Tell us about your company and the problem it solves, or its benefit to learners or educators.
At Conscious Discipline, we believe every school can be a place where the adults and the children in it feel safe, connected, and capable of learning together, and that starts with the adults, not with a behavior chart. We’re a brain-based, adult-first approach to school culture and self-regulation, built on more than 30 years of work inside real classrooms in the U.S. and over 100 countries. Most approaches to student behavior focus on correcting what the child is doing in the moment. We start somewhere different: with the adults in the building. A child learns to stay calm and handle big feelings by watching adults who can do that themselves, so when the adults in a school are regulated, that skill spreads to the kids around them. That is what actually changes outcomes – fewer disciplinary incidents, stronger relationships, and classrooms where learning can happen.
I came to this work after spending more than a decade building education technology myself, including co-founding Fishtree, one of the early adaptive personalized-learning platforms used by hundreds of thousands of students worldwide, and later developing and leading classroom technology for Follett and Learning Without Tears. Every one of those products taught me the same lesson: even the best-designed technology only works if the classroom underneath it is calm enough for a child to actually learn. That’s exactly the gap Conscious Discipline fills. For educators, the benefit is a practical, teachable system, not one more mandate stacked on top of everything else.
What is the challenge educators face today that is fixable?
The fixable challenge is that we keep asking educators to manage behavior without giving them the support to do it well. Recently published research found that 75 percent of educators expect student behavior to be a major concern for the 2026-2027 school year, and nearly half say they specifically need more support from their leaders. That tells me the gap isn’t willingness, it’s support. A teacher can’t stay calm for twenty-five kids all day if no one is helping her build that capacity for herself first, and a principal can’t lead a calm building if she’s running on empty right alongside her staff.
I’ve watched schools get more sophisticated every year at tracking behavior data — better dashboards, better reporting, better ways to spot a problem forming. But a dashboard can tell you a classroom is struggling; it can’t make the teacher in that room more regulated. That takes real investment in the adults: protected time during the day to actually reset instead of running from bell to bell, training that builds their own regulation and not just classroom management tricks, and leaders who model calm instead of just expecting it. Schools that make that investment see the behavior numbers move, often within a single school year. This is solvable. It just takes a clear, practical path forward, and treating the adults as the starting point, not an afterthought.
What is the challenge educators face today that will persist?
The persistent challenge is that the world keeps changing faster than childhood can adjust to it. Kids are growing up saturated in social media, streaming, and now AI-generated content, and teachers tell us constantly that it’s getting harder to hold a student’s attention against that level of stimulation. But it goes deeper than attention. Children are absorbing more information, more opinions, and more conflicting messages about the world than any generation before them, and they don’t yet have the tools to process all of it. That confusion doesn’t usually come out as a question. It comes out as behavior: shutting down, acting out, disconnecting.
I want to be clear that this isn’t an argument against technology – I spent years building it, and I’ve seen firsthand how powerful the right tool can be in the right hands. But technology doesn’t create calm, it amplifies whatever is already in the room. Drop a great platform into a dysregulated classroom and it just adds another layer of noise; drop it into a calm one and it can accelerate learning in ways we couldn’t imagine a decade ago. That’s the piece I think gets missed: the more powerful and pervasive technology becomes, the more essential it is to build the human systems underneath it. Society will keep shifting, technology will keep accelerating, and we will never fully predict what the next distraction or disruption looks like. What doesn’t change is what a child needs when they’re overwhelmed: a calm, present adult who can help them find their footing again.
That’s where our work comes in. We give teachers and school leaders real tools to keep themselves regulated in the middle of a chaotic moment, because a calm adult is what makes a calm classroom possible, and a calm classroom is the only place real learning actually happens, whether that learning is coming from a textbook or the latest AI tutor. A brain that’s activated by stress or confusion can’t absorb a lesson no matter how well it’s taught or how well it’s coded. Children have always needed a regulated adult to find their footing, and they always will, no matter what’s competing for their attention outside the classroom. That’s the constant we build schools around, and it’s why the work holds up no matter how the world keeps moving.
What are the areas of education or training and workforce development that are being overlooked?
Over the years, it’s seemed more likely for a school or district to secure funding for a reading program than for professional learning that helps a principal or a teacher regulate their own stress. That’s not a knock on district leaders – they’re doing the best they can at a time when budgets are under more scrutiny than ever and they’re under real pressure to demonstrate the impact of every dollar they spend. I think the responsibility sits with providers like us: it’s on us to make it easier for district leaders to implement programs that sustainably support teaching and learning, not harder. I saw a version of the same gap for years on the technology side of my career, watching companies hand a district a platform and leave them to figure out the training and the conditions needed to make it actually work. The overlooked opportunity is workforce development that treats educator wellbeing and self-regulation as core infrastructure, built in from the start rather than sold as an add-on – and it’s on providers to make that case clearly enough that it competes for the same funding as a reading program.
What do you foresee will be a challenge in education in three to five years?
In three to five years, the challenge will be sustaining human connection in buildings that are under more financial pressure and more technological disruption at the same time. I’ve watched a few waves of EdTech promise to transform the classroom over my career, from adaptive learning platforms to now AI, and the tools that actually stuck were always the ones layered onto strong human systems, not the ones that tried to replace them. That pattern will only intensify as AI keeps reshaping instruction and administrative work: the more powerful the technology gets, the more important human connection becomes. AI doesn’t regulate a dysregulated seven-year-old or rebuild trust between a burned-out teacher and a classroom. The schools that come out ahead will be the ones that build those human systems now, before the pressure peaks, rather than trying to bolt them on after the fact.