Learning shouldn't inform

Learning should transform

Too often, "learning" is just information transfer.

Achieving real transformation may seem like magic, but it’s achievable when the experiences are informed by science and amplified by technology.

Let’s bridge the gap between knowing content and creating understanding.

Let's turn your content experts into masters of teaching, training, and presenting.

Hi. I’m Sean, Founder and President of effectivEDU.

I’m your partner for creating science-backed, tech-enhanced, transformative learning.

(Here’s what that means.)

Hi. I’m Sean, Founder and President of effectivEDU.

I’m your partner for creating science-backed, tech-enhanced, transformative learning.

(Here’s what that means.)

Impactful Learning Starts With Science

It might seem like magic, but impactful learning is engineered.

By grounding every choice in proven research, we move beyond guesswork to create experiences that reliably deliver extraordinary results.

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When educational choices are informed by research from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and proven educational theory, extraordinary outcomes don’t just become possible.

They become probable.

Think about your most inspiring teachers. Their “magic” wasn’t intuition; it was the purposeful application of research-backed best practices and knowledge of how people learn. They knew how to create psychologically-safe learning environments, how to prevent cognitive load from overwhelming the learner, and when to apply spaced repetition practices to make learning really stick.

It felt like magic, but it was highly intentional and highly effective.

That’s the core of effectivEDU: I channel learning science to create learning engineering that feels like learning magic. Every engagement is grounded in expertise and engineered to create impactful, life-changing results.

Technology Is A Human Amplifier

Let’s reframe the conversation about technology and AI. 

Technology and AI are not threats to be banned; nor are they magic wands. 
They are powerful human amplifiers in learning and in all aspects of life, and their greatest potential is unlocked when they are wielded by a thoughtful human.

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In learning, technology and AI can foster meaningful change by creating personalized learning paths, simulating real-world scenarios, and supplementing great human teachers.

In life, we must become facile with these amplifiers: understanding their mechanics, debating their ethics, and thoughtfully shaping their (and our) future.

This dual focus on practical application and critical understanding is essential. We must learn to master these tools… so they don’t master us.

If It Doesn’t Create Change, It Isn’t Learning

Whether the learning is intended to enhance skills or reshape beliefs and behaviors, it should always create measurable change.

Because if nothing changes, nothing was learned.

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That’s why I obsessively focus on outcomes. Every effectivEDU intervention is meticulously designed to go far beyond information delivery; it’s engineered to move past theory and catalyze that change for your people and your organization.

Whatever the intervention, the goal is always the same: to facilitate impactful learning, powered by science and enhanced by technology, that catalyzes meaningful change.

And here’s the secret sauce:

I always root your learning strategy in your learners’ needs

Those lenses of learning science, technological amplification, and potential for change are important. But they’re not enough.

Just as your school or business is unique, so are your learners. And the science tells us the best learning happens when it fits the learners’ unique needs and interests.

That’s why every effectivEDU engagement starts with a deep dive into your organization.

Because understanding your culture and your people leads to the most effectiv learning possible.

So: where shall we transform your learning?

Equip Your Expert Faculty for a New Era

The Challenge: Your teachers are masters of their content. Some are master teachers as well. But even the most veteran teachers feel that today’s educational landscape is shifting under their feet. AI and EdTech changes, learning science advancements, new literacies, and digital native students demand a new set of pedagogical skills.

The Solution: I provide the learning science and tech strategies to navigate this shift. Rather than leave them feeling overwhelmed by changes, let’s empower your faculty to harness AI to deepen thinking, build safe and inclusive learning environments, and evolve their teaching methods without abandoning the rigorous content and student-centered teaching they love.

Core Services:

Embedded, Bespoke Professional Development

Long-term Action Research engagements where teachers apply, reflect, and iterate on new methods and powerful use of technology in their own classrooms.

Targeted Workshops

Short, high-impact training on specific pedagogical or technical skills, always grounded in learning science (not buzzwords).

Teacher Evaluation and Consultation

Teacher evaluation that prioritizes growth through empathic (but accurate) feedback.

Strategic Partnership

Consultation, evaluation, or execution of planned enhancements and strategic vision-driven projects.

Information Transfer Is Just The Beginning

The Challenge: Even the most brilliant subject-matter experts can struggle to transfer their knowledge and skills to others. Some intuitive practices in training and presentation actually detract from retention. If your internal training or external presentations aren’t engineered using cognitive science and learning strategies, they’ll fail to change behavior and waste your resources or opportunities.

The Solution: Professionalize your trainers and presenters to think and act like great teachers. Whether delivering train-the-trainer workshops or implementing a full learning system architecture, I employ the same learning science and classroom best practices that I teach to your trainers and presenters.

Core Services:

Bespoke Training System Architecture

Design an end-to-end system for hiring, training, evaluating, and remediating your trainers and presenters that fits your needs and your culture.

Targeted Workshops

Science-backed best practices for training and presentations that make change and make the learning stick.

Presenter Coaching

Short- or long-term coaching and feedback to help your people crush their high-stakes presentations.

Strategic Partnership

Consultation on, or evaluation of, your existing systems, curricula, or personnel.

What makes effectivEDU so effectiv?

Expertise

Sean Dagony-Clark

Founder and President

I have over 20 years of education and technology experience teaching; training and mentoring teachers; publishing and podcasting on education; buiding and leading education and ed-tech teams; and establishing a world-class ability to create exceptional learning.

Thought leadership

Building presentations that stick (part 1)

Are your best intentions sabotaging your presentation? 😬You’ve got such great information for your audience. You spent all week putting together your masterpiece of a…
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A dangerous trend: using AI fakes to protest AI problems

I’m seeing a dangerous trend right now: using AI fakes to protest AI problems.It goes like this: someone shares a personal experience of AI’s biases,…
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Did my AI haiku describe me?

The wonderful people at The Upside used AI to create a haiku about me, based on my professional bio. While I’m grateful as always for…
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How did you take care of yourself today?

How did you take care of yourself today?I’m watching the clouds go by and listening to the rustling of the leaves. Been at it about…
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You don’t paint a wall with a hammer

You don’t paint a wall with a hammer. With AI, as with everything, you find the right tool for the job.My last post showed why…
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Don’t trust ChatGPT for factual analysis

Lesson learned: for factual analysis, consumer-grade AIs like ChatGPT and Gemini can be dangerously unreliable.The project: create an AI study partner for the California psychology…
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Everything has changed. And nothing has.

AI and learning? Everything has changed. And nothing has.The “everything” is obvious: AI tutors, automated assessments, rampant cheating, legit fear of replacement, and the potential…
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The Upside Impact Index 2025

Learning isn’t learning if it doesn’t create change.It’s a core belief that’s driven more than two decades of my work. And it’s why I’m so…
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Learning science really works!

Forgetting is a path to remembering. 🧠💪Last week I posted about my recent CPLEE project: building a tech-infused, learning science-informed approach to passing a licensing…
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Don’t trust. VERIFY!

Critical thinking with AI?Don’t trust. VERIFY!(👆 there’s your AI mantra for the week)I just came up for air after a lengthy project helping someone study…
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This, or that, or both

Sometimes it’s not this or that. Sometimes it’s both.That’s why I’m pivoting my consulting business in the new year.Thanks to The Upside’s This or That…
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Disruptive innovation? or copyright violation?

Disruptive innovation? or copyright violation?I’ve become an armchair expert on copyright over the years – partly from sheer 🤓, and partly because my edtech work…
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All change is harm

“All change is harm.” 🧐🤯My friend Caitlin Harper shared so many valuable insights on managing change in today’s Ways We Learn Podcast, but that one…
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What’s the most important factor in learning? 

Question for you: what’s the most important factor in learning? 🧐I’ve got a new Ways We Learn Podcast episode dropping tomorrow, and a bonus episode…
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Celebrate your wins

A wise coach of mine once told me to celebrate my wins. So here goes, and I hope you’ll join the celebration:🎉 I’ve just been named…
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Building shared understanding

Pro tip: you don’t know what other people are thinking. 😵‍💫 So find out!Have you ever thought an employee understood their task, but received a…
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Thank a teacher this week!

How best to appreciate a teacher during National Teacher Appreciation Week? Tell them! 🧑‍🏫My Latin teacher in 7-8 grades was Dr. Paul Pietrow. (He was…
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Don’t deliver a “sh💩t sandwich”

Delivering really bad news or a difficult conversation?Don’t deliver a “sh💩t sandwich.”(This is more often called a “compliment sandwich”: sandwiching difficult information between two slices…
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What’s your most valuable mindset?

Mine is inquiry. We prize decisiveness, creativity, empathy, and plenty of others. And they’re all important! But I think approaching situations with questions has served…
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A day of school vs. an experience to remember 🌙😎

Think back to your school days. What do you remember learning? Not the subjects or topics you know you learned, but what learning activities do…
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Invisible Ink – A Generative AI Ghostwriter

I went down a rabbit hole of Gen AI and engineered an AI ghostwriter! A human ghostwriter would try to understand and mimic the voice…
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Gen AI is a TI-30, and the Humanities are having their “slide rule moment.”

(I haven’t lost my mind. Allow me to explain.)Math and math-adjacent fields faced a crisis in the 1970s when digital calculators arrived in students’ hands….
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AI is changing the world. We can’t allow it to change our humanity.

✅ Consider politics: deepfakes are already influencing elections.👩‍🎓 Consider education: I recently showed a team of teachers how to generate an entire term paper with…
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Given AI, do we know whether our children are learning? 👩‍🎓

That question was at the heart of the professional development session I ran last week for Horace Mann School’s History Department.I think the teachers left…
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We should feel stress at work. (Hear me out.)

Psychologically safe working environments should include stress (meaning pressure to perform and grow).They shouldn’t be overly stressFUL (meaning an overload of nerves). Too much stress…
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Are your employees afraid of being wrong? 🙅‍♀️

One of my earliest supervisors berated us when things went wrong. I found myself constantly watching my back, afraid to make a mistake and get…
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AI is the biggest EdTech disruption since the chalkboard. 🦾🎓

Yet 60% of teachers still don’t use it. 🤔Spoiler alert: it’s not their fault.Plenty of past EdTechs have claimed they will revolutionize teaching. Most have…
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Teach what’s NEEDED, not what’s NEXT (3/3)

But… what if you can’t use AI? 😰My last few posts used AI assists to illuminate what your learners need to learn next.🦾 First we…
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Teach what’s NEEDED, not what’s NEXT (2/3)

You’ll learn best if the learning is targeted to your personal needs. 😎 (This isn’t about learning styles. Don’t get me started on learning styles.)What…
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Teach what’s NEEDED, not what’s NEXT. (1/3)

But… how do you know what’s needed? 🧐I had high school classes where the teacher said “We were on page 87 yesterday, so today we’ll…
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Uh oh. Do you actually know what your learners don’t know? 🤔

Teaching is way more than telling. A great teacher unearths their learners’ misconceptions and misunderstandings, and then targets them to fill gaps and build higher…
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You just learned ChatGPT and now it’s gone?! What will you have to learn next?! 😓

No, ChatGPT isn’t dead yet. But this weekend was chaos weekend at OpenAI, the company that created it. (CEO Altman was out! Then maybe he…
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I built an artificially intelligent tutor! 🤖🎓 How’d I do?

My edu-geekery dial went to 11 last week when OpenAI announced custom GPTs. And here I’ve been talking about how you can use ChatGPT for…
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How do we humanize non-human interactions?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the below since I posted it. The risk of trusting AI to get pseudo-human interaction right, the difficulty of…
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ChatGPT made my daughter cry, and it was my fault

She’d just told me she’d started learning about the human nervous system for a class by Googling articles. I asked her a few questions about…
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“But Artificial Intelligence Can Do It For Me!”

How do we nurture excellence in a world where “artificial intelligence can do it for me”? I homeschooled my elder daughter last year and this…
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Is Artificial Intelligence Smarter Than You? (part 4 of 4)

If you’ve been following this series, you know the answer is yes. At least in some ways. Here’s where you find out what to do…
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Is Artificial Intelligence Smarter Than You? (part 3 of 4)

Most likely: yes. And you’ll find out why in this very post! Wait, don’t leave! This is a four-part series on how we can use…
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Is Artificial Intelligence Smarter Than You? (part 2 of 4)

Sorry, but the answer might be yes. Wait, don’t leave! This is a four-part series on how we can use artificial intelligence to our advantage!…
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Is Artificial Intelligence Smarter Than You? (part 1 of 4)

Sorry, but the answer might be yes. Wait, don’t leave! This is a four-part series on how we can use artificial intelligence to our advantage!…
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Don’t ban ChatGPT in schools

Another notable voice has spoken against banning ChatGPT in schools. Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, was interviewed by Education Week yesterday. He says banning ChatGPT and…
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Ways We Learn

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of the new podcast Ways We Learn! Joe Burgess, Brian Tobal, and I are investigating the ways people learn…
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Get started with video production (for a lot less $$ than you think)

There’s a huge learning curve if you’re just getting started in video production. I’ve been producing videos for years and it’s definitely not easy if…
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Be nice to your learners’ brains!

You’ve heard the expression “drinking from the firehose,” right? If you’ve ever worked in a startup, taken an unfamiliar course, or started a new job,…
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Do we still care about cheating?

Fine, it’s a provocative title. Of course we do. But here’s a real question for those in a school or professional learning environment: how are…
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Results

I can’t remember when I was that engaged for a full 90 minutes

I can’t remember when I was that engaged for a full 90 minutes – unless I was presenting myself! Really enjoyed the engaging and interactive session!

Kelley

Instructional Designer

You made this job into something easy

I cannot emphasize this enough, you made this job into something easy…. From someone who was insecure, and unsure of how to present, I remember watching and learning from you in recordings. I can’t thank you enough and wish you well.

Forrest

Instructor

This should be mandatory training for all new instructors

Great class! One of the few (from my previous experiences in other jobs) to be one of the best. This should be mandatory training for all new instructors. I’ve been teaching for 12 years and I learned some new tips!

Dwayne

Instructor

One of the best investments of my time I’ve made in the last year

I had been toying around with the idea of turning an Instagram Live series into a podcast for 6 months, but doing absolutely nothing about it. When I learned about Sean’s workshop series, Unlock Your Pod-tential, and l saw what I would learn, I figured it was now or never, so I signed up. I learned more than I could have imagined. Sean covered everything that’s involved in getting a podcast out into the world — guest wrangling, recording (including what platforms, tools, and equipment to use), editing, hosting, syndication, publishing, and marketing. Hands down, one of the best investments of my time I’ve made in the last year.

Katherine

Business coach and strategist

Wow!

Sean, I’ve just joined, but your training videos taught me so much about how to engage with students and get them to engage with the topic. The number of times I wrote “Wow!” in my notes on your videos – well, shoot, let me count real quick … 16. 16 times. In training videos where the natural state is to zone out and push through it.

Robb

Instructor

I feel confident in the knowledge gained AND empowered!!

Thank you Sean!! What an energizing and engaging presentation. Learning is SO empowering, and I definitely walked away feeling empowered to create stronger learning experiences. The information was delivered in a highly digestible and engaging way – with opportunity to immediately apply what we learned! I feel confident in the knowledge gained AND empowered!! Thank you for creating such an engaging learning space, and for being as invested in teaching the information as we were in learning it!

Shaina

Curriculum Designer

Yesterday was amazing

THANK YOU for creating an opportunity for us to level up our skills. Yesterday was amazing and we are so appreciative of your time and expertise.

Gabi

Head of Career Outcomes

Your videos were inspiring

@Sean, I have just completed my onboarding, but I’ve watched so many of your videos, since I took the cybersecurity course just this last year. I can really say your videos were inspiring. From your poise to your professional tone and cadence, I was always so impressed in the way you do things. Honestly your videos are part of what inspired me to push forth in this side of things. Being so new at cybersecurity, I really felt (and still do feel) inadequate at times, but you really inspire that confidence in teaching as a tool to better others’ lives. 

James

Instructor

Would really like to get more training like this

Totally new information to me, very useful and informative and already had me thinking about ways to change our slides for current development efforts. Great content, would really like to get more training like this! When I was an instructor I enjoyed the volume of training and would like to see more on this ‘side of the fence’ to help us sharpen our swords.

Jay

Instructor and Instructional Designer

Sean knocked it out of the park

The practice with partners giving and receiving difficult feedback. Sean knocked it out of the park with this training. AMAZING AND HELPFUL!

Jen

Manager

I learned so many things!

I learned so many things! I don’t feel there was a section of this training that wasn’t useful. It was engaging and helpful. Great presentation, Sean!

Brandy

Manager

Can it be more often?

Great training. Can it be more often? I def want to make these types of training sessions a consistent thing for my team.

Sandra

Manager

Hearing how to best construct content so that is most impactful to students was really interesting

As a new hire it was really helpful to be able to view examples of content that is being taught to students (via the breakout session and then show & share). Additionally, hearing how to best construct content so that is most impactful to students was really interesting. It make me think back on what my best learning experiences were while in school and recall what concepts were being used.

Allison

Learning Experience Designer

Sean will be your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice as a resource

In working with Sean over the past year, I can honestly and sincerely say he has forgotten more about pedagogy than I could ever aspire to know. However, his patient and calm teaching style helps people understand and visualize his concepts, making them relatable and actionable.

Mixing his ability to teach others how to teach with a knowledge and passion for technology makes Sean a very unique talent in this space and while you can and should do your diligence when looking for this skill, I believe that Sean will be your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice as a resource.

Bart

Head of Experience Design

It was so fascinating

To be honest, I was expecting this lesson to be very dry, but it was so fascinating! I started on this journey because I’m passionate about development and want to share that with others, but I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting I found the science behind learning and education. Awesome job with this presentation! Now I need to find this podcast.

Danielle

Instructor

One of my favorite trainings ever!

Sean’s delivery is always on point through any training, lecture, presentation that he gives. The role playing session is perfect to give managers the practice that they need, it allows them to get to know each other more too! One of my favorite trainings ever!

Alison

Manager

Very comprehensive and engaging

Very comprehensive and engaging, breakout sessions were great. Great job! Exceeded expectations and excellent first impressions as new instructor.

Amaya

Instructor

I would like more sessions of this type

Useful and appreciated. I see this as an investment in my preparation and ability to succeed in this role. I would like more sessions of this type.

Mike

Instructor

Ready to explore what effectivEDU can do for you?