A podcast about learning

There are a million ways to learn. We're investigating all of them.

Ways We Learn is a podcast where Sean, Joe, and Brian dig into how people really learn — through stories, games, screens, classrooms, failure, and each other. Educators, founders, parents, and card-carrying nerds all welcome.

Featured Learning About Copyright Law with Ariel Diaz

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Your hosts

Three curious people, one running question

Sean Dagony-Clark

Learning scientist

Sean is a learning scientist who has spent 20+ years on one stubborn question: how do people actually learn a new thing, and why does the technology built to help so often get in the way? He’s worked alongside businesses, schools, and families to make their tools finally serve the people using them, and he founded Your Tech Ally to do that work full-time. On the show he’s the one who keeps bringing every conversation back to where it started — but how does anyone actually learn this? — which is, more or less, why the show exists.
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Joe Burgess

Builder of AI products & teams

Joe builds AI products and the teams behind them — two companies founded and sold, and product, engineering, and AI orgs grown from zero to a hundred people, including generative AI shipped inside a business doing hundreds of millions in revenue. Before that he was on the founding team at Flatiron School, teaching engineering directly and building the systems that teach people to code. On the show he’s the one poking at whether a method actually holds up when you try to scale it to real learners.
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Brian Tobal

Education founder & engineer

Brian has spent his career on the hard question of how learning actually sticks — founding and running education companies (a YC-backed startup that predicted when employees would forget their training; a microschool network he led as CEO), heading up academics and curriculum at Flatiron School, and, before any of that, teaching K–3 science by split-testing lessons on six-year-olds. He’s the host most likely to ask what a learning idea looks like for one real kid in one real room.
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Episodes

Pick a question, any question.

Learning About Copyright Law with Ariel Diaz ↗
4 clips from this episode
- The Textbook Oligopoly
- Copyright and Presentation
- Economics of Textbooks
- Gray Area
AI as Learning Facilitator with Steve Midgley & Whitney Whealdon ↗
4 clips from this episode
- AI Teacher's Assistant
- The Bridge Analogy
- Teachers' Unsolvable Problems
- Our 10-Years-From-Now Selves
Gamification That Doesn't Suck with Seth Trudeau ↗
4 clips from this episode
- Expertise ≥ age ?
- This Might Have Ruined Me For Normal School
- Expertise vs. Traditional Hierarchy
- Focus on Strengths
Civics Lesson with Sean Dagony-Clark ↗
2 clips from this episode
- Let's Talk
- Vote!
Revolutionizing Education With AI with Rob Cobb ↗
3 clips from this episode
- AI Changes Everything
- This is Changing the World
- AI is a Superpower
Building a Human-Centric Law Firm with Elizabeth Henries ↗
4 clips from this episode
- The Right People
- Pitfalls
- Working is Your Option
- A Delicate Ecosystem
Effective Organizational Change with Caitlin Harper ↗
4 clips from this episode
- Communication Shouldn't Be Speaker Focused
- All Change is Harm
- Change Feels Like Harm
- Actions Speak Louder
Why Scale Fails with Mike Goldstein ↗
4 clips from this episode
- The Talk Meter
- Intellectual Alignment
- Low Buy In, Low Accountability, No Scale
- High Dosage Tutoring

The full index — all 39 episodes

Brain Chemistry and Nootropics with Dan Freed ↗
2 clips from this episode
- Other Options
- Nootropics
Learning to Homeschool with Juliana Stonebrook ↗
4 clips from this episode
- Creating an Adaptive Environment
- Life Has Never Been So Easy
- Expectations
- Let's Get Ice Cream
The Power of Play in Presentations with Minna Taylor ↗
8 clips from this episode
- Responding to the Audience
- Why Improv?
- Presentation Must Have Presence
- How I Define Play
- Confidence Comes Later
- Polish Last, People!
- Speak Through the Screen
- Improv is the Tool, but Play is the Practice
Asking Powerful Questions with Merritt Minnemayer ↗
3 clips from this episode
- Powerful Questions
- You're Not Teaching Them
- Don't Ask Why
Bonus: Looking Inward Before Looking Outward with Lena West ↗
Learning to Be a CEO with Lena West ↗
4 clips from this episode
- Pricing Depends on You
- Formula vs Framework
- Healing is Your Responsibility
- Always Add 20%
Bonus - AI in Education with Amin Shaykho ↗
Learning in the Gig Economy with Amin Shaykho ↗
5 clips from this episode
- Cheating
- Connection
- The Moment it Clicked
- Facing Failure
- Special Sauce
Explainable AI in Healthcare with Akash Parvatikar ↗
5 clips from this episode
- Inside the Training Techniques of Healthcare AI
- AI Should Talk the Language of a Pathologist
- The Future of Healthcare AI: Explaining the Unthinkable
- Problem first, AI next
- Knowing when I'll fail
AI Policy and Practice in Schools with Eric Hudson ↗
9 clips from this episode
- School leaders need to be flexible re: AI
- Productive struggle
- Pandora's AI box
- Privacy and AI
- Chat isn't necessarily the best AI interface. 🤔🤯
- Cheating vs assistance
- AI can't do everything for you
- Invisible AI 🧐👻
- ChatGPT, not CheatGPT
What's Next in AI? with Claire Zau ↗
1 clip from this episode
- Approaches to AI
Upcoming Series: AI ↗
1 clip from this episode
- Ways We Learn Series: AI
AI in Higher Ed with James Genone ↗
6 clips from this episode
- What does an AI class look like?
- Making things tough for teachers
- Faculty agency
- Treat AI like a human assistant
- Will AI Replace Teachers?
- Use AI in Schools
TEASER: Adapt and Evolve (James Genone) ↗
2 clips from this episode
- Adapt and Evolve
- Adapt and Evolve (James Genone)
Nerding Out on Education with Michael Kolodziej ↗
5 clips from this episode
- Learning Means Making Mistakes
- Lectures vs Learning
- Intrinsic Motivation
- Grades are Punitive
- Participatory Learning
Founding African Leadership University with Yusuf Ahmad ↗
5 clips from this episode
- Founding African Leadership University with Yusuf Ahmad (clip)
- Assessing Far Transfer
- WWL S2E03 Teaser 1 Founding African Leadership University
- WWL S2E03 Teaser 2 Far Transfer
- WWL S2E03 Teaser 3 Redesign Takes Time
The Power of Human Connection with Mark Williams ↗
12 clips from this episode
- Face to Face Connection Matters
- Brain Wave Synchronicity in Learning
- Learning on Paper
- WWL S2E02 Teaser 3
- WWL S2E02 Teaser 4
- WWL S2E02 Teaser 2 super short
- WWL S2E02 Teaser 5
- WWL S2E02 Teaser 2
- Embrace the Silence (S2 E02 Teaser 1)
- Learning on Paper (S2 E02)
- Brain Wave Synchronicity in Learning (S2 E02)
- Face-to-Face Connection (S2 E02)
Professional Military Education with Dr. Jill Goldenziel ↗
Stop Fixing Your Kids' Problems! with Sue Groner ↗
Learning From Lambda School with Caleb Hicks ↗
Learning to Lead Through Play with Mary Hendra ↗
Dr. Kristen Eccleston is The NeuroDiverse Teacher ↗
Supporting Autistic and Neurodiverse Learners with Nate Shalev ↗
1 clip from this episode
- Supporting Autistic and Neurodiverse Learners with Nate Shalev
Learner Motivation ↗
1 clip from this episode
- Ways We Learn: Learner Motivation (Sneak Peek Cinema)
What is Creativity and Why is it Dangerous? with Dr. Michael Hanchett Hanson ↗
Transformative Learning and Information Transfer ↗
Sora Schools and Meaningful Learning with Garrett Smiley ↗
Learning from a 100M Startup with Darrell Silver ↗
Learning from Stories with Rebecca Sheir ↗
Does cheating matter? ↗
What are we learning? ↗