doing it
unconsciously, where we mightfall into some trappings of
educational colonialism and tryto tell them that our way is
better.
That is not what we're trying todo.
We're trying to come in with aconsciousness around who we are,
what we bring and who they areand give them the tools to have
that same.

(57:22):
That's where the biggest impactopportunity for me is to work
with my team to have thoseunderstandings and bring it into
the work that they do.
Beyond that, I think that it'stough.
I was in some of the highestneeds public schools in the
country when I started mycareer, like many teachers and
then moved on to a moreprogressive school that was
still had a lot of students froma lot of different walks of

(57:45):
life.
Now I work with public andprivate schools across the U S
and Canada but then also theschools that we work with in
Taiwan are private schools, notreally by the same token that
you would think of in the U Swhere it's 30 and$40,000 a year.
It's not like that there.
But they are people who arerelatively privileged.
I think of the work that we doat this still fairly small size

(58:08):
as being work of open-heart.
I believe that regardless of whoyou are and where you are, that
you deserve love, and youdeserve the opportunity to
connect with people, whether youAre the most disadvantaged kid
in the world or the mostadvantage get in the world.
There's a whole army ofeducators out there who are

(58:29):
ready to find their place in theworld and figure out how to best
have an impact.
I have dreams of what we can doonce we've better established
ourselves.
Right now we don't have a grantwriting team, so we're not able
to give stuff away for free aswell as we could, although
anybody who's listening, pleasewrite to me, Seth, at being in
global learning.com, if yourschool feels like they could

(58:52):
benefit from this sort of thing,drop me a line, let me know.
We'd love to accommodate what wecan.
What we are looking to do is topartner with institutions that
do have grant writing teams.
I've got an exciting opportunitythat I'm working on with, uh,
University that is doing somenutrition-based education and
thought that virtual field tripswould be a great way to bring in
the cultural piece.

(59:13):
The woman I'm talking to isreally inspired by our social,
emotional learning work andthought that was a huge
component that was missing fromher nutrition education, which I
thought was so inspired.
To consider SEL as thisnecessary component of nutrition
education.
As a privileged person, I putthings into my body that are
what I would consider highquality ingredients.

(59:33):
I feel good about that.
I feel good about sacrificingsome other things so that I can
afford to do that.
You could imagine the way thatpeople who don't have that
choice, how that must impacttheir emotional mental health.
Being able to partner withinstitutions that have those
grant writing wings, where wecan become a part of that to
reach those populations thatcan't necessarily afford the

(59:55):
services, that's in theshort-term plan.
And then the long-term plan isto have those efforts of our
own, once we have scaled upenough to be able to afford that
sort of work.
That is the direction that we'reheaded.
I just did all this work aroundvision for the company,
revisiting this stuff after allthese years.
And that was one of the bigparts of it.
What is the path?
What do we need to do?
How do we need to succeed inorder to be able to get to a

(01:00:17):
point where we are in a positionto give more stuff away for
free, essentially.
We're not quite there yet butwith any luck and humility, we
will get there.

Danu Poyner (01:00:26):
Thank you for engaging with the question.
I appreciate that.
I like the framing of findingyour place in the world that is
the theme of our conversationtoday.
One thing I always ask people onthe podcast is if you could gift
someone a life-changing learningexperience, what would it be and
why?

Seth Fleischauer (01:00:44):
There's a member of my family that hasn't
adopted the same growth mindsetthat I have.
I see the potential of themhaving that and feel that it
would be such an amazingexperience that ultimately
they're, I think, afraid tohave.
I'm not sure what the experienceis.
I've done some out there stuffwith body work and Reiki and

(01:01:09):
some of these spiritual things.
What would work for any givenperson to shift a mindset like
that I think is a very personalthing.
I don't think I have a way ofpredicting what that would be
for this person but the endresult is what I would give
them.
And I wish I knew how to getthem there.

I've really enjoyed speaking with you today, Seth.
We've covered a lot of ground.
I should give you an opportunityto share with people how best to
get in touch with you and wherewould be a good place for them
to look if they wanted to findout more about the work you're
doing.

yeah, thank you.
LinkedIn is a great place to getin touch with me.
Seth Fleischauer is my name.
I'm fairly active.
They're not as active as I usedto be but I really do enjoy the
community and the discussionsthat happen there.
So that's my social mediaimprint.
If you want to hear about theMets, I'm also on Twitter.
Louche Seth, which is Chinesefor teacher.
And then global learning.com isour website.

(01:02:02):
That's a good place to go forinformation about who we are and
what we do.
We're looking to deliver ouramazing services wherever we
can, at schools that otherwiseoutsource content, right?
Schools that are open toBringing in subject matter that
maybe their teachers don't havethe access or the expertise for

(01:02:22):
and we're really all aboutengagement, right?
It's all about students who mayor may not be engaged with any
given subject matter.
We come in, we make it breathe,we bring it alive.
And we inspire students to bringtheir best self, not only to
that moment, but to the momentsthat come.
So, if anybody out there islistening, that sounds good for

(01:02:42):
anybody that you think it couldbe good for.
Please send them our way.

Fantastic.
Thank you so much.
Is there something else thatyou'd like to talk about that we
haven't covered today?

I'm interested in this idea of grokking, but
it's more like questions foryou.
Do you know where the term camefrom?
The first time I ever heard itwas in your podcast.
and then.
after you said it, I heard it acouple of other times and I was,
oh, apparently I've been missingthis word.

Yeah, that's the lore of learning new terms.
Once you hear them, once theypop up everywhere, it's got its
own little life that phrase, butit comes from a science fiction
book, written by Robert Heinleinis stranger in a strange land
and he uses it in lots of ways,to understand something,
intuitively empathically to takeit into yourself.
So it becomes part of you, andin the computer programming

(01:03:28):
world, they used a lot to getacross things and to make it be
part of you.
I thought it was a really niceway of encapsulating, a way of
going about learning that's alittle away from the formal
structures, and I thought thatwill be a nice way to think
about my project.

It feels almost spirits.
Cause you talk about anintuitive, right?
So there's this leap of faiththat a person has to arrest
their understanding and be opento new understanding.
I think generally, a lot of mylearning is still stuck in the
traditional system.
But there are things I would saythat gardening is a big thing.

(01:04:06):
I'm a self-taught gardener.
I really love talking to peoplebeing inspired by people asking
questions.
I've always said that the secretto gardening is the ability to
fail, the acceptance of failureand paying attention.
If you do those two things,you'll be great.
I'm going to be looking for moregrokking opportunities as
inspired by you.
So thank you.

Oh, thank you, sir.

Thank you so much for having me on today.
It was a real pleasure and Ilove what you're doing.
I love your project.
I look forward to seeing howyour community grows.

thanks very much.
I really appreciate you makingthe time and it's been a great
conversation.
Keep up the good work and we'llkeep in touch.

Yeah.
Thanks.
You too.
Have a good one.

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How we design conscious, creative and caring virtual learning - Seth Fleischauer | S2E10

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}How we design conscious, creative and caring virtual learning - Seth Fleischauer | S2E10