In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Rebecca Winthrop - senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Disengaged Teen - about the four modes of student engagement her team identified across a decade of research, and what those modes reveal about how generative AI is reshaping students' relationship to learning. Her framework, grounded in work by researcher John Marshall Reeve, finds that students who take initiative in their own learning not only feel better, they out-achieve achievers - a finding with direct implications for an era when AI can produce the proxy products that schools have long used to measure learning.

Together, Seth and Rebecca explore what it means that engagement modes are states and not traits, why self-awareness about which mode you're in may be the skill that matters most in an AI-saturated classroom, and why the resistors - not the achievers - are actually closest to explorer mode. Rebecca distinguishes cognitive stunting from cognitive bypass: the concern isn't students using AI to speed up work they can already do, but students outsourcing cognitive work they haven't yet built. She unpacks her task force's central finding - that "teach-not-tell" AI use narrows risk while "wide AI use" accelerates disengagement - and argues for a burden-of-proof model before new AI tools get scaled. And she makes the trust problem concrete: anti-plagiarism posturing turns teachers into police, ruptures relationships, and produces exactly the kind of environment that research says is worst for learning.

Key topics:

• The four engagement modes: Passenger, Achiever, Resistor, Explorer
• Why states - not traits - is the crucial distinction
• Metacognition as the lever for mode-shifting
• Cognitive stunting vs. cognitive bypass
• "Teach-not-tell" vs. "tell-not-teach" AI use
• Why trust - not detection - is the right lens for academic integrity
• The pre-mortem methodology behind the Brookings AI task force

Links & Resources:

• The Disengaged Teen by Rebecca Winthrop and Jennifer Wallace - https://www.thedisengagedteen.com/
• Brookings report: A New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect (2026) - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-direction-for-students-in-an-ai-world-prosper-prepare-protect/
• John Marshall Reeve's work on agentic engagement - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00405841.2019.1702451
• Dr. Amy Berry's research on student engagement - https://www.amyberry.com.au/
• Dr. Trevor Soponis - https://mim.bepodcast.network/episodes/67-building-sustainable-professional-development-across-cultures-with-dr-trevor-soponis

Guest Bio: Rebecca Winthrop
Rebecca Winthrop is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of its Center for Universal Education, where she leads research on student engagement, learning quality, and education in crisis contexts. She co-authored The Disengaged Teen based on a decade of research across thousands of students and families, and recently chaired a global task force assessing the risks and benefits of generative AI in education across multiple countries. Her work focuses on how schools can shift from high-stakes proxy assessments to learning environments that build the capacities students actually need.

About the Host:
Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators - building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Phil Evans - a career educator who works on schoolwide adoption strategy for the International Baccalaureate and hosts his own podcast, Education by Design - about what school is actually for, and how personalization, agency, and systemic coherence pull against each other in practice. The conversation leans on Brookings researcher Rebecca Winthrop's framework distinguishing passengers, achievers, resistors, and explorers as different modes of student engagement.

Together, Seth and Phil explore the tension between personalizing learning for individual students and scaling any given approach across a whole system, why compliance-driven curriculum may be preparing students for a workplace that's already moved on to skills-based hiring, and what Rebecca Winthrop's engagement-and-agency framework gets right about the limits of always aiming for "explorer" mode. They also get into why coherence - not talent, and not curriculum - is what actually determines whether teachers share their best work: Phil contrasts a gifted teacher working entirely alone with a network of IB educators trading resources by the jump drive, simply because the second group had already agreed on a common framework.

Key topics:

• What school is actually for - market signal, individual capacity, or civic preparation
• The tension between personalization and scalability in education policy
• Compliance versus agency as workplace-readiness skills in the AI era
• Rebecca Winthrop's passenger / achiever / resistor / explorer framework
• Why coherent, shared systems - not individual talent - determine whether teachers collaborate
• The IB's schoolwide model as a case study in systemic coherence
• Self-knowledge and career choice at 22 versus 42

Links & Resources:

• Education by Design - Phil Evans's podcast: edubydesign.com
• International Baccalaureate: ibo.org

Guest Bio: Phil Evans
Phil Evans works on schoolwide adoption strategy for the International Baccalaureate, helping schools design and scale services that support IB implementation. He's spent nearly eighteen years teaching and working inside IB schools in the U.S. after moving from Australia in 2008, and in 2025 launched his own podcast, Education by Design, exploring how schools are architected rather than simply operated.

About the Host: Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Lesley Hatton, Senior Programme Officer at Nord Anglia Education, about Global Campus — the platform connecting nearly 90 schools across Nord Anglia's international network, and what it takes to design cross-cultural connection at that scale. The conversation draws on 2023 research with University College London that identified four "connection pillars" behind the program's design.

Together, Seth and Lesley explore how Nord Anglia's four connection pillars — self, world, experts, and community — took shape from that UCL research, and the test her team uses to decide whether a proposed activity (a long-requested "mathematics club," a Tanzania expedition, live drawing sessions paired with MIT and Juilliard) actually builds connection or just adds more schoolwork. They get into the harder part of running one platform across dozens of countries with different cultural and legal norms — what gets moderated, what gets held back for a specific school, and why something as simple as an image of a pig can be off-limits in some places. Lesley walks through the six student behaviors her team tracks, including the finding that students at Nord Anglia's most-connected schools score six to ten points higher than their peers on self-reported measures of those behaviors — and closes with what a school outside any international network can realistically borrow from the model.

Key Topics

• The four connection pillars: self, world, experts, community
• 2023 UCL research on intercultural competence
• Designing activities that build real cross-cultural connection (the mathematics club example)
• Content moderation across different countries' cultural and legal norms
• Collaborations with MIT, Juilliard, and UNICEF
• The six student behaviors and the most-connected-schools data
• Building global connection without an international network

Links & Resources

• Global Campus — Nord Anglia Education
• Nord Anglia Education
• Learning Explorations - Nord Anglia's podcast hosted by Emily Murphy: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/learning-explorations/id1673148486
• Seth's earlier Make It Mindful conversation with Emily Murphy on metacognition — https://www.banyangloballearning.com/podcast/45-metacognition-the-first-step-to-lifelong-learning-with-kayla-morehead-and-emily-murphy
• Why Distance Learning, Seth's other podcast — https://www.cilc.org/Members/Why-Distance-Learning-Podcast.aspx
• Banyan Global Cohorts
• World Savvy
• Svitlo School

Guest Bio: Lesley Hatton

Lesley Hatton is a Senior Programme Officer at Nord Anglia Education, where she works on Global Campus, the platform connecting students across Nord Anglia's international network of schools. Before moving into this role, she taught in international schools herself. Hatton studied at the University of Warwick and is based in Reading, UK.

About the Host

Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts