In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Jessica Werner, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Northshore Learning, about why teacher burnout is better understood as a systems problem than a personal one — and what happens when schools try to fix it without addressing the foundations that are already shaky. Jessica draws on her doctoral research in Uganda, where a policy expanding secondary school access flooded classrooms without providing additional support, and connects that experience directly to what she's seeing now in U.S. schools facing school choice expansion, teacher shortages, and the pressure to adopt every new initiative at once.

Together, Seth and Jessica explore why measuring teacher wellbeing is so difficult and why qualitative judgment still matters, how cultural context shapes what counts as a behavior problem and what motivates students, what schedules and workloads quietly signal to teachers about how much their effectiveness actually matters, and why adding initiatives on top of weak foundations accelerates burnout rather than solving it. Jessica also shares a specific example from a school in Colombia where an American teacher adapted her math instruction to work with — rather than against — the social, collective culture of her students, offering a concrete picture of what culturally responsive intervention looks like in practice.

Key topics:

• Teacher efficacy as a component of job satisfaction and retention
• The limits of quantitative measurement for wellbeing
• Cultural differences in student motivation: intrinsic vs. extrinsic
• Schedule design and its unintended impact on teachers
• Addition without subtraction: the workload problem
• School choice policy and the costs of rapid enrollment growth
• Neuroscience basics that translate directly into classroom management
• School-student "match" as a framework for the future of school choice

Links & Resources:

• Northshore Learning — coaching, school partnerships, and on-demand courses for educators: northshorelearning.org
• Jessica Werner on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jessica-werner-ph-d-818032163
• Northshore Learning YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCznAU47jszmmJyFBWd_1Lvw
• Hidden Brain podcast with Shankar Vedantam (recommended by Jessica): hiddenbrain.org
• Justin Reich, MIT Teaching Systems Lab — referenced by Seth on "addition by subtraction" in schools: https://makeitmindful.transistor.fm/episodes/76-experiment-with-humility-teaching-in-the-ai-evidence-gap-with-justin-reich

Guest Bio: Jessica Werner, Ph.D.

Jessica Werner is the founder and CEO of Northshore Learning, where she works with schools in the U.S. and internationally to support teacher effectiveness and student behavior through personalized coaching, group training, and on-demand professional development. Her work is grounded in neuroscience and centers on what actually allows teachers to feel effective — and what systematically undermines that feeling over time. Jessica holds a Ph.D. in education, with doctoral research focused on the implementation challenges of Uganda's universal secondary education policy, and has over 20 years of experience as a classroom teacher, professor of education, and consultant.

About the Host: Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators. See banyangloballearning.com.