Case Study: With Each Other, Not Next to Each Other
- Michael Bates
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Jonathan Teske | Founder & CEO, ReframeXR
From “Why Don’t People Get It?” to a Message That Finally Lands
Interview Date: July 30, 2026
THE JOURNEY: PRACTITIONER FIRST
Jonathan Teske didn’t come to EdTech from a boardroom. He came from a classroom.
His background is teaching English as a second language — every grade level from K through 12. He went on to lead an ESL program at a middle school that became the best in Montgomery County, Maryland, for language proficiency improvement two years running. The district promoted him to leadership coach to replicate that success across all of its middle schools, where he focused on de-biasing data analysis for English learners and building more inclusive pathways into higher-level classes.
Then came a chapter that few founders can claim: Jonathan became the first educator hired onto a secret EdTech R&D incubator team at Meta. There he built Project Spark, a project-based learning program that grew from a 400-student pilot to roughly 10,000 students across multiple states — before being spun out to Discovery Education. He then served as Meta’s VR future-of-education product lead, building go-to-market strategy for VR device management in schools and managing a fund that backed startups and research across the VR education ecosystem.
But he couldn’t solve the problems he most wanted to solve from inside Meta. So he left and founded ReframeXR.
THE WHY: “ALONE TOGETHER”
ReframeXR is a mixed reality solution that lets science teachers create collaborative, phenomena-based sense-making activities — students observe first, together, before jumping to explanations. The company operates in Broward County Public Schools in Florida, growing from seven schools to twelve, expanding from middle school into elementary and, soon, high school science classrooms.
The conviction underneath the product is a phrase that kept surfacing in our work together: alone together.
“You are alone and fully immersed in a world, not talking to anyone — alone together in a room with 29 other students not interacting with each other. And we know from research that students excel the most and retain the most when they actually have to make sense of their world with someone else.”— Jonathan Teske
Jonathan watched VR’s moment in education stall precisely because the technology isolated students — headsets on, peripheral vision gone, each child in a separate world. His answer: the classroom is a feature, not a bug. Technology should harness the fact that students are in a room together, not work around it.
“The majority of your time spent in a classroom, if it’s around other people, should be with other people — not just next to other people.”— Jonathan Teske
That philosophy extends to his design choices. ReframeXR keeps the teacher in control — a teacher can put on a headset for five minutes and design a lesson that looks exactly like one built with physical manipulatives, except everything is a 3D hologram. And the company deliberately collects no student data, trusting the teacher’s professional judgment rather than chasing the industry’s data-for-the-sake-of-data thesis.
THE CHALLENGE: GETTING INTO THE ROOM
Jonathan is candid that founding a company was harder than he expected — particularly at a moment of anti-EdTech and anti-AI backlash that he understands and even shares.
Fundraising was tougher than anticipated. Distribution and relationships mattered more than product quality. Decision-making in districts had consolidated, with more gatekeeping between founders and the people who buy.
“I know how to speak to leadership. I know what makes them tick and what matters to them. So it’s not necessarily about what I say when I’m in the room — it’s more about just getting to the room, which has been a bit difficult.”— Jonathan Teske
And there was a deeper frustration — one nearly every technical founder will recognize. The people who understood ReframeXR became champions instantly. But too many conversations started with confusion.
“It was my frustration prior to you, and a little bit while we were working together at the beginning: why don’t people get it? The people who are getting it are like, ‘No duh, Jonathan, this makes so much sense.’ But then you still get into rooms where people are like, ‘What do you do?’”— Jonathan Teske
Part of the problem was positioning. ReframeXR had been framed against VR — the anti-VR — which required prospects to first understand VR well enough to know what they didn’t like about it. The message was technology-focused when it needed to be classroom-focused.
THE TURNING POINT: LANDING THE LANGUAGE
Our work together centered on the why — pulling out the research that connects ReframeXR to what a classroom, a teacher, and a student actually care about, rather than what the technology does.
The breakthrough was gradual, then all at once. After two years of “why don’t people get it,” Jonathan coalesced the message around a term already in use in schools across the country: collaborative sense-making. Sense-making is embedded in the Next Generation Science Standards adopted across 47 states — it’s the language science administrators already speak. ReframeXR simply happens to be the technology that maximizes it, giving students shared access to content that is abstract, dangerous, impossible, or conceptual.
“You can now de-abstract the abstract — and do that with other people. I finally was able to coalesce around the terminology that’s already being used in schools, marrying two things people thought were disparate. The last six months have been illuminating to finally get there, and I’m already getting some good early traction.”
— Jonathan Teske
With the message landed, the conversation in districts has shifted from conceptual understanding to dollars and cents — exactly where a founder wants the conversation to be.
WHAT MADE THIS WORK DIFFERENT
Jonathan has worked with other consultants. One relationship was heavily lead-gen focused — introductions and calls that ultimately landed flat, because the foundational positioning work hadn’t been done first.
“It’s the difference between immediate value versus long-view value. Being able to take a step back, play the longer, bigger view, and make sure there are more ducks in a row — that’s really been the core difference.”— Jonathan Teske
It also took self-awareness — a willingness to honestly assess his own stage and readiness as a founder, and to do the unglamorous foundational work: discovery practice, consultative selling versus solution selling, and workshopping the why with someone he trusted.
“I needed to be workshopping and practicing with someone I can trust and build those foundational skills — the sales work, how we do discovery, consultative selling, the why work around what our product solves — that I never got from anyone else before you.”— Jonathan Teske
LOOKING AHEAD
Heading into the new school year, Jonathan is eager to put six months of positioning work to the test — in marketing, in sales conversations, and in more of the rooms he’s been working to get into.
“I have never felt more confident in both the product and the positioning for the company.”— Jonathan Teske
The problems ReframeXR solves — alone togetherness, loneliness, the classroom as a feature rather than a bug — are universal. ReframeXR just happens to solve them in a science classroom. And now, the message finally matches the mission.
The right product deserves the right message.
For Jonathan Teske, two years of “why don’t people get it” ended when the why became visible — to his audience, and to himself.
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW
Hear Jonathan share his story in his own words — recorded July 30, 2026.
Michael Bates Solutions
Author, One More Question | Creator, EdTech Impact Accelerator
Comments