The Classroom Was My Incubator
- Feb 20
- 3 min read
By Bree Hemingway, PhD, MPH, CHES
I never set out to become a tech founder. I didn’t start with a pitch deck, a startup accelerator, or a bold vision to “disrupt” education. The idea that changed everything came from a different place: my own classroom.
I am a professor of public health with a PhD, and for years I watched highly motivated graduate students struggle with the same problem. They could explain theories fluently, cite frameworks perfectly, and pass exams with ease—yet when faced with real-world complexity, uncertainty, and competing stakeholder priorities, many froze. Traditional case studies felt static and outdated. Community-based projects, while powerful, were difficult to scale ethically and often placed a burden on already overstretched partners. I kept asking myself: How do we prepare students for practice without burning out communities or lowering our expectations?
That question became the seed of Learning Clarified (LC), an educational technology company I co-founded with a partner who shared my belief that education could—and should—do better. From the beginning, LC was a collaborative effort, grounded in complementary strengths and a shared commitment to designing tools that genuinely support teaching and learning. Together, we set out to build something that felt deeply aligned with how faculty actually work.
LC is a simulation-based learning platform designed by faculty, for faculty—built to help students practice decision-making in realistic, messy, and consequential scenarios before they ever step into the field.
The execution started small and intentionally low-tech. I began by designing simulations for my own courses, embedding them directly into my teaching. Students assumed professional roles, reviewed fictional but realistic data, navigated political and ethical tensions, and made decisions with trade-offs—just like they would in real public health settings. I observed how they responded, gathered feedback, refined the scenarios, and tested again. Teaching became my R&D lab, while my co-founder and I worked closely to translate these insights into a scalable, sustainable platform.
What surprised me most was how quickly students’ confidence grew. They weren’t just memorizing frameworks anymore; they were using them. They learned how to defend decisions, revise plans, and sit with uncertainty. Equally important, faculty colleagues who reviewed the materials saw something familiar: pedagogy grounded in accreditation requirements, aligned with competencies, and designed to fit existing workflows—not another tool asking them to rebuild their courses from scratch.
That insight shaped our approach to innovation. Rather than starting with technology for technology’s sake, we anchored everything in teaching practice. LC was co-designed with faculty, peer-reviewed like scholarship, and refined through real classroom use. The technology serves the pedagogy, not the other way around.
One of the biggest challenges I see early-stage entrepreneurs overlook is translation. Translation between a compelling idea and an executable system. Translation between the language of users and the expectations of funders. Translation between passion and sustainability. Good ideas fail not because they lack merit, but because they are not translated clearly enough across these boundaries.
My creative process—and the one my co-founder and I return to repeatedly—follows a simple but disciplined loop: teach, test, refine. Every innovation must prove itself in practice. Speed matters less than usefulness. Hype matters less than adoption. Ethical impact matters more than novelty. This framework may not produce viral headlines, but it builds trust—and trust is what sustains educational change.
As a woman founder building in education and public health—fields often undervalued in the tech ecosystem—I bring a perspective rooted in care, rigor, and practicality. I believe faculty expertise is one of the most underutilized innovation engines we have. When we treat teaching challenges as opportunities for design, and when we trust educators as creators—not just consumers—of technology, entirely new possibilities emerge.
Learning Clarified didn’t start in a boardroom. It started in a classroom—and in a partnership grounded in shared values and lived experience. Sometimes, the most powerful incubators are the spaces we already inhabit—if we’re willing to look at our everyday challenges as the beginning of something bigger.
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