New View EDU Episode 73: Empowering Variable Learners

Available April 29, 2025

Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.

Educators understand that not all learners need the same things to thrive. But it’s not always easy to discover what each student truly needs to help them learn and grow to their greatest potential. That’s why Nancy Weinstein created MindPrint Learning, a company devoted to finding each student’s specific learning needs so parents and educators can help empower kids to take charge of their educational journey. Nancy joins NAIS President Debra P. Wilson, along with Sumner McCallie of the McCallie School (TN), to share how MindPrint works with schools.

Nancy, left, begins by sharing her personal story, which led to the founding of MindPrint Learning. When her third-grade daughter was struggling, and even the most engaged educators couldn’t figure out how to help, Nancy says they were referred for psychoeducational testing. Going through the process and realizing how time-consuming, emotionally fraught, and expensive it was, she thought there must be a better way to help families understand their children’s learning profiles. That journey led her to create MindPrint Learning, which offers online assessment tools and creates reports for students, teachers, and parents that highlight each individual student’s strengths, weaknesses, and support strategies.

Sumner McCallie, the dean of faculty and curriculum at McCallie School, shares how he and his team have integrated MindPrint into their school to improve student outcomes and the development of learner agency. Sumner says that, particularly after the pandemic, teachers at McCallie had begun to express concerns about students struggling with concepts and retention more than in the past. In searching for answers, he stumbled upon MindPrint and administered the online assessments to a select group of students. After helping the students understand their results, and using recommended strategies based on the reporting to intervene with the group, the school saw remarkable results. Now, they’re administering MindPrint to every freshman as well as many of the faculty and upperclassmen, to help each individual within the school community better understand their learning profiles.

Both Nancy and Sumner point out that a key strength of MindPrint is that it doesn’t require asking teachers to do more or change their teaching styles; instead, it empowers students and those who support them with more individualized information, so they can take charge of their own learning. Nancy says when MindPrint is utilized with younger students, parents and teachers naturally have to be more hands-on with helping the child try different strategies and implementing approaches to learning, but there’s still a core component of helping the child understand their own personal needs. As kids grow and develop more self-advocacy skills, agency becomes a core piece of successfully using MindPrint. Sumner relates a story of how he sat with a high-achieving student who was inexplicably struggling in a particular class, and through reviewing the student’s MindPrint results together, they realized the student was using the wrong study approaches for his learning needs. Once the student understood what he should be trying instead, he changed his study habits, and his success in the class soared.

The data available through MindPrint is invaluable, Sumner says, to helping teachers and students understand how to unlock the potential in each learner. Nancy also shares how a more holistic view of the data can help schools understand broader trends. For example, she says, after the pandemic, educators seemed to almost universally feel that kids weren’t engaging with school in the same ways they had prior to the lockdowns. Through analyzing MindPrint data, Nancy and her team discovered that the educators were right, but the problem wasn’t what everyone thought it was. Rather than being a problem of attention, the MindPrint data showed that the real issue was with memory and retention. Kids aren’t recalling information as readily as they did prior to the pandemic, so teachers may need to change their strategies or expectations of how much repetition is needed to help learning stick.

Ultimately, the point is to “give each child the gift of knowing how they learn.” Nancy and Sumner agree that watching the ensuing transformation in learner agency and outcomes is a gift that keeps on giving.

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Debra, Nancy, and Sumner explore in this episode include:

  • What does MindPrint do? How is it used in schools?
  • What kind of information is on a student report, and do students, parents, and educators all see the same things? How can the reports be leveraged to help students?
  • How does a school like McCallie operationalize the use of MindPrint throughout the school’s culture? What about schools that are not able to be as “all in” with the tool as McCallie is? How can they get the most out of the tool?
  • What does it look like to utilize MindPrint to encourage greater learner agency? How can we avoid the trap of using this tool to ask teachers to do more?

Episode Highlights

  • “We all know when students aren't learning, they can't articulate why they're not learning. They behave in a certain way. Some of them pull back, some of them are disruptive, some of them sort of, you know, kind of shelter in place, if you will, and hide their emotions. And as parents and teachers, we can't always figure out what that is. But if we can know, this is a kid who's struggling to focus, or struggling to remember what they learned, or struggling to learn in some contexts but not others, well then we know exactly what to do. We have great teachers, but if they're playing a guessing game for all the kids, it's just impossible to do. But with the data, it is so eminently possible and makes such a difference in so many kids' lives.” (6:47)
  • “It wasn't just grades that were moving up. You could see it in their confidence. When they finally understood what was the struggle and why they weren't necessarily understanding something, it wasn't that they were not smart. It was that they needed to do some things and that the friend across the table didn't have to do those types of things, but had to do different types of things because of where their brain works. And all the brains were working, but they weren't working the same way.” (12:38)
  • “In fact, great teaching involves recognizing we have a lot of different types of learners in our class, right? I mean, that's how that works. But for a student himself or herself, themselves, to say, I have agency here. I actually have an ability to take what's being given to me, in whatever format it’s being given to me, and begin to maneuver myself and maneuver the content into a way that I can best absorb it, or into a way I can best remember it and process it, that's pretty powerful.” (20:33)
  • “And so it is almost like during the pandemic, we sort of developed learned helplessness in our students, right? So that if I can't do it, I'll sit back and wait for someone to show me how, as opposed to I'll pause, reconsider, go through some productive struggle and know how to do it, and then sort of get to the other side. … But I think what our data can really do is not just give us permission to throw up our hands and say, kids are different and we still have the same amount of time and they're different and I don't know what to do. We can know what to do. We can sort of pinpoint those differences and start to support teachers and faculty in how we get to the goal line in supporting students.” (41:07)

Resource List

Full Transcript

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About Our Guests

Nancy Weinstein is the founder and CEO of MindPrint Learning. Prior to founding MindPrint, Nancy worked in industry at Bristol-Myers Squibb, The Walt Disney Company, and Goldman Sachs. She has a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Harvard University. She is co-author of The Empowered Student and a contributor to Humanized Education from Marzano Resources. Nancy is a national speaker on using science-of-learning best practices to improve student outcomes. She is the principal investigator on five National Science Foundation grants.

Sumner McCallie had a unique upbringing in Africa and the Middle East. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Yale University and a master’s degree in education from Vanderbilt University. Sumner's teaching career began in Switzerland and Nashville before he joined McCallie in 1996. At McCallie School, Sumner has held various roles including academic counselor, dean of residential life, and academic dean, and currently serves as dean of faculty and curriculum. He teaches courses in bioethics and philosophy. Beyond academics, Sumner has led McCallie's Habitat for Humanity chapter, facilitating the construction of 17 homes in Chattanooga and organizing over 20 international trips to places like Thailand, Romania, Brazil, and Tanzania.