Tom Vander Ark on Difference Making and Schools Alive With Possibility

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and this month we’re focusing on Difference Making, the subject of a new book by Tom Van Der Arc and Dr. Emily Liebtag. The book stemmed out of our multi-year Future of Work campaign when our team quickly realized

that one of the hallmarks of the Future of Work is purposeful work contributing to communities. Through hundreds of school visits and powerful conversations with inspirational organizations across the globe, we observe changemakers in action and learners who are more ready than ever to make a difference in the world. Difference Making at the heart of learning is an inspirational yet practical guide to

help educators, counselors, and youth development leaders build on students’ talents and interests in order to develop their desire for a better world, an entrepreneurial mindset, and personal leadership skills so that they can make a difference for their families, their communities, and society. In this episode, Tom sits down with fellow Getting Smart team member Rebecca Middles

to discuss what Difference Making means, why it is the superpower of the new economy, and how more schools can get involved with organizations who are dedicated to Difference Making. Let’s listen in to this conversation. Hey, Rebecca Middles, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you.

We’re turning the tables today, Rebecca. I’m going to give you the pleasure of interviewing me on a new book that dropped recently called Difference Making at the heart of learning. So, Rebecca, let’s take it away. Let’s get started.

All right, Tom, what is Difference Making? Well, it’s something that we’ve noticed increasingly in schools around the world, a focus on contribution, on making a difference in your community. We first noticed this about five years ago, and we started focusing on the future of work and the impact that AI was having on the nature of work and the nature of learning.

And we’ve made this unusual observation that an entrepreneurial mindset of being able to spot opportunity and deliver value for a community was really, really important. It might be the most important set of skills valued in the workplace. And we saw more and more schools tapping into this. And it turns out that Gen Z as a generation is really interested in the idea of making

a difference. They’re pretty frustrated with what my baby boomer generation has done to the planet and the world that we’re leaving them. And there’s a lot of young people that are really interested in making a difference. And so it’s the interesting intersection of being this new superpower, of being able to

spot opportunity and deliver value as a citizen and a contributor at work, but also the inclination of this generation. And they are coming together in this beautiful way that we think could be the new purpose of education, the new focus of schools on equipping young people to make a difference right where they are.

Young people as solutionaries. Love it. Yeah. It’s something that I know is near and dear to your heart. I think when you started your school in Anchorage, there was a bit of this involved in the mission.

It wasn’t there? Yes, there was. A commitment to make a difference and connect with the community. It was treated as a competency that was just as important as core content. It’s a disposition, right?

It’s about being committed to the other. It’s about a sense of mutuality. It’s about a commitment to our friends at Yale Education, we call it a commitment to your crew, but also a commitment to your community. So it’s interesting that it’s both a disposition and a set of skills for delivering value.

True. It’s a purpose. It’s that commitment and it’s really that school at the time along to your point is committing graduates to lead their own life, to make a path and feel empowered to make change and to have the tools they need in order to make that happen.

And one of the ways to do that is to see yourself as someone who can help find and design solutions. Yeah, I really, you know, we started visiting our friends at One Stone in Boise four years ago as they were beginning to plan a new high school. And One Stone is my favorite after school program in America. Their motto is raising an army of good for good.

And they really helped equip young people to make a difference in their community and they wanted to bake that into the plans for a new high school. And I think watching that process really gave me the sense that this is not just an extra. This really could be the central animating focus of a school, particularly a high school to lean into the opportunity and the need to really rethink and remake community.

And that two secret sauce, this commitment to contribution, it’s not conceptual. It’s personal, right? It is. I’m a I’m one of the hybrid people on our team that spent time in the private sector. And it was 15 years in the private sector or after 15 years in the private sector that I really

discovered by visiting schools and looking at data of deep calling a sense of commitment to spend the rest of my career in education. And it’s it’s sort of ironic that my first careers were in extraction, both physical extraction in the energy business and financial extraction in the finance business. But it was it was all about what can we take?

Not what can we give? And so for me, my my last 30 years have really been about turning that on its head and thinking about what contribution can I make? How can I equip other people to make a contribution? The neat thing, Rebecca, that you and I get to work with just extraordinary teachers and

leaders all over America, who for their whole careers have been committed to that idea of contribution. But many of them just haven’t been invited to make that notion of contribution central to the schools that that they’re leading. And I think there’s that real opportunity to invite young people more fully, more actively to

discover their sense of purpose and then to create enough voice and choice in our schools that kids can really lean into the areas that they’re most interested in and begin to figure out how and where they want to make a difference in their community. What’s the link to the future of work? You know, we just had Jamie Marisotis on the podcast last week, the CEO of the Lumina Foundation.

And Jamie put it really simply learn stuff that computers don’t do. You know, for for 40 years, even during the information age, we’ve we’ve continued to focus school on memorizing stuff and on doing little problems on teaching long division and factoring polynomials. And computers are a lot better at that stuff than we are. Jamie said, instead, what we should really focus on and what makes us truly human, our creativity, our

empathy, our ability to address problems that we’ve never seen before in really thoughtful and creative ways, and then to engage computers in the in the heavy lifting of computation. And I love that sense of the opportunity, the requirement to refocus on what makes us truly human. And so in this new age, this age of living with and working with smart machines, surfacing and cultivating curiosity and creativity, and and and the depthness to walk

into new problems, and to deploy design thinking, which starts with empathy, and then continues with iterative problem solving, it’s really those skills that are most important in this world. And so when we think about difference making, it’s really that set of skills that are critically important for flourishing in, you know, in a dynamic world. Well, let’s dive into the book, difference making at the heart of learning. What skills from what you

shared are the most important, the new learning priorities? You know, we we summarize those as leadership and problem solving. And by leadership, we start with a sense of agency, the confidence that I can act on the world, that I understand who I am, that I’m grounded in a sense of purpose, and that I’ve had experience doing good of serving a community and that I have that sense of agency about who I am and what I can do. That’s that also incorporates a

sense of personal effectiveness, self awareness and ability to create manage great relationships. But it also acknowledges that I’m a global citizen, right, that I have a responsibility to my local community and my my my broader community. So there’s that global competence as well. And then we combine it with problem solving. And I already mentioned design thinking, we think that’s a super important skill set. But I also combine that with entrepreneurial mindset, that that idea of

being able to spot opportunities and say, I could make a difference there, and I could deliver value for a group of people over here, that entrepreneurial thinking, not in the small business school sense of the word of, I could start a business to make a lot of money, but in the broader sense of, I can see I’m using pattern recognition to identify the opportunity to add value. And then I can persevere through difficulty to add value to a to a community. So those are those are some of the the key skills

that that we see in schools and programs and colleges that that really teach difference making. I imagine those skills sound familiar to you. I think we see those in a lot of the schools that we that we really love around the country, don’t they? They do, I can see how this book was in the works for some time with you. The book is organized in three sections. A focus is on difference making. And it starts with a shared mutuality. We’re all in

this together. It sounds pretty timely. Yeah, right. It’s you never know, like, where your book is going to land in the world. But the first section of the book is called a new mutuality. We’re all in this together. And for the first time in human history, we’re living through a shared pandemic, a shared crisis that really does impact all 7.7 billion of us. But we’re also living through a pandemic of climate crisis, another worldwide

shared crisis. To some extent, at least in America, we’re also living through a race crisis of really coming to terms with our roots in inequity. We’re living through, in part because of the pandemic, but the economic conditions that existed before it, the most rapidly spreading economic inequity in American history. And so in some respects, we have the stacked crises of the economy of racial tension, of climate, of the health crisis. All of that to me signals in a new, much more tangible,

much more visceral sense that we’re all in this together. And that we have a uniquely American history of valuing the individual. And even in our education system, it’s all been about the individual grades and the individual advancement. I think the first implication here is to really, really embrace the sense of mutuality. Rebecca, you and I both love EL education, the expeditionary learning schools, and they start every morning with a period they call crew. And crew is your team,

right? It’s your advisory group. And it’s the advisor and your advisory group that’s going to help you get through school. And the cool thing about crew is that it represents a sense of daily mutuality that I’m not in this by myself, but I have my crew. And we need more of that, particularly in America, the sense of mutuality in small groups, in our community, in our regions. So that’s really where the book starts is sort of calling for, for a new sense of mutuality and community.

We’re also hearing how students are responding to not crisis of our social justice issues that you’ve brought up, but also our pandemic, certainly, and how that impacts what is school and the purpose of school. It’s interesting, this book was written certainly before that, but certainly almost calling it out and seeing that come into fruition. The purpose of this book in this setting is just really ironic, isn’t it? I mean, the fact that that is such an even more called out now is really important.

And I think what you’re sharing is everyone has sort of a big next step. And knowing that you have that big next step is part of the journey. Knowing that you have that in you, where did that phrase come from? Yeah, I founded a church bulletin a year and a half ago. There’s a local church here that has this really cool mission that everybody has a big next step and everybody can make a difference. And I

remember one Sunday being in church and turning the bulletin over and seeing that and just saying, out loud, yes, that is exactly it. That’s the growth mindset, right? That acknowledging not just for me, but for everybody here, that we all have a chance to step up and to make a big difference. And what a cool idea that notion, not just a growth mindset, but it’s that you and I in our community that we all could step up and grow in ways that extend our contribution. So I love

that idea. That’s the second part of the book where we really talk about how human beings thrive by making a contribution, right? They’re not just making a difference for other people. It’s really the most rewarding work that we can do as human beings. In that part of the book, it was really fun just to catalog about 30 different programs around the world that are really making a big difference for young people in their communities. Could you highlight some of those? I mean, I think

that’s a great time to, the ones that had that contribution at the core. Do you have any favorites that fall into that category? Well, I was thinking of design, design for change and the high resolves, videos for change piece came to mind. Yeah. No, videosforchange.org is part of high resolves, came out of Australia, but is now a catching hold in America. What a cool example of just inviting young people to make a difference and to share that with the world through a simple

video. We love that. Big Thought. Big Thought is BigThought.org, one of the best after school programs in America. It’s in Dallas run by our friend Byron Sanders. Byron just thinks so deeply about the kind of learning experiences that he can create for young people. I’m thinking of Diverse. It’s a program that gives voice to middle and high school students and invites creative expression. They actually take over the nightclub scene in North Dallas. It’s called Deep Ellum.

And kids will come out and express themselves in new and creative ways. And just that opportunity creates the sense of creativity and efficacy that is just super powerful. Byron is such a great leader for that community. We love what he’s doing there. Global Dignity. We just passed Global Dignity Day where our friend Cynthia Geyer leads a global effort just to acknowledge the simple fact that every life has value, that every person deserves a sense of dignity. And it’s just

been so cool to watch the way that that day has been embraced by young people all over the planet. I’ll also think of Tara Tchaikovsky. She runs Technovation. Tara is an extraordinary leader that’s really empowering girls, especially in STEM and technology. She’s got this cool program called the AI Family Challenge where she invites families to understand what’s happening with artificial intelligence and machine language. And then to use simple open machine learning programs

to participate in community-connected projects. So, you know, another great example of connecting families and community with new tools to make a difference. School’s alive with possibility, right? I mean, that’s the idea that we’re we transition into from this section is this idea of how does that actually show up within schools too? I’m thinking of the dignity, the respect, the community, those pieces that you brought up. You also highlight a couple of

dozen schools that are engaged in this work. Yeah, a lot of our friends at the XQ network that you work with on a daily basis. Which XQ school do you want to start with? You can start with Crosstown. Thank you. Just talk to them. What do you see at Crosstown that embraces difference making? Well, a very shared commitment to a strong connection to the community and empowering

learners to be connected to their community, to have a very strong voice in their school, and to feel that they have a personalized team of support to have a pathway and journey about what that looks like when they leave their system. I’m very committed. Yeah, I love Crosstown High. It’s a very cool school in a renovated Sears distribution center right in downtown Memphis. I talk frequently about Project 901, a great project that our friend Ryan,

an English teacher, launched with a social studies teacher, and it started with a visit to different parts of the community. Then they invited young people to pick an issue that spoke to them and build a project around it. It turned into a research project and it turned into a design thinking project. Then it turned into a writing project and a presentation. All of these skills that they’re building, they’re building design skills and writing skills and

presentation skills. They’re doing history. They’re doing deep dive research project, but it’s around something that they care about that’s connected to their community. Just a great example of place-based learning, difference-making, student-centered learning, but projects that are really packed with valuable standards. There’s just a lot that we love about Crosstown. There’s many. There’s latitude, Purdue Polytech, Grand Rapids, Iowa, Big, Crosstown, Brooklyn

Labs, so many of those schools that you’ve highlighted. Another one that you might want to pull out? Well, we love Purdue Polytech in Indianapolis. It’s a great school that Mitch Daniels, the former governor and now president of Purdue, helped to start. It’s now not just one school. They have three campuses and they’re beginning to help districts live into this framework that they’ve created. It’s personalized skill building plus community-connected project. It’s a competency-based

school. We love the way that they brought the business community into that school to help sponsor and mentor projects that are really work that’s important to the students and to their community. So another really terrific example that’s becoming a national example. Iowa, Vegas really was started by four school districts. It’s a half-day program in Cedar Rapids. Young people can come and co-construct projects, big integrated projects that are connected to

communities. They usually result in a public product that’s of value to them and their community. Just a great example of this sort of collaboration that school districts can have to create an opportunity like a difference-making opportunity like this for young people. You mentioned one stone earlier. I’m also thinking of Two Town Science, NUVU Studio, High Tech High, DTECH, ILEED, many schools that are highlighted, right?

We also called out some school districts. I love the Loudoun County mission of empowering all students to make meaningful contributions to the world. Superintendent Eric Williams has made that work really central to that big Washington, D.C. area district. We love that. We mentioned DL Education earlier. That’s a national network of schools, many of them in school districts. And they have a beautiful character framework and right at the heart of it is

contribute to a better world. So we love how they’re making that idea of contribution central to an EL education. A dozen colleges that focus on difference-making are also highlighted and make the book. Olin College? Yeah, there was not as many colleges. I would have to say I was disappointed that I didn’t find this idea more prevalent in colleges. But where it is prevalent, what I am super excited about is a network of America’s best engineering schools

called Keen. It was started by the Kern Family Foundation and it’s the Kern Entrepreneurship and Engineering Network. You can find it at engineeringunleash.org. And those 50 engineering schools are doing such a great job of teaching this entrepreneurial mindset. And again, it’s the not necessarily the idea of starting a business, but it’s the making a difference in the world mindset of I want to be about spotting opportunity and then delivering value for a constituency.

Some of my favorite colleges are in there. My alma mater, Colorado School of Mines, is in the network. Arizona State University, America’s most innovative university is there. But also my favorite engineering school, Olin College. This is a small engineering school outside of Boston, purpose built 20 years ago. Rick Miller, the president just retired. Olin is the best example of active learning in America. Students begin day one making stuff

in every class that they take. And then they graduate to upper division courses where they have a year to make a difference for a constituency in the world. And so I love the active learning and the way that it matures into contribution at Olin. Well, I certainly hope that this is something we see that becomes more prevalent in higher ed because you can see the alignment as you’re getting ready to leave and lead your life and

career. You certainly would hope that this becomes more obvious to folks to be brought in. Rebecca, let me add that many of the caring professions do this moderately well. I think there are medical schools and nursing schools that do this relatively well. I think there’s a few schools of education that really put contribution and service at the core. And so I do think you can find aspects of difference making in some of the caring professions. But I do think there’s a

broader opportunity in higher education to make difference making central. I do appreciate that that Rick Miller from Olin is now leading a national network on reviving higher education. And it does have a beautiful focus on difference making. So I’m encouraged to see that. But more broadly speaking, I guess I’m excited to see so many people from all over the world that are really picking up this idea for all the benefits that it creates. The fact that we have

to solicit difference making because we’ve made a mess of the planet. We have to be responsive to young people that want to make a difference. And then just the psychological benefits of leaning into this purpose focused learner centered education that it has such such terrific benefits. Rebecca, we had Joanne McKeckin on a couple of weeks ago. And I was struck by the fact that Joanne’s email signature says meaning and fulfillment is the new wealth. And contribution is the only

way to earn it. She frequently says you are what you add. So I you know, I love finding people like that that are committed to difference making. It’s exciting to see more schools and community programs taking this up. We think it’s an important campaign and one that really has a big chance to change the world. It strikes me that we haven’t mentioned global goals, the biggest difference making framework in the world. Do you want to say more about that?

Yeah, it’s check out global goals.org. The the UN sustainable development goals are increasingly used by teachers in schools all over the world to frame difference making projects. We’re seeing hundreds of schools every year adopt the global goals as part of their course of study, at least introducing young people to the global goals, and then using some of the curriculum that’s associated with each of the 17 goals to frame up projects.

There’s a non-prophical take action global that does a great job of framing up projects around the global goals. We think that’s a terrific place to start. I would love to see every young person in America get some exposure to the global goals and to have the opportunity to do one or two deep dive projects into the goal of their choice sometime during high school. We’ve actually taken the global goals and expanded them just a bit. We talk about the 24 plus one goals which start with the

17 global goals from the United Nations and to it we’ve added a few important things like artistic expression, the making of beautiful spaces, biotech for good, preventing nuclear war, cyber security, understanding the brain. We think these are important emerging topics that are not covered by the global goals but are as important in terms of potential impact for the future of the planet. The plus one is exploring space. Our sense is that if we don’t get this right

on planet earth that we should at least be responsible about the ways that we explore the solar system. Global goals are a terrific way for schools to introduce young people to the world. We even call those 24 plus one the earth owners manual because we think it’s a great systematic way to introduce young people to the opportunities that exist. The last thing that I would say about difference making Rebecca is that we’ve talked a lot about problems and a lot of these global goals

are problem focused. What’s also clear the flip side of that is that we’re living through the best time for difference making in human history. There’s never been a better time for young people to make a difference on the planet. They have never had supercomputers in their pocket. You can run an open version of machine learning on a handheld computer now. You can build a campaign that changes the way the world thinks about an issue. Just in new and different ways young people can create

campaigns, build apps, start businesses, create impact organizations that change the world. That’s the exciting flip side is that we’re living through a scary period with this stack of crises but we’re also living through a period where young people can change the world. We argue in difference making that that’s what school ought to be about helping young people figure out who they are, what they’re good at, and how and where they’re going to lean in and make their unique contribution.

For anybody that’s got great examples of that we would love to be in dialogue with you. We’d love to highlight the ways that the young people that you’re working with are changing the world. Reach out. Let’s be part of a difference making campaign together. Thank you, Tom. Thanks so much for joining us today. Be sure to check out Tom’s newest book co-authored by Dr. Emily Liebtag called Difference Making at the Heart of Learning. It’s an inspirational yet practical guide

to help educators, counselors, and youth development leaders build on students’ talents and interests in order to develop their desire for a better world, an entrepreneurial mindset, and personal leadership skills so that they can make a difference for their families, their communities, and society. We know students learn more when they feel a sense of purpose. With adults to help guide them, they’ll be ready to make a difference and shape the world to come. We’ve got a link to the book

in the show notes and if you’re hungry for more on contribution, check out episode 196. Five reasons high schools should help young people find and make their unique contribution. That’s it for today listeners, but before you go, don’t forget to rate and review the podcast. As always, thanks for tuning in. For the Getting Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.