Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast

Seth Fleischauer (00:00.781)
Hello everyone and welcome to Make It Mindful, the podcast where we explore how to keep schools relevant by looking through the lens of mindfulness and asking the question, what's really worth paying attention to here? I'm your host, Seth Fleischhauer. In each episode, I interview educational change makers striving to understand what they do, why it works, and how it can lead to practical transformative solutions for teaching. This week, my guest is Nancy Weinstein. Nancy, thank you so much for being here.

Nancy Weinstein (00:27.835)
And thank you for having me.

Seth Fleischauer (00:30.267)
Excited for this conversation you and I met at COSA which is like the Oregon Superintendent Association Conference here in Oregon, although you are based on the East Coast Thank you for coming out to my fair state and I learned a little bit about mind print the company that you founded and run which is a an assessment you have a tool that is an assessment that is based in cognitive science and You use that assessment to really inform

schools about how they can best support their learner.

Nancy Weinstein (01:25.613)
Seth, can you hear me?

Nancy Weinstein (03:06.646)
.

Seth (04:34.459)
My god, that has never happened before. I'm so sorry.

Nancy Weinstein (04:39.105)
You're really very good though at presenting. I loved your flow.

Seth (04:43.831)
Thanks. You ain't seen nothing yet, Nancy. Here we go. All right, I think we can still do this. All right. Okay.

Nancy Weinstein (04:51.424)
Okay.

Seth (04:55.281)
So Nancy, you and I met at COSA, which is the Oregon Superintendent Association Conference here in my fair state, although you are based in New Jersey. And I learned a little bit about MindPrint, the company that you run and founded. I was super impressed with the way that it is like based in cognitive science and with the practical application to really supporting learners in a way that seems very personal.

and transformative for what any given teacher or school might be doing. I want to dive into that. I also understand that you have a set of data that you've been able to watch what students are good at and really just get like a portrait of their brains. And you've been doing this during the pandemic. So you have a story to tell about how the pandemic

Nancy Weinstein (05:25.278)
.

Seth (05:46.277)
seemingly has impacted the way that students think. And I think that that is a super powerful story that I am happy to provide you with the platform to get out there because it's a story that needs to be told. Before we go there, let's give you an opportunity to just introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you ended up at MindPrint.

Nancy Weinstein (06:08.262)
Well, first of all, thank you for having me. And I'm excited to tell the folks about MindPrint and share some of this data. So I appreciate your giving me the opportunity. I started MindPrint about 10 years ago.

My background was in bioengineering, but I had spent most of my career in the business world. I had two daughters and about 10 years ago, my older one was in third grade and she had this incredible teacher who said, there is something holding your child back and I'm not sure what it is and I'd love to see more data.

wasn't coming from the educational space, right? So my experience in education had been like many people. I went to school for 16 or so years, right? And so most of did, that are here on this forum. But I really didn't know much beyond that. And so when she was saying more data, honestly, my reaction was, okay, go get data. Why are you...

Seth (07:01.328)
Almost all of us did.

Nancy Weinstein (07:20.556)
telling me this and not doing it if you know that you need data to support my daughter. And really what she was trying to say was that she was seeing this variability in my daughter where she understood things, she was capable of doing them, and then it wasn't getting done. Long story short, we went outside of the public school system and paid for a psychoeducational evaluation with a

psychologists where they evaluate, evaluate your student or your child, in areas like understanding and reasoning and memory and executive functions, all the things that folks talk about. And, and it was, it's a tough process. It was an expensive process for me. And when I asked the psychologist, I said, what do tell my daughter about why I'm pulling her out of school and asking her to do all this unusual testing, right? Kids know when you're doing something different. She said, Nancy.

you tell her that you're giving her the gift of how she learns and it's a gift that she's going to have for the rest of her life. And I was so taken aback by that. honestly, said, like in true curiosity, if we know this to be true, why are we not getting this data on every child? And so,

At that time, I wasn't working full time. had an opportunity to explore and I kind of took my background in bioengineering and dug deep, read a lot and started to understand that the reason we weren't doing it for every child was that basically technology had not reached that part of the learning world. And so while the tests had been around for 50 or so years, nobody had made them so that they were scalable.

So that's why it was so expensive for me to do it. And that's why it would continue to be expensive. And I said, we can do this for every child. We know that these tests work. We know that they tell us how students learn. We know that when we follow what the tests tell us, that students are able to be more successful. We can do this for every child. And with that, I ended up starting MindPrint. So.

Seth (09:37.681)
Hmm. Wow. And I want to, I want to really connect those dots of like, when we follow what the data tells us, we're able to have students be more successful. want to, want to really like lay out that path, why it works. I do have to share my own personal experience with this. You gave me a couple of logins so I could try it with my kids. with my daughter who's older, I was able to kind of like really break down and share with her the results. And she was sitting there reading it and be like, how does this thing know me so well? What?

How does it know I can do that? And part of it was that there's somewhat of a disconnect between what the tests are and what it says about you. There's definitely some, I guess, conclusions that are drawn when they're, and I don't want to say what the tests were. I did watch because I know that not knowing what they are is part of the process for the students. there's certain questions there where she had some kind of answer and then.

And then it said it was wrong and she was confused for like half a second. But then she was like, no, no, no. Maybe that means this thing. And then like, and then later it like talked about how she was really good at like abstract reasoning and like being able to like generalize her like solutions from one thing to another. was like, that's what they were doing. And like she had no idea that that's what it was assessing, but it was in the portrait that it that it painted of her was extremely accurate. And I'm wondering like,

Is that like, do you find that to be true? Like as you're, as you're going through in your, you work with schools and these schools are, are, are providing these tests for like, you know, so many students at a time. Like, do you find that there is a, that the accuracy is, is like, are all the students being like, how does this know me that way?

Nancy Weinstein (11:23.326)
So it's great question. So let me start for your listeners to just explain what the assessment is. So it is a series of nine very distinct, very different puzzle -like tasks, but different types of puzzles, right? So, you know, if you've thought about a kid's book, like where they would do a maze and a crossword puzzle and a word search, very different tasks, but all puzzle -like tasks.

None of those are on the mind print assessment, you could think about it that way. It's all online and it takes about an hour for most students. Some students work more slowly and it takes longer. Some students work quickly and it takes closer to 45 minutes, but in general, and we work with students starting as early as third grade all the way through college. And the assessment, we do get that feedback. you're, you know,

like from your daughter had that this knows me, because the assessment was, was developed, actually it was developed at university of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, at their brain behavior lab. And, fun fact, is the same assessment that NASA uses to understand, brain changes in the astronauts when they go up into space. So that's just to say, there is a whole lot of science behind making sure that these tests are accurate and reliable.

And like I said earlier, these tests have been around for about 50 years, the same types of tests that we're doing. And so we know that, that they really do accurately describe how individual students learn. Because let's step back and say, we all have learner variability. We all know that some things come easier to us and some things come harder to us. And we also know that.

The most successful people are the ones that figure out, they know what comes more easily and they lean into their strengths. And when something's harder, they figure out strategies to work around it. And so what these tests do is they enable students to really see their strengths and then be able to understand what is going to be more challenging. We all have challenges.

Nancy Weinstein (13:46.028)
question of when we discover them and where they show up in our lives, if they show up in math class or English class or when we go for our first job. But how do we manage around that? And so what we do find and it's important is that it should be reflecting the student in front of us so that we can support them. If your daughter looked at it and said, this isn't me.

then she would never buy into the idea of using the strategies that we're suggesting for her. But the idea is that this test knows me and this test is saying, yeah, you're really strong in this and you should do more of what you're really good at. But these things also might be hard for you. And it's not that you can't do something. It's just, you might need a different approach because of how your brain works. And so that is truly the beauty of it is that when

teachers see the results of our assessment, when students see the results of our assessment, maybe it wasn't what they predicted that they would be strong at, but when they see it, they're like, that makes sense. That's why that's easy for me. That's why that's hard for me. And then we have that self -awareness and that buy -in to say, okay, now we're going to maybe change our behaviors a little bit to make learning easier. Does that make sense?

Seth (15:07.048)
Yeah, yes. And I think that what you're speaking about, especially like for older students, because I also took this with my son, but he's, you know, he's a much younger kid. I couldn't share the results with him in the same kind of way. But with the older students, I think that there's you're talking about metacognition, right? Like the ability to think about what you're thinking or how you're thinking. And then that can also lead to some like executive functioning skills, which is part of what you're assessing.

You one of the things I want to get into is that like so you've got like all of these different categories of information. I want to want to like talk about this path of like follow what the data says so that the students can be successful and I want to add this kind of context of like teachers are overwhelmed. There's you know 100 things that they'd love to do that that they that are on their list that they haven't gotten to yet.

Oftentimes what teachers are looking for is just like a tool in their tool belt that they can like, you know, use this and then like apply it real quick. They don't really want to like, you know, change everything about how they're teaching. do, does, do your recommendations fit into like the modern busy teacher persona where, where like they resist some of that, those like more kind of systemic changes. and if so, like,

Nancy Weinstein (16:07.298)
So what

Seth (16:29.371)
How can they still have impact?

Nancy Weinstein (16:35.53)
So it's funny you say metacognition, so we don't always say metacognition, but we kind of are the metacognition company, right? We are the one company I hope, I think, I believe that we're the one company that really helps students understand how they learn, think about their thinking and act on that. and something else you noted is, you know, with an older student, you can share the data and then they can act on it and take agency over it. And we.

We do that a lot with our older students. We even offer a course in schools where they're basically taking a course in metacognition and learning how to use strategies to make them successful. You are also right on the money with our younger students. We can't expect them to read a report and change their behavior. And so we do give that data to the teachers. And what we say to teachers is that,

It's all about prioritization. And that's what teachers do all the time. They're constantly prioritizing, right? So they're given a curriculum, but they're prioritizing, they're adjusting, they're adapting. Even if they're not sort of in a very deliberate way, differentiating, they are when they walk over, when a student raises their hand and says, I don't understand this. They're trying to explain it in a different way, give the student a different strategy. What MindPrint does is when you're for a teacher that's trying to do that.

Instead of playing kind of the guessing game, try this. This child reminds me of a child that I worked with last year and this worked for that child. So I'm going to try that again. Instead of doing that, mind print is sort of your try this first. And this should work for this student in this context. And so when we think about, call it late elementary, middle school, where teachers really are

Seth (18:17.735)
Hmm.

Nancy Weinstein (18:30.942)
really have the time to spend with individual students where they might not once we get to high school or late middle school. We suggest to teachers, look at the overall trends in your classroom. And oftentimes there will be trends and particularly coming out of COVID, there are really significant trends in student populations based on the age of students during the pandemic. And hopefully we'll get to that later. But first, look at the overall trends in your classroom and say,

Let's say, look at my kids. Are there a disproportionate number of my kids that are struggling with memory this year? Okay. If I know that going in, then I can say, okay, I'm, I'm going to expect that they might've learned stuff last year and really understood it, but they're going to need a little bit more practice. I'm just going to have to build that practice in. And if I can do that, everybody's going to be more successful.

Seth (19:29.18)
Hmm.

Nancy Weinstein (19:30.432)
So we enable teachers to look at that trend data and say, day one, when I go in and I look at my students this year, what should I tweak this year? Or when I think about grouping students together, who's going to be more complimentary and learn better together? who can I anticipate might struggle because they learn so differently? So that's what we want teachers to do at a very sort of general level.

when they think about their students in the beginning of the year and they have a whole classroom's worth of data. And then as they're going through a topic, they might adjust their curriculum based on what the mind print says. But what we find more often in elementary is that the teacher runs into a challenging student. I want to help this child and I don't know how to help them. And I'm trying these different things. And this gets back to our prioritization. They can, instead of trying to figure it out, they can literally go to the mind print.

and the mind print will pinpoint for them, this is very likely this child's challenge. Right now, they're maybe they're eight years old and their executive functions haven't fully developed and this child's having trouble focusing right now in this moment in time. That might be different a year or two from now, but what the mind print says is now they're having trouble focusing. So let's not assume that they're misbehaving or they don't care, they're not engaged. Let's go to the, okay, what can I do to help this child focus?

And we'll start there. And very likely based on even what you noticed is that it's accurate. You can put in very simple strategies, right? So strategy for attention is making sure that child takes more regular breaks. Doesn't try and persevere for 20 minutes on the same task, but instead we chunk it up in five or 10 minute blocks. make all the difference in the world. It helps the teacher. It helps the student. I'll give one.

anecdote in a middle school that we were working with, they gave it to all their students. In this case, they did all tier two students. So all their math pullout students, which is about 20 % of the grade. the teachers went through and gave everybody their mind print. And then they used some of our lessons around teaching students strategies. And one of the teachers who started the year

Nancy Weinstein (21:56.962)
quite reluctantly. was almost a year or two from retirement. She was like, I've had it since the pandemic. Yeah. And she came, they told us the story. She came running over to the person who was our champion in the school and who was doing the implementation. And she said, my God, I love MindPrint. This reminds me why I got into teaching in the first place. Now I know, like I can,

Seth (22:01.177)
I've met that teacher.

Nancy Weinstein (22:26.324)
I can do this again. And you can imagine that alone, even from that teacher's belief in how many children will be touched. That was last year, but we're touched last year and will be touched this year or until she retires. And we want to do that for every teacher. that's the, you know, maybe teachers who are on one end of the spectrum, ready to retire, but also for the novice teacher, which is a big problem in school, challenge in schools right now.

that novice teacher that wants to do everything right. And we know that those teachers are not getting enough coaching because there's just not enough time for it and mentorship. And if they knew what strategy to use, they would use it, but they might not know the strategies yet. They've only been doing it for a year or two. And mind print is kind of like that instructional coach in a box, if you will, right? Like you're not, here's child sitting in front of you, you know, you want to help them. You know that they're engaged and you can't figure it out.

And you go to MindPrint and MindPrint says, try this with this trial. And I think that's, it's pretty powerful.

Seth (23:30.469)
Yeah, it's, you know, what I'm hearing is that as you say, every teacher, every person prioritizes throughout their day, right? Like, have, we have, we go into this world with agency and we make decisions all day long and those decisions are an act of prioritization, right? Of like, based on what's in front of me, what is the best call? And what you're doing is essentially taking the guesswork out of that and making it so that they're, the teacher,

who got into this to have impact is more likely to have that impact because they're not, you know, blindly guessing, maybe not completely blindly guessing, but having a much more informed data to support which thing they're going to try first. And I think that's, yeah, that's super powerful. And I can see why that veteran teacher had that aha moment, right? Like we, you know, as a veteran teacher, you kind of...

you get, I don't want to say that like your creativity like leaves you, but there, there is a bit of like, you know, burnout factor of like, this again, or, and to, be able to kind of take the, the guesswork out of that, think I imagine would, would decrease a lot of the mental load that you might feel as that teacher, and just make it so that you can just do exactly what you've been wanting to do this entire time, which is have an impact on, learning.

Nancy Weinstein (24:54.562)
you

Seth (24:55.555)
You did mention briefly the COVID data and I do want to get into that because I think it tells a really interesting story. There aren't a lot of people who have access to data of students of what they could, know, how their brains worked previous to COVID, during COVID and now, you know, after COVID. Can you tell that story for us? What is going on with students' brains and what does that mean for teaching?

Nancy Weinstein (25:21.605)
Okay, so let me back up and say that what we measure at MindPrint, so we measure, is it okay if I back up? Because I think it informed, right? So we measure 10 skills, and these skills are shown to explain more than 50 % of the variability in outcomes.

Seth (25:29.607)
Please. Yeah.

Nancy Weinstein (25:43.902)
So think of it this way, if you had two children that started in the same district in the same school, had the same teacher every year, and one ends up as an A student in math and the other one ends up really struggling in math by the time they get to high school, and we say, why is that? They did everything right. Maybe they're even twins, right? Mindprint can pretty much pinpoint why that is, right? There's always...

course an engagement piece, but pretty much you could use mind print to decide on that. And so these skills that we're measuring are sort of the underlying root cause of how we learn, why things are easy or harder. So we measure three types of complex reasoning, which explain how you understand and take in new information, your long -term memory, whether you retain it, your executive functions, attention, working memory skills that drive. If I.

Even if I understand it, I remember it. Can I show what I know on the test? Can I focus long enough to do my work and not make silly mistakes or rush through it? And then finally, can I really go to the next level in problem solve? So those are the skills we measure. are 10 skills. And when we measure those skills for every student that we work with, we talked earlier about grades three through 12, and we work with students across.

all demographics, charter schools, public schools, private schools. We were sort of asking ourselves the question when we saw some of the achievement data come out that said basically students have fallen behind in reading and math. Their scores haven't recovered. They've recovered a little bit more in reading than they have in math. And everybody's kind of like throwing up their hands and saying it's mental health and it's social media.

And it's whatever, again, they're not engaged. And we said, okay, maybe it is those things. Clearly those things are contributing. But if we wanted to get to the root cause, those things are really hard to address, right? It's really hard to just say in general, we're going to reengage students. We want to say, well, has their capacity to learn in any way changed? Right? So these skills that we measure that we know have always driven outcomes, achievement outcomes.

Nancy Weinstein (28:03.126)
have those skills changed and if they had, then maybe what we're doing in the classroom and how we teach students might also need to change. And so we stepped back, it was post hoc and gave our data. worked with a researcher from MIT, Dr. Nancy Tsai and said, can you look at our data pre and post pandemic and say, has anything changed in these cognitive skills?

Or are they relatively still consistent, right? So the way students understood before the pandemic is still the way they understand now. So if you taught the algebra lesson before the pandemic and they understood it, they would understand it now. And so she looked at data for, we had 37 ,000 students as a data population that we looked at pre post pandemic across all age levels. And the result were strikingly.

consistent across age groups and demographic groups, that basically those understanding skills, for the most part, didn't change very much. What did change, and we always ask people to guess what would change, and what everybody thinks would change would be those executive functions, the attention, the working memory skills can students focus. And actually what we found is that those didn't change very much.

But what changed a lot were memory skills. So students' ability to retain the information that we give them. So I'd use the example, I think earlier in the podcast, we were talking about the example of the student with weaker memory. So if you think about it, if we explain stuff to students and they understand it, and then we give them the test and then they don't do well on the test, why aren't they doing well on the test? Well, it's not because they didn't understand it. It's because they didn't remember it.

And the teacher wouldn't have even thought that they didn't remember it. I did it the same way I did before the pandemic and they did well on the test. And so it's this different, it's a different need. so when we talk, going back to the discussion around prioritization, what we need to do is prioritize those memory strategies because that's what's different about students. So we found that their memory, particularly, particularly

Nancy Weinstein (30:22.838)
their ability to remember words and language, not so much pictures, that that really dropped dramatically and particularly in our youngest learners.

And so, right, so we lost that and then also, should I pause and let you ask more about memory?

Seth (30:39.041)
Well, yeah, so I'm curious about what this means for teachers, right? So you're like, you got to work on the memory skills. Does that just mean that you are like doing vocabulary exercises differently? Are you doing them more like like what is the where does the rubber meet the road?

Nancy Weinstein (31:00.278)
So the simplest example, way I would explain it is, first there are very specific memory strategies that are tried and true, and we know if we use them, they will help all students, right? And it's practice, right? To your point, like more vocabulary practice, more. There is, that said, from a prioritization, we don't want to just dump rote memorization on students, because some students remember more easily than others in the type of memory scale.

The most simple way to explain it would be if before the pandemic, the rule of thumb that teachers used in their classrooms was, I need to review this seven to 10 times to make it stick. So whether it's I'm saying it, I'm having them write it down, I'm having them practice it, I'm giving them a quiz. Teachers usually use that rule of thumb at seven to 10 times. What we would say is someone changed the rule on the teachers.

And that rule is now 12 to 15 times and teachers need to know the rule. Right. And so they need to build that in and whether it's a couple of extra examples in homework, whether it's on chapter two tests, including questions from chapter one to give students some extra review. So they're building in that repetition. That's what teachers need to know in its most simplest way. And what

Where we think we can really help is we think just that alone will reduce so much of the frustration and anxiety that teachers and students are feeling in the classroom around. We now know it's changed. It makes perfect sense given the changes that we're seeing in terms of achievement with math scores falling further behind than reading scores with younger students falling further behind than older students.

Just like you were saying with your daughter, that aha moment, this all makes sense. That's the same thing with what we found with our data is it all makes sense. It fits with what we're seeing in achievement. It fits with what teachers are seeing in terms of engagement and thinking that students aren't focusing where it's not that it's that they don't remember. So it feels like they're not focusing. but, but the solution is so clear and not, I'm not going to say it's easy because I always say nothing in teaching and learning is easy.

Nancy Weinstein (33:27.296)
But it is straightforward and understandable and manageable.

Seth (33:34.919)
We're at your hard stop. How hard is your stop?

Nancy Weinstein (33:42.082)
Let me ask for five minutes. Yep.

Seth (33:43.463)
I basically have like kind of one more question, is like, I'm, I'm a teacher or a principal or someone who doesn't have the funding to be able to do what you want to do. Who, how do I advocate and who do I advocate to in order to make this a reality in my classroom? And I think that that's a cool closing question that will like enable you to, you know, kind of like make it more practical for some of the listeners who might not be able to pull those levers.

Seth (34:18.449)
So this sounds transformational. And if I'm a teacher listening to this or I'm a principal, anyone who, who doesn't necessarily have the like funding or the levers to like make this happen on a large scale in a school or in a district, how do I advocate for this product, for getting this into my school if I'm not the one who makes that decision? Do you have any pointers for teachers who might be listening to this?

Nancy Weinstein (34:49.666)
So what we find is that when we get in front of a director of curriculum and instruction, they almost universally say, my God, why didn't someone tell me this existed? And can I get this in my classroom? And I would say our goal for MindPrint is we think every child should have a MindPrint. Every child should understand their own variability and the adults around them should know it to be able to help them. So the product is priced.

really affordably so that schools can test a couple of students and it's not very expensive at all, but ideally test all of their students. And the message that we would give to the the leaders, the district leaders, the ones with the purse strings is when we get, when we're able to get students' mind print data,

and triangulate it with their achievement data, we are able to drive dramatic gains in achievement in a relatively short period of time because we're giving each student what they need without any of the other additional spending. It's not an additional curriculum. It's not an additional class or training that teachers need so much. And so as a result of that, when you think about efficiency,

and sort of bang for your buck in terms of where you're spending money in schools. We can help dramatically and make all your teachers happy. the teachers, once the teachers start using it and I'm like, we're never going to convince every teacher to use every solution. There's no way I can't claim that. But the teachers that adopt and embrace mind print end up saying, I don't know how I did my job without it. And they're happier for doing it.

Seth (36:32.455)
You

Nancy Weinstein (36:45.127)
And I don't know if that answers your question, but.

Seth (36:47.447)
Absolutely, absolutely. And it's a super compelling story. Turns out having the right kind of data, it can really inform your practice. Who knew? Well, Nancy, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for sharing your story and the story that the data that you gather tells about each student that is able to get a mind print.

Nancy Weinstein (36:57.333)
Thank

Seth (37:12.643)
I love that your logo is like a little brain that looks like a fingerprint because like mind print doesn't, my mind didn't jump there initially, but then when I saw the logo, was like, it's a fingerprint, but it's your brain. I get it now. That's clever. So, so yeah, I, you know, listening to you talk, hearing about the benefits, it seems like every student should have a mind print. So hopefully some people are hearing this and can, you know, talk to the right people to get it into their schools and their districts.

For our listeners, please check the show notes and you will see information about where to find Nancy's work. And if you'd like to support the podcast, please do tell a friend, follow us, leave a rating or a review. Thank you as always to our editor, Lucas Salazar. And remember that if you'd like to bring positive change to education, you must first make it mind print. Ha, make it mindful. Just kidding. See you next time.

Nancy Weinstein (38:05.184)
you