Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning

Seth Fleischauer (00:00.748)
Hello everyone and welcome to Make It Mindful, Insights for Global Learning, the podcast for globally minded educators seeking thoughtful conversations about how education can adapt to an ever-changing world. I'm Seth Fleishauer, former classroom teacher turned founder of an international learning company specializing in the teaching of global learning. Together, we explore the interconnectedness of people, cultures, and systems and how these relationships shape transformative ideas in education.

Each episode features educational changemakers whose insights lead to practical solutions and lasting impact. And today's guest is Eric Hudson. Eric, welcome to the podcast.

Eric Hudson (00:37.646)
Thanks for having me.

Seth Fleischauer (00:39.866)
A pleasure to have you here. I look forward to diving into your experience as a consultant for independent schools, specializing in AI. That's something that we've talked a lot about on the podcast. You also have experience as the former director at Global Online Academy, which is an international virtual school. And that is something that I'd love to dive into as well as we focus on global learning here on the podcast.

Brought to you as always by Banyan Global Learning, let's make it mindful. So you are an expert in learner-centered technology in, sorry, I'm gonna start that over, learner-centered teaching. Do you prefer tech or teaching? Yeah, okay.

Eric Hudson (01:27.564)
whatever works for you, learner centered education maybe.

Seth Fleischauer (01:30.9)
Okay, cool. So you are an expert in learner centered education in digital literacy and strategic program design. You've got extensive experience online with blended learning environments, particularly at Goa. You're focusing on AI literacy, but also executive functioning, fostering agency and students. you're an advocate for balancing innovation while preserving essential human skills and authenticity in education. So what we're looking to aim for in today's episode is to provide actual

actionable insights for educators to integrate technology agency and global competence into their teaching practices. So that's that's the overarching goal. And before we get there, I was hoping that you could just kind of fill in the blanks for us a little bit. How did you get to where you are in life?

Eric Hudson (02:16.14)
Yeah, so right now I'm an independent consultant. I've been on my own for 18 months, but I began my career as a teacher. I spent 12 years in the classroom, mostly middle school and high school literature and composition in independent schools here in the US. And then I spent 10 years at GOA. I was an instructional coach at first and then left as chief program officer and

G.O.A. If You're Not Familiar is a nonprofit organization that does passion-based online learning for high school students and PD for teachers and leaders. And the kind of through line of my whole career has been just a real genuine interest in how technology can make teaching and learning more effective. And so I've always been curious about technology as a tool. And that's the lens I bring to generative AI, which is

How can this very powerful technology make learning more effective and more exciting for students? And that's very much sort of the focus of the work I do right now.

Seth Fleischauer (03:23.948)
Well, I'm just going to mirror that question right back to you. How can this technology make learning more effective and exciting for students?

Eric Hudson (03:33.23)
I mean, the real power of generative AI is that it is very flexible and very sophisticated, and it's kind of been well publicized that it makes certain mistakes or it can do certain things for you, and all of that is true. But I think what I'm very interested in is the fact that now everyone with a mobile device and an internet connection has a pretty competent assistant in their pocket.

And what I'm seeing is students and teachers able to now leverage generative AI to make ideas they've had become more real or pursue lines of inquiry or challenges that they didn't think they could pursue before, or just think differently about how they want to run a unit or run a class and how the technology might help them do it. And so that's kind of where

I'm interested in generative AI as sort of an innovation partner for students and teachers.

Seth Fleischauer (04:33.73)
I love that. think that at least for this stage of development, is the goal, right? To not replace what we're doing, but to augment what we're doing. Hopefully it stays there for a decent amount of time before it gets into some of that replacement stuff. But the question I love to ask people about this is like the balance between teaching foundational skills and using, leveraging this technology. I think that people our age have

a wonderful, can have a wonderful relationship with AI because we were taught those foundational skills. We understand what a good output is and what a bad output is. We can do that discernment. I'm wondering how you advise schools in terms of the balance between developing traditional foundational skills which help to help students to leverage the AI for what it could be.

As opposed to this sort of new generation of foundational skills of how to use the AI at all, like, like, what are the practical practices that you go through in order to, to, to get the most out of the technology? I feel like there's kind of those two sets of skills. And I'm wondering how you find the balance there because the temptation is just dive in with the AI. The AI is going to be there to do it for you anyway. Why do you need to learn all these other things? Where do you, where do you fall there?

Eric Hudson (05:57.496)
Well, I I think to use generative AI effectively, you need to have certain skills in place. You need critical thinking skills, you need discernment skills, you need writing skills, you need reading skills. So all those things still very much matter and they should be taught. what I often tell teachers is, you have choices in this kind of AI world. You can really just...

design assessments or look at your current assessments and think about how do these assessments need to be redesigned to resist generative AI, right? To think about certain things that get moved into class as they used to get done for homework. Or you can really think about how this tool can be an assistant to your students in building those traditional skills. in addition to learning how to critically evaluate a text like a book, you learn how to critically evaluate AI output.

or if you are learning how to pursue lines of inquiry in research, you know how to navigate a database or you know how to move around a library, but you also know how to use generative AI research tools to curate high quality academic sources, right? And so it's not a zero sum game. It's very much about how much clarity do you have about

what you're trying to teach and why you're trying to teach it. And then can you think about how vulnerable or not that skill is to the use of generative AI and how generative AI could actually be integrated into the teaching of that skill to offer some support to your students.

Seth Fleischauer (07:43.552)
like that framework of how vulnerable the skill is in the use of AI. I think that's a helpful way to think about the spectrum, right? There's a spectrum of how much you could involve AI in any given assignment. And I like that idea of like, is this skill vulnerable to disappearing through an over-reliance on this technology? I wonder where agency comes into all this. You're talking about using these assistants.

There's, guess, a cynical way of looking at it would say that some of the agency is taken away because you become dependent, you can become dependent on these things. A more optimistic view might be to say that look at all of these things that you can accomplish with these tools and therefore your agency is expanded. How do you see agency fitting into this discussion?

Eric Hudson (08:35.342)
I mean, agency is at its most basic level, agency is an internalized sense of self-efficacy. It is the sense that you have power and control over outcomes in your own life. so over-reliance on AI is basically delegating your self-efficacy to something else, right? And so I think if we are interested in the intersection of agency and AI, we really have to think about decision-making as a competency that's

really important for students and adults in using AI, which is basically should I use AI or not for this specific use? If I do want to use it, how should I use it? What are the ethical trade-offs of using it or what are the ethical considerations of using it? All those things relate to agency. I don't see generative AI as sort of either giving people agency or taking it away. Generative AI is just a technology. How we use it

is gonna define whether or not it nurtures agency or not. And something I really advocate for with teachers is you don't have to love AI, right? But you do need to engage with it because your students are already making decisions about their own use of AI and they need more guidance and support in making good, effective, ethical, agency-driven decisions.

Seth Fleischauer (09:45.803)
Hahaha

Eric Hudson (10:02.614)
And that's not something that we necessarily naturally know with new technologies. It's something that needs to be taught. And so that's kind of the pathway forward I really advocate for with schools is, you know, it's not about loving or hating AI. It's about teaching people how to make good decisions about their use of the technology.

Seth Fleischauer (10:20.492)
Yeah, yeah, you know, this podcast is called Make It Mindful, right? Like, like what I hear when you're talking is, is that mindfulness piece, that idea of like taking a beat rather than just being like, I've gotten to this point with this problem where I don't know how to solve it for an instant. Let me jump to AI to help me solve it. But rather taking that beat and asking yourself, as you said, you know,

how do I want to use this? What are the ethical implications? And I imagine that that is, that's a case by case decision, right? Like it's more of like a framework of these are, these are the types of values I want to bring into this. You you talked about ethical implications, values in terms of plagiarism or sense of like creative license, creative output, like what,

what reflects you personally versus what reflects like a more, you know, something that you did with the computer. In addition to environmental implications, like there are there are all these things and you I guess as a as a member of modern society, you kind of have to toe that line for yourself personally, right? Like there aren't necessarily right answers here. There are a bunch of questions. And the point is to know your answer to the question to not necessarily

navigate mindlessly through it, but rather to take a beat and to understand why you're doing what you're doing. Would you say that's that's kind of the crux of it?

Eric Hudson (11:56.012)
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the core functions of school is to help teach students how to do that kind of decision making, regardless of whether or not it has to do with AI. I think the point of school is to teach students how to be autonomous, ethical adults. And so I think in that lane, generative AI is a really good case study for decision making.

the importance of understanding a technology as you're using it and the importance of keeping your own goals and values at the center of your decision-making process. I think especially for high school students, it's a really useful kind of object to study with them.

Seth Fleischauer (12:42.976)
Yeah. So let's put this into the international context because you work with independent schools, some of which are international. How is the conversation any different in an international setting than it is in a domestic setting? Are there things that are going on in the rest of the world, like cultural implications for the use of AI, different types of ethical decisions that they're making?

diff- maybe in an English language learning context, maybe there's like an additional component of whether or not they, they are using it to bypass some of those vulnerable skills. what, what is the kind of the international vibe around this?

Eric Hudson (13:23.67)
it's hard to say. mean, I think it really does come, regardless of where your school is, I think it boils down to what your mission and core values are around the technology. I mean, I think in many ways international schools have some useful guidance in that a lot of the international schools I work with, you know, really use UNESCO as a resource and UNESCO has put out some really useful sort of

competency frameworks for both teachers and students. The IB is starting to catch up by offering some concrete guidance for schools around how to manage this in their classrooms. think international schools tend to be multicultural, multilingual institutions. And that is something that the international schools I work with really want to keep at the forefront, right? Which is this tool, which has live translation capabilities or

this tool which really has sort of a Western Anglo bias built into it. How do we want to, as a multicultural, multilingual institution, wrestle with some of those ideas? I mean, I think all schools everywhere are talking about that, but probably international schools maybe have those more at the top of their lists.

Seth Fleischauer (14:43.778)
Yeah, makes sense. let's build on that idea of international schools. I want to talk a little bit about your experience at at Goa at the Global Online Academy. You called it passion based online learning, which I love. Can you unpack that a bit?

Eric Hudson (15:03.458)
Sure, so GOA was designed as, it's not a diploma granting institution. It was designed as a supplemental program for bricks and mortar schools. And so when a school joins GOA, we offer a catalog of, they must have more than 60 courses by this point, that are designed in kind of the elective model, right? So students are choosing a topic.

or a class that they might not be able to access at their bricks and mortar school. And so when I was at GOA, the most popular courses were things like medical problem solving, Neuropsychology, these courses that engage students in topics that maybe have something to do with their kind of future plans for themselves or their interest in the world beyond school. And that is kind of the in. And then the courses are designed to be very small.

and teacher and student centered. And so the classes are no more than a couple of dozen students per teacher. And there's just a high level of interaction and project-based learning and thinking about sort of how to get students to really engage with the material in a way that professionals in that field might engage with that material.

Seth Fleischauer (16:23.456)
You mentioned the professionals in the field. there also an element of like partnerships with like external organizations, professional entities?

Eric Hudson (16:32.088)
Sometimes, sometimes, yep. Sometimes the teacher brings some level of experience to the course. Sometimes we engage external partner, GOA would engage external partners in the design of the courses, the instructional design of the courses. So it varies.

Seth Fleischauer (16:33.826)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (16:48.578)
I see you navigating between saying them and we, right? I see that some of your... Yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously, like having been there for a while, you probably still feel a certain sense of ownership over the work that you did there. And so I wonder like what the broader lessons are for education as a whole, seeing this passion based online learning be so successful at Goa.

Eric Hudson (16:52.394)
Yeah, yeah, it's because I only left like 18 months ago. Yeah, yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (17:18.306)
Part of like the, it's such a beautiful application of distance learning because you're able to pull together students that are interested in these super niche topics, right? And you can imagine at any given high school, you're probably not going to have a critical mass of students that are able to, that you're able to justify throwing a teacher at.

some of these niche subjects. despite that, what do you think is the, is the like lesson for how schools in general, how like the independent schools that you work with right now, like what can they bring to their approach to education that will allow for students passions to be a driving force of their agency?

Eric Hudson (18:15.112)
there's a going on in that question. So I, you know, I think you just have to prioritize student voice and student agency and the choices you make in the design of school. mean, something I really learned from GOA is that good pedagogy is good pedagogy, regardless of the learning environment. so we, GOA's model was to hire really talented bricks and mortar teachers.

teach them how to use the technology and how to translate their good pedagogy into the online learning environment. And I think that schools could learn a lot from this exercise of let's not worry about what we think kids need to know. Let's identify a real authentic either question or field or something that has real relevance to the lives of students and think about

Well, what would it look like to actually teach students how to do those things? And what would it look like to ask students what they want to learn and see if we could figure out a way to integrate that into our program? do think it's those kinds of like, what is the level of involvement in students at all stages of your decisions about the design of school?

Seth Fleischauer (19:36.492)
Is there a danger though of sort of, I'm not sure what the metaphor is that I'm looking for here, but when the cats take over the cat hospital, don't know. There's some kind of danger that you would get away from the central purpose of the school as it was founded, right? Like if you are outsourcing a lot of the creative drive to the students as opposed to having

an agenda for what you are looking to accomplish and making sure that you are providing that you are you're making a promise to the parents who are signing their kids up for this school and then you're delivering on that promise specifically. How do you like toe the line between those two things of providing agency to the students yet making sure that there is rigor there is

There are certain standards that you're looking to meet, whether they be knowledge-based or skills-based, I think is more of what you would argue for. Like, how do you let it not get too far off the rails?

Eric Hudson (20:47.502)
You know, Mitchell Resnick runs the lifelong kindergarten lab at MIT Media Lab. They created Scratch. I don't know if you're familiar with Scratch. It's like that sort of computer science coding tool for young students. he says, look, he's like, any effective learning experience needs walls. It needs constraints, right? But the walls should be wide. And I think that's kind of the design principle.

Seth Fleischauer (20:55.542)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eric Hudson (21:12.248)
we brought to GOA, that's the design principle I do when I work with teachers on assessment design and curriculum design, which is you need a teacher and you need a teacher with expertise, but the teacher should be using their expertise to create wide walls for their students to move more freely, not to create narrow channels where the students are being forced to do things in a certain way. And a really good teacher,

with really solid expertise has the capabilities to design learning experiences that offer students those kinds of, that kind of flexibility. Because I think that the question is not how much control are we giving to students versus how much control are we not giving to students? The question is, what is the relationship between the teacher and the student in this learning experience? And how is the student being treated more as a collaborator?

and less as a receiver of information. And if the student is, and I've seen this over decades of doing this work, if the student is taken seriously, then they take the work seriously. And so I think that's kind of this thing we just need to acknowledge about teaching and learning in a modern world is students have a voice, they have prior knowledge, and they have a say. Students have a lot of choices, right? And so I think

giving them that chance to be effective, real collaborators will always pay off in the end.

Seth Fleischauer (22:41.922)
I like that. I like, you know, that relationship based teaching. think that that is critical no matter what pedagogy you are working with, but especially in one where you're lending more agency to students, it can be critical to being able to toe that line of like how much is too much. I was hoping that you could give me an example of what these wide walls look like. I love that metaphor.

I love this idea that you doesn't want to be a narrow hallway. We want we want to give them opportunity. My son goes to a Montessori school. That's essentially how I see that model. Right. It's like there are these structures that they're given but they're given extreme amounts of freedom within those structures. So can you give us an example either at GOA or with the schools that you consult with now of a really

good way to see that the walls are wide, you're providing that opportunity, but the walls are there.

Eric Hudson (23:41.55)
Yeah, sure. When I was at GOA, I designed and taught a course called advocacy. It's a semester long course for high school students on how you develop communication skills that drive social change, right? And so the course begins with an overview of what we even mean by advocacy. Every student chooses a social cause or some sort of idea that really matters to them.

and they spend the entire semester building a advocacy campaign around that issue. And the walls I'm providing as the teacher is instruction and resources and feedback around the core competencies of advocacy, communication skills, social media, whatever it is. But the students are doing all of the research around this cause that they care about. Every student is working on something completely different.

from every other student. All I'm providing them with is some methodology and a framework that will allow them to find some success in building an advocacy campaign around that thing. that was very much my goal in designing that course, is I wanted students to work on something that they cared about, even if it had nothing to do with what their peers are working on. While at the same time, they would be able to get together with their peers.

and have meaningful conversations because they were working on some similar skills, they were looking at some similar resources. And that to me is like the Venn diagram that we're looking for between teacher expertise and student agency is students are engaged in rigorous work because the thing they're working on is something they really care about.

Seth Fleischauer (25:24.234)
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great example. And similar to some of the work that we do with our students in Taiwan, where we have some project based learning that we can accomplish and advocacy is a great subject area to to to teach for that, right? Because students have those passions. And I think especially today's students have those those things that they want to see better by the time that they grow older.

I wanted to back up. said, know, we need teachers in order to create these boundaries. We started this conversation about AI. I guess I want to ask for how long will we need teachers? Is that a forever piece? you think that like with AGI coming, AI being able to accomplish tasks like for me to just say like, hey, could you go and

you know, I, I want to know which of my contacts are going to be at this upcoming conference. Can you email all of them and see what they're, you know, if they would like to meet up with me, like that type of task versus like doing each part of that with, with AI or whatever. and once we get there, there's a question of how relevant human labor is not just in education, but in all industries. I'm,

I like to think with, you know, with humans, planes have been able to fly themselves for 20 years, but we're like, nope, we need a human pilot in that cockpit. I don't care if I see him or not. I want to hear his voice when he comes with a loudspeaker. I want to know that he's there. And so that's like not trusting a robot with your life. And I feel like people probably don't want to trust their children to a robot.

But maybe not, maybe culturally things will change eventually. I'm wondering how you see the broader culture shifting as a result of this rapid development of AI and how that impacts education as we move forward.

Eric Hudson (27:39.874)
I mean, I can't predict the future that's above my pay grade. But what I'm seeing in my work with schools is not replacement. And I think AGI is farther away than we think it is. I do see kind of generative AIs creating like a new category of thing that we need to consider in schools. For example, writing, right? I talk about writing a lot.

I used to be English teacher. Writing is one of the skills that people feel is most under threat by generative AI. And I think we're kind of getting to this point where we understand that writing matters, learning how to write on your own matters. And we live in a world where now it's possible to write in partnership with generative AI. And hybrid writing is a skill that is going to be important for us in the future. It's the same thing with all these voice bots.

the bots you can speak out loud with and converse with, it's creating a new category of conversation, right? We're gonna interact with generative AI in a way that is like, but not exactly the same as interacting with a human being. And we really need to figure out how these new categories of doing things fit into our lives. And so sure, is it possible that there will be a category of learning

or a category of teaching or a category of school that is totally done with AI. I mean, I've seen Star Trek, yeah, for sure, right? But also there's going to be a role for human centered interactions between human teachers and human students. And so we're kind of in this space where we're trying to figure out where this new category of thing fits among all the things we currently do.

Seth Fleischauer (29:35.138)
Well said. Well, thank you so much for being here, Eric. Where can our listeners find your work on the internet? Where would you like to send them?

Eric Hudson (29:46.508)
Yeah, I think probably the best place to find me is I have a sub stack. It's called learning on purpose. You can Google it. That's where I write a lot about this work. And that's where I encourage people to learn more.

Seth Fleischauer (30:01.442)
I like that title. Again, title of the podcast, Make it Mindful, Learning on Purpose implies that you're putting some intentionality into what you're learning. Where'd you come up with that title?

Eric Hudson (30:13.422)
I don't know. When I went off on my own, I started it when I left GOA. I don't know, my biggest learning in my years in education is that nothing matters more than a clear sense of purpose. Like if you don't know why you're doing something, whether you're a teacher or a student or a leader or whoever, you're not gonna do it as well. And so I think that's kind of where that title came from.

Seth Fleischauer (30:39.778)
I like that. Bring in that intentionality, that Daniel Pink why. It's great. Well, Eric, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate your time. For our listeners, if you would like to support the podcast, please do tell a friend, follow us, leave a rating or review. Thank you as always to my advisor, dear Jamarlo and to my editor, Lucas Salazar. And remember that if you'd like to bring positive change to education, we must first make it mindful. See you next time.