From Invited to Included: Student-Led Changemaking at the International School of Düsseldorf

Too often, young people are invited without being included. They may be invited to a conference, but they’re relegated to the student voice table, where you can go talk to a real live student. They may be on a student advisory board, but they aren’t actually part of the core advisory board that makes the decisions.

That’s why a recent project and event caught my attention, called the Changemakers Conference, which features student leaders from year three all the way up to year 12. So today we’re joined by six guests, which is a Getting Smart record. So, silent celebration.

So we have two different groups of three. We have a group of teachers, or educators, from the International School of Düsseldorf, as we’ll call it on this podcast: Mike DeHart, Adrian Ireland, and Kyle Shahan. Fellows, welcome. Thanks for being here. And then we also have a group of students. We have Julia, Melania, and Gabriela. Thank you all for being here.

Personal Relationships to Change-Making

A question I want all of you to answer, which is: what is your own personal relationship to change-making? When did you first hear this word? When did you start thinking about this idea of making a change? Adrian, because you emailed me first, I think I’m going to start with you, if you’re ready.

Adrian Ireland: Yeah, I mean, change-making for me has mostly come to fruition within the educational space. When I started learning a lot about systems thinking and systems architecture, and kind of how you can shape environments to better promote the kind of learning that you want, that’s kind of when I started viewing myself more as an educational changemaker.

Kyle Shahan: Thanks, Mason, for having us all, by the way. It’s exciting to reach an American audience. We’ve done several of these for European audiences in our networks and stuff. Yeah, for me, I guess I first heard the word probably about four years ago, and I was immediately deeply, deeply intrigued, especially with the word “maker” itself inside of the word “changemaker.” I have a background in maker education, and a lot of the competencies are the same, I find: looking very closely, thinking about how systems work, tinkering, breaking things down, deconstructing things. As it relates to change-making, whether it’s social change or environmental change, a lot of those competencies relate.

Mike DeHart: So about a year and a half ago, I was stupid enough to say yes to Kyle when he invited me to go to Budapest. I had no idea what I was getting sucked into, but I think he invited me because I have a background in sustainability, and a previous life before teaching. And I had always oriented towards, you know, project-based, student-centered, student-oriented learning. And so the term, the concept, kind of brought together my sustainability background and my focus on giving students real things to sink their teeth into. And so, once I got over the shock of what we were getting ourselves into, it also became a lifelong focus.

Melania: I think for me, change-making started long before I heard the word “changemaker.” If you go back to when I was really, really little, I always saw, like, oh, things aren’t the way I’d like them to be, specifically if you look through the lens of sustainability. My parents started us very young, me and my sister, with documentaries full of really inspirational stories about change, people who made the world a better place. So then, when we went to school and I got the opportunity to join things like the Green Team, or eventually the Eco Committee, it was really clear to me that that’s where I wanted to be. And that got me to the Changemaker Conference in Budapest. And then we decided to plan ours, and I got invited to be part of the core team.

Mason Pashia: We published a book a few years ago called Difference Making at the Heart of Learning, which is really about a similar topic, this idea of contribution as a core skill and posture for all people to take in the world, and that our schools really need to embrace. So, I agree. Okay, let’s hear from the students here. Gabriela?

Gabriela: Okay, so most of the time we shared responsibilities throughout the planning. Closer to the end, my specific role was mostly with the students from ISD, working with the groups we had there, like the facilities and food team, and managing what they were doing.

Planning the Conference: Roles and Responsibilities

Mason Pashia: So tell me more about this pre-planning piece, because I think that’s really interesting. If I remember correctly, you were all given some money to control, and in planning this event, you had to handle a lot of the aspects yourselves.

Gabriela: So for the planning, we really had to plan out where the schools would stay, what schools would be coming, where we’d be putting them in the school, what the days would even look like, who we wanted at the conference regarding speakers, how we wanted the conference to be structured, the theme, everything like that. So we all had a lot of meetings to plan those things out and communicate our ideas.

Mason Pashia: Melania, tell me a bit about your role.

Melania: So the way we worked as a team, our responsibilities were very mixed. It wasn’t really until, I don’t know, January, the conference was in March I think, that we assigned clearer, more focused roles. That’s where I focused more on working with the speakers. I was letting them know how their contracts would work, and we were exchanging emails back and forth about that. Towards the end, it was really focused on making sure we had all our workshop leaders and student speakers organized. But it’s really hard to say what we were doing as individuals, because especially between us students, we shared so much of the work, we just did it all together, because it’s better when you have that support.

Adrian Ireland: Let’s not forget the part where you reached out through your own network and landed our absolute largest speaker, behind all of our backs. Nobody knew this was even happening. And then I just got an email one day, a month before the conference, like, “Hey, so I did this thing.” And that turned out to be a really pivotal, great addition to the conference.

Melania: Right, we were looking for another speaker, this was February I think, and we were still trying to fill one of our speaker slots. And, yeah, we got a really amazing speaker. He’s a mental fitness coach, Chris Larson, who co-founded a company called Leap76 for mental fitness, especially with elite athletes. He came on the first day and spoke to all the students, and that was a really big success. So yeah, that was really cool.

Mason Pashia: Nice job, that’s awesome. I know Melania just said it’s really hard to isolate your role, but what were some of the moments of this event that stood out to you in the pre-planning?

Julia: Yeah, so we tracked every delegation through Google Sheets, and I was very active in making sure that all the schools had their travel information updated, that they’d done all the consent forms and whatnot, and that they’d even gotten their invoice in the first place, communicating with our billing team. I was very much focused on communication with the school groups.

Mason Pashia: You’ve all mentioned that it was kind of chaotic, you were in a lot of different places. Was that by design? Was it exciting, was it hard? How do you feel about wearing so many hats?

Julia: In retrospect, it probably would’ve been better if we’d had more specific roles. I think the one thing we all took away is that delegating tasks specifically to a person, and really assigning them, matters, because a lot of the time it was kind of ambiguous. We’d say, “Oh, we need to do this thing,” but we never really said who exactly should do it. Later on we did, but in the early stages we didn’t. So the task would just float around until it became pressing to address, when there were deadlines that had to be met. Having specific roles would’ve made everything go a lot smoother, and I think it also would’ve made the conference more resilient, because when it’s a big community thing, that comes with engaging a lot of people. So I think having more specific roles, or responsibilities distributed, would’ve been ideal, I think.

Mason Pashia: Melania, you?

Melania: I think there was also value in the fact that we were working so closely together. I mean, I think it’s always better to get a second opinion, or in our case, a second and a third opinion. For some tasks, like writing an email, it’s very much a one-person job. But when it came to looking over our applications to lead workshops or lead a speaker session, I think it was really important that we got all three of our opinions, especially as students. Everyone got to say what they thought, and I think that led to a more balanced, better lineup in the end. I think it was really cool that we got to work together on this. It’s important that we all got a chance to share our opinions, especially because we’re pretty different as people, and we prioritize different things. We also had different strengths and areas that we played to. I think, generally, there was also a clear division in who was doing what, even when it was ambiguous.

Navigating Disagreement and Consensus-Building

Mason Pashia: I’m personally really interested in this idea of consensus-building, specifically in a large group of different opinions. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges in our world today, just finding consensus. So how did you all navigate that? If you’re collaborating with a group of people bringing really different perspectives, how did you work together to find the right path forward? Or how did you help people take their ideas and be like, “Maybe not right now”? What was your approach as a group for working through those times? I’m sure they all looked pretty different from each other.

Adrian Ireland: I can speak a bit to that. We definitely had some capital-D disagreements. There were times when us adults bent and changed our minds, convinced by other things, and there were other times when our student leads pivoted. I think one of our strengths as a group was not being afraid to talk it out and take that time. Sometimes we’d sit with something for half of our meeting time, but it was an important thing to get clear on, an important thing for everyone to be on board with. Even if a decision was made, each member of this group was putting in hundreds of hours over months, and that level of commitment required that level of ownership to really come to that consensus.

Kyle Shahan: As an adult on the core planning team, I really saw myself, and I think we all did, to some extent, as amplifying student agency and ownership. That was sort of a guiding principle, so where there were differences, disagreements, or different perspectives, the guiding principle always tended to be: this is student ownership, and the way they see things and envision things ought to be the right way to do it. For me, that really wasn’t much of a tension, it was really joyful to trust at that level. And I also recognize that these three student planners here were absolutely amazing in their level of control and ownership, and their clarity around their vision for this conference was so complete that we really didn’t have a lot of uncertainty around how things went, around those decisions. So, for the most part, it was easy.

Mason Pashia: Gotcha, that’s really helpful. Go ahead.

Adrian Ireland: I’ll just add that the final decision-making laying with the student planners was clear. I think what was good about the disagreements is that it pushed us as a group to fully understand what we were committing to, so it was more like pushing ourselves to make a more informed decision. But yeah, that final decision, as Kyle mentioned, was with the students.

Inside the Conference: Structure and Strands

Mason Pashia: Awesome. I want to spend a couple minutes getting, from one of the students, the perspective of just what happened at this event. I remember being struck when you described it as really a fully intergenerational event. You’d go to a workshop led by students, you’d go to a workshop led by adults, you’d go to a talk from a student, you’d go to a talk from an adult. It’s really kind of a wonderful thing. So I would love to hear from one of you just what, if somebody went to this event, what would they see, what would they hear, and what stuck with you?

Melania: Okay, so the Changemaker Conference 2026, it was a three-day event. It concentrates on four aspects of changemaking. We structured our conference around four strands: economy, society, nature, and well-being, because we feel that those are the four areas most student projects are focused on. And then it was our job over the three days to address all four of those strands in a balanced way. So day one was focused on vocalizing, or centralizing people’s focus on what is most important to them, what they want to get out of the conference, what they want to learn. On the second day, we really tackled what they can be doing, that’s what, on the second day we had all of our workshops and a lot of our speakers as well, so that people could be exposed to a huge amount of information to build off of. And day three is focused on action planning, and how they can transfer the things they learned during our conference to the work they do at their own schools. And then, on the last day, we also have a part called “We Will” statements. So everyone got together to share, in one sentence, what they will do until next year, or once they get back to their school.

Julia: So I think Melania covered it quite well, but one thing that we also need to mention is that every Changemaker Conference is structured around a theme chosen by the host school, and that’s also how we came up with this structure over the three days. So the first day was all about centralizing your focus, day two is all about collecting the tools on the bridge, and then day three is all about landing with impact, what are the next steps from here, right? And just to look into some of the content that we had at the conference: we had a wide range of workshops and topics for all those four strands that we had.

A few that I want to mention that I guess were more creative, we had a self-defense workshop hosted by students, and then one of our speakers did a workshop about ecological citizenship. And then we had a group of ISD students building bug hotels, right? So there’s just a wide range of more physical, hands-on workshops, and then also informational ones, but all of them had some sort of activity.

Designing the Workshops and Sessions

Mason Pashia: A lot of our listeners have put on events, or do these big education conferences that are so much work, so much payoff, but, specifically in my experience, the sessions have just been a nightmare to arrange. It’s kind of a weird combination of trying to plant a seed and be like, “Maybe you should talk about this,” and also trying to handle a submission from somebody which is sort of way out in the field. Were you all, how did you all have to engage with that part of the process, and what did the actual creation of the sessions kind of look and feel like, to make sure they matched the theme?

Julia: A lot of it was just us trusting the people. Most of the workshops were students from other schools who applied, and we had this form that outlined the criteria that we wanted for the workshop. They sent in their applications, and we read through them as a group. On one hand, we wanted to maximize the diversity of workshops, so sometimes that meant it might not match our theme completely. But I think we did a good job, and I think our theme is also something that’s a little broader, so it’s easy for everyone to interpret it in their own way, and for it to still fit the conference thematically.

Building a School Culture Around Change-Making

Mason Pashia: Mike, I want to hear, I don’t know if you’re the right person to talk about this, but I want to get your perspective on it. So, earlier somebody mentioned that they wanted to contribute, basically, to their school community. They wanted to help in some capacity. So how have you and the other fellow educators on this call, or at the school, gone about really building this community that is both identifiable, like, you know, you are a part of this place that has this sense of belonging, a sense of identity, but also made it a place where people want to see that thing get better, rather than just wear their school like a badge?

Mike DeHart: Maybe not the right one, but I can give it a stab. I’m only a year and a half at ISD, but I will say one of the things that really attracted me to the community is that it is a community. Expat schools in general tend to be a little more closely knit, but there’s a thing called ISD Lion Spirit, and it’s legit. You know, your kids will look you in the eye, they’ll wish you good morning, they’ll open the door, I mean, it’s a great community. There is already a sense of community, and when I came, there were all these sustainability subgroups, and one of the things that I tried to do was to participate. There was more than I could get on top of. But there is also, on top of this sort of school spirit, kind of a deep fabric of caring about the larger environment. And I will say a lot of that has to do with people like Kyle working so hard with the younger kids to really deeply embed this thinking. We have a great elementary program, we have outdoor learning, and we also have a really rich environmental sustainability platform that’s built, baked deep into our elementary school. So I kind of jumped into try to support all these kids, ’cause there’s all this stuff already going on, but I think others maybe could speak to how the heck we got to be where we are in terms of outdoor learning. And, aside from Kyle, who is just amazing.

Mason Pashia: I love this idea of starting early. We hear the critical nature of that a lot, so that’s important. Adrian, go ahead.

Adrian Ireland: I can tell you a bit from more of an administrative side. So I do a lot of the scheduling and a little bit of the staffing decisions in grade six through 10. And I think some of what we tried to do this year, and I think we’re still on the journey of trying to make change-making more an integral part of what it means to be in our community, is we tried to open up different spaces within the school day where we could give it time and resources.

So we were quite intentional. We knew from a year before that we were going to be hosting this conference, and we added Changemakers electives into our elective program to try to get students involved, to actually have time to do work and to support not just the conference, but other change-making projects within the school. I mean, Mike teaches digital design in grade seven, and he had his little army of grade-seven students doing a lot of the digital mockups and maps that schools used when they came in. And he made this amazing sustainability magazine called Seeds of Change. So we did try to intentionally bring it into the school day,

’cause I think what anyone who works in a school will tell you is that time is scarce. But also you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is, and if you’re not giving it time, then it’s hard to support these things.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that’s so important. Love hearing about how embedded that is in the curriculum.

Kyle Shahan: Yeah, thanks. I just want to add on to what Adrian said. I’m glad, Adrian, you brought it over to this idea of kind of a robust capacity that our school had. And I think, perhaps for American listeners, this might be important to understand. I don’t know the context of public schools or private schools in the States, but we had a lot of support from leadership and the board on this. This group of six core planners were given time. We took time, as Adrian said, we had two Changemaker electives that were brought on, to sort of be a bit of an engine. And as the conference got closer, it became clear, I think, to us on the team, really just what robust capacity our school had.

I mean, we had our counselors involved, our food service team, by the way, which students were communicating directly with, all these people. This, again, was not like an adult-planned thing. But yeah, data protection, on devices, I mean, we had a lot of things going on, to put this kind of event on, in the context of a private international school in Europe.

So that kind of capacity and robust resources and time that were allowed is a big part of it.

Mason Pashia: And you got more than 120 students involved in this too, which is pretty incredible. That’s a serious level of student action and agency, so that’s awesome. Gabriela, you planted this seed at the beginning of this conversation about wanting to be, feeling like you’re a part of the school community, wanting to contribute to it. What things, for you, make you feel a sense of cohesiveness around the school community, or what makes you feel that?

Gabriela: So for me, what makes me feel like I belong in this school community is, in general, just how everyone acts and treats each other in the school. Everyone is very kind and inclusive to everyone as well. For me, I’ve been at ISD for 11 years of my life now, so since the beginning I’ve just always been a part of that community. I’ve grown up with it, so yeah.

Where Students Go From Here

Mason Pashia: Awesome. Okay, I just want to hear from each of the students, like, where do you go from here? This sounds like a really exciting experience. You don’t have to say, “I’m going to college,” I’m not asking literally what you’re doing after school, but just how do you keep change-making alive in you, I guess. Like, what’s been seeded here, or what projects are you excited about, or how has the spotlight of your attention shifted since this event?

Julia: I’d say I definitely walked away from the conference with so much hope and so much excitement for projects. I’m already active in our school’s Eco Committee, and I’m really hoping that we get a lot of work done there. And then I’m also engaged with some local organizations, helping out our local community. But what I would say is that it is difficult as a grade 11 student, as much as I do want to do something, it’s hard to balance that, right? And I really do think that needs to be a systemic change, and that time is allocated towards service learning in the timetable, because even for us, we did have to spend a lot of time outside of class doing this. I don’t think it should be an expectation, really, that everyone should be spending all of their free time on service learning, that should be embedded in the curriculum already, right? Because that’s how you’re going to get the most engagement from students, is if they have time within the school day to do it as well. It can’t be a full expectation to do it outside of class when you have homework, when you have, I mean, for us, we’re graduating next year. There’s a lot of other big life things there too, and yeah, so that’s my take on that.

Melania: I think for me, as awesome as the conference was, I think most of my learning and my biggest takeaways come from everything that happened before the conference. I mean, it’s such a huge, like Julia said, time commitment, that it’s something you’re always thinking about. And it taught me so much about myself as a person, as a member of a team. It also made me feel much more confident in my capabilities. I think it teaches you a lot that you can’t really learn in a standard classroom environment, about interaction and cooperation, as an experience, planning the conference. It’s really empowering.

I feel that over the course of the year or so that we were planning, you become much more, I guess, assertive. And you feel more confident in sharing your opinions, you feel more confident in your opinions, and you feel that your voice matters way more, and that’s something that, you know, you’ll carry forward years into the future.

Mason Pashia: Super cool.

Gabriela: So after this event, I think I might slow down my change-making a bit, especially since we are coming up to our mock exams in our last year, the IB. So I definitely will be kind of putting away my extracurriculars on the side and focus on school. However, I hope to continue some of the projects I’m already a part of, and just continue contributing as well.

I hope, after school, possibly, I was inspired by some of the adults in this conference, how they are a part of a lot of other organizations outside. I was hoping to possibly, after I graduate, join some organizations or participate in volunteer work.

Why Is School So Hard to Change?

Mason Pashia: Awesome. Okay, this is a terrible question to end the podcast with, but I’m gonna ask it anyway. It’s like you can’t wrap your arms around it, it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s my personal thing that I really have been thinking a lot about right now. I think we actually talked about this when myself and the students had a chat, like, a couple weeks ago.

But I am thinking a lot right now about how there are so many youth-led movements specifically around climate change and sustainability, and there are almost none around redesigning school, which I think gets at a little bit of both what Gabriela and Julia just talked about, which is, we just don’t have the time, the space, to do this thing. And so I’m really curious, like, what is it about school that makes it feel so unassailable in terms of changing it? And I know we’re here with some really great educators at a pretty innovative school already, so this is a little bit of, an audience, in a way. But I’m super interested in what makes it feel like we can’t change the education system, or why that is not a target of mobilization for students. So, can anyone speak to that? I don’t know if it was about this or the last question, but people had raised their hands, and I would just love a response to that.

Kyle Shahan: I can jump in just to get the ball rolling, Mason. I think it’s probably the essence of a lot of problems that seem intractable. And it comes down to the design of the learning that we are doing. And the way we do school these days is the way we’ve done it forever. And that is, specifically, to split people, learners, agents, changemakers, into same-age grade levels, and then we split them further up into homerooms, and we regulate every moment of their school day. That kind of system has some benefits, of course, it avoids chaos. At the same time, it separates and fragments changemakers, and separates them further from the impact and meaningful learning that they want to do. And so, I heard Gabby talk about it, next year they’re headed into 12th grade, and they have a workload that is non-negotiable. No one likes that, students don’t, educators don’t, we all know it’s a problem, but we don’t know how to break it down. And so, with that in mind, conferences like this

are more important, to build the sort of, you know, you might call it off-timetable learning, you might call it intergenerational learning, where students connect across grades and ages, and it’s a really important learning hack, really, to get students of different ages together. And so we have to be building these spaces for students to connect and grow their voice and impact, and the skills that you’ve heard them talk about. And right now, it seems to be sort of some big extra thing that we do, or there might be an off-timetable period in the week where students

can connect, but it’s an extra thing. As far as a philosophy and approach to school these days, we have to be teaching students not just how to go out and compete and fit in, in the world, when they’re done with 12th grade, but really how to rewrite the game. And until we learn how to connect students in these kinds of spaces as the normal mode, or format, this kind of thing is going to be challenging.

Julia: I had a conversation last week with some other educators who were also involved in the changemaker space. We were very much talking about how content-driven the learning is, and that’s how traditional school has been, right? You have your six or more subjects, right? And then you just inhale a bunch of content and information. But what we’re realizing with the conference is that so much real-world learning happens from these extracurriculars, these service projects and whatnot. But I do think there’s a problem with labeling them extracurriculars, ’cause then you don’t prioritize and value them as much, even though that learning is something that is very powerful for your future, right? And if we don’t integrate service learning and project-based learning into our curriculum, then in the future we’re just going to treat it as something separate, even though these issues are very real and very pressing and important. And furthermore, I think it’s important that we make time in the schedule for service projects, because we want everyone engaged, right? I think at our school, what I’ve noticed is that, you know, even though the Changemakers Conference was a big thing and we had a lot of students involved, if you look at the whole demographic of the school, that’s like 10% of the student body. It’s still only a minority that is doing this.

And what we want, for a more equitable world, is for everyone to be involved, and for everyone to want to make the community a better place, right? And so, if we integrate it into the fabric of what a school is and what we’re learning, then everyone, even those who are more cynical, I guess, and not so interested in sustainability, will also contribute to the community.

Adrian Ireland: A hundred percent agree with everything Julia just said. I’m a bit of a tinkerer, an experimenter. I’ve done a lot of project-based learning education through entrepreneurship. But nothing has really compared to the experience I’ve had with this group of adults and students, and I think one reason, and I’ve been trying to think really hard as to why that is, is that learning is really powerful when you’re learning together with the students. We’ve never hosted a conference. We, the teachers, didn’t have a curriculum to follow. We didn’t have a game plan. We didn’t know what we were doing. And the students picked up on that a few times, nod your head if you noticed that. We worked together, we asked questions together, we made mistakes together. I do feel, like Julia said, that as soon as you have a set curriculum, and as soon as you position the teacher as expert, really transformational learning like this becomes really, really difficult, if not impossible. So I think that’s the hurdle we’re dealing with. We were fortunate enough to have the time and space to have that experience together, but it’s not something I’m going to be able to mimic in my biology class anytime soon. So yeah.

Mason Pashia: Mike, what would you add, and where can people go to learn more as well?

Mike DeHart: Yeah, I really like what Adrian said, because, I mean, I hate to say it, but you know, we, as educators, are actually the problem. I mean, we, as adults, until we accept, you know, that painful truth, that, by definition, education is limited by our imagination, because we’re in the structure where, as Adrian said, we’re trying to trap the learning inside these boxes, and we think they’re clever.

And, you know, our research and our education says, “Oh, this is it, this is the thing,” but, by definition, it’s a box, and we’re trapping the kids inside it. And if we just accept that we need to get out of the way, we need to step aside. I mean, statistically, these girls are all smarter than me, and, on average, you know, our kids are going to be as smart or smarter than us.

We actually need to get out of the way, right, and not limit their learning to, one, something we contrived, we constructed, and two, to something where they practice. Like Julia was saying, service learning, like getting engaged, like actually doing something that’s concrete. The kids will own it. They will want to do it.

It’s an attractive model. And so, for us, I think if we step back and say, “Okay, yeah, we have to construct something where some learning occurs,” but not limited by this curriculum, or these laws, or imagination. We need to just let them run, and practice, and do.

Closing Thoughts

Mason Pashia: Love it. Thank you, Mike. Okay, Julia, final words.

Julia: Taking on something as huge as the Changemaker Conference, it became such an integral part of my identity for the past year, and I think if we do more of that for all students, really putting something into their hands, they will learn to really care about something and invest time into it.

Mason Pashia: Something that I really like that you all said, which ties us back into the intro, is this: this is both including students, but it’s also not making it their problem. I think that so much of the world’s challenges right now are so big and so unknown: “Oh, young people will figure out climate change,” or, “Oh, young people will figure out this thing.” But the way that this conference is designed, and the way that you all are talking about this, actually has some accountability and complicity for the adults as well. You are still kind of in the dirt, messing around, trying to figure out how to solve this at the same time as they are, and you’re both getting better for it by doing it together, rather than making it either person’s problem, which I really love.

If anybody wants to find out more, go to ChangemakersEarth.