IMPACT OF AGENTS
How Education Can Empower Students to Change Themselves, Their Communities, and Their World
G. WILLIAMSON M c DIARMID RONALD A. BEGHETTO YONG ZHAO
IMPACT OF AGENTS
How Education Can Empower Students to Change Themselves, Their Communities, and Their World
G.WILLIAMSON M c DIARMID RONALD A. BEGHE TTO
YONG ZHAO
Copyright © 2026 by Solution Tree Press
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction of this book in whole or in part in any form. This book, in whole or in part, may not be included in a large language model, used to train AI, or uploaded into any AI system.
The quote inspired by H. L. Mencken featured in the introduction was generated with the assistance of ChatGPT.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.
Solution Tree Press would like to thank the following reviewers:
Doug Crowley
Assistant Principal DeForest Area High School DeForest, Wisconsin
Paige Dannelley
Chair and Graduate Program Director, Department of Education Spring Hill College Mobile, Alabama
John D. Ewald
Associate Solution Tree Frederick, Maryland
Janet Nuzzie
Intervention Specialist, K–12 Mathematics
Pasadena Independent School District Pasadena, Texas
Jennifer Renegar Data and Assessment Specialist Republic Schools Republic, Missouri
Tanya Rogers Former District Principal of Early Learning and Childcare School District No. 73 (Kamloops-Thompson) Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada
Luke Spielman
Principal Park View Middle School Mukwonago, Wisconsin
About the Authors
G. Williamson McDiarmid, PhD, is a former dean and current alumni distinguished professor emeritus of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before earning his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Bill taught elementary and high school for eight years. From 1979 to 1986, he was a research associate and faculty member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, taking a year off to work as a Title I resource teacher in a remote Cup’ik Alaskan Native village. From 1987 to 1997, he served as codirector of the National Center for Research on Teacher Learning at Michigan State University. In 1997, he returned to Alaska to become director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage. In 2001, he was appointed Boeing Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington. In 2009, he became dean and alumni distinguished professor at the School of Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, retiring in 2018. He served as a distinguished professor of education at East China Normal University from 2018 to 2022. Wherever he has taught, Bill has worked to create stronger connections among universities, schools, communities, and businesses. He helped secure funding for and lead the Alaska Partnership for Teacher Education and the Teachers for a New Era project at the University of Washington. He is the author or coauthor of six books and more than eighty articles and monographs.
Ronald A. Beghetto, PhD, is Pinnacle West Presidential Chair and Professor of Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Arizona State University. Ron’s work explores the psychology of human creativity, generative artificial intelligence, and what’s possible in educational settings. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, and the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation. He has served as a creativity adviser for the LEGO Foundation and Cartoon Network, editorin-chief for the Journal of Creative Behavior, editor for the Review of Research in Education, and book series editor for Creativity Theory and Action in Education.
Ron is the 2018 recipient of the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, and the 2008 recipient of the Daniel E. Berlyne Early Career Award for Outstanding Research from Division 10 of the American Psychological Association. He has received recognitions for excellence in teaching, including the 2006 Ersted Crystal Apple Award, the University of Oregon’s highest teaching award for early career faculty; the 2015 ALD Faculty of the Year Award at the University of Connecticut; and the University of Connecticut’s Provost’s Recognition for Excellence in Teaching. Ron is one of the top two hundred university-based scholars in education (#63) as recognized by Education Week in the 2025 EduScholar Public Influence Rankings.
To learn more about Ronald A. Beghetto’s research, publications, and work, visit www.ronaldbeghetto.com.
Yong Zhao, PhD, is Foundation Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Kansas and a professor of educational leadership at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education in Australia. Yong was presidential chair and director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education at the University of Oregon and a professor in the University of Oregon’s Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. He was previously university distinguished professor in the College of Education at Michigan State University, where he was founding
director of the Office of Teaching and Technology and the U.S.–China Center for Research on Educational Excellence, and executive director of the Confucius Institute. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and elected fellow of the International Academy of Education.
Yong is an internationally known scholar, author, and speaker whose works focus on the implications of globalization and technology for education. He has designed schools that cultivate global competence, developed computer games for language learning, and founded research and development institutions to explore innovative educational models. The author of more than one hundred articles and thirty books, he was named one of the ten most influential people in educational technology in 2012 by the magazine Tech & Learning
Yong received a bachelor of arts in English language education from the Sichuan Foreign Language Institute in Chongqing, China, and a master of arts and doctorate in education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
To learn more about Yong Zhao’s work, visit http://zhaolearning.com or follow Yong Zhao on LinkedIn.
To book G. Williamson McDiarmid or Yong Zhao for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.
Introduction
We find ourselves in an unprecedented moment in education. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to reshape many facets of society, including education. These advances are happening in the context of a growing youth mental health crisis and multiple existential threats, including climate change, nuclear threats, and pandemics. Too many students are depressed, anxious, and unsure about whether they really matter and what their future holds. The question of how to educate and support young people has never been more critical.
Calls for a more meaningful, engaging, student-centered, and progressive approach to learning are not new, and, as they always have, such ideas face criticism and active and passive resistance. One sure sign that ideas have the potential to make an impact is they draw criticism, resistance, and even ridicule. The critiques, like the reform ideas themselves, have been consistent across decades. Few have been more acerbic than those of H. L. Mencken, the wellknown and colorful journalist and conservative social critic from the 1920s. Mencken was popular during the first wave of progressive educational reforms and frequently railed against what he viewed as “soft-headed” ideas.
Welcoming and engaging with such criticism whenever one has ideas for education can help one refine and strengthen the ideas. Because he passed away in the 1950s, and we therefore couldn’t invite the actual Mencken to review our ideas, we embarked on a creative thought experiment. We engaged a powerful AI model, Anthropic’s Claude (https://claude.ai), to assume Mencken’s persona and critique an early draft of our introduction. The results were both
humorous and thought-provoking, prompting us to address the very real challenges that call for educational transformation.
Here’s the jeremiad we received from AI-Mencken:
Well, well, well. Another grandiose scheme to save the youth and reshape education. How novel! These academic types never tire of their utopian visions, do they? What a rot! As if vague notions of “impacting the world” are more valuable than mastering mathematics or literature. This reeks of the same soft-headed progressivism that has been eroding American education for decades.
Their hand-wringing over “rapidly changing technology” and “existential threats” is particularly amusing. Every generation thinks it faces unprecedented challenges. Yet here we are, still muddling through despite the hysterical proclamations of academics.
The authors seem enamored with the latest educational fad. Apparently, teaching children to read and write is now secondary to ensuring they feel good about themselves. Heaven forbid we hurt a child’s self-esteem by expecting them to learn something!
In short, this book appears to be yet another misguided attempt to fix education by moving further away from actual education. If implemented, it would likely produce a generation of self-important do-gooders, armed with inflated self-esteem but little actual knowledge or skill.
After having a good laugh at this venomous response, we decided we needed to address the legitimate issues that AI-Mencken raised. Like some current critics, Mencken believed public schools were a waste of money and taught twaddle. He thought parents, rather than “unintelligent quacks” (his view of public school educators; Mencken, 1933, p. 135), should be responsible for raising and caring for their children. He was not anti-education but rather anti-schooling, which he believed stifled independent thought. We disagree with AI-Mencken. We believe that schools should do more than teach basic academic skills. Never has it been more urgent that schools help students realize that they matter and they have the potential to make an impact on the world around them.
In the following pages, we discuss why many potentially transformative ideas have failed to gain traction in most schools. Then, we cover the mental health crisis among young people; the potential that making an impact and mattering
have to mitigate this crisis; the disruptions of emerging technologies, as well as the fundamental change that these technologies will drive in education; and how schools might transform the current educational paradigm to serve society well. In that, we agree with AI-Mencken: Schools need to be transformed. From there, we provide an overview of the book’s chapters and interludes and close with important caveats to keep in mind.
The Grip of the Grammar of Schooling
We acknowledge that not all the ideas and suggestions we present are new. Ideas of encouraging greater student agency and autonomy and creating hands-on opportunities to solve real-world problems have historical roots predating John Dewey, usually regarded as the father of progressive education. Educators like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, and Francis Parker advocated for less didactic and more experiential learning approaches. As far back as the American Civil War, author Ralph Waldo Emerson (1862) wrote, “Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.”
Historically, the influence of these educational ideas waxed and waned globally. As Stanford University education professors David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) observe, educational reforms are often cyclical, with ideas recurring under different names. Despite these cycles, the fundamental structure of schools—what Tyack and Cuban (1995) term the grammar of schooling, including age-graded classrooms, teacher-centered instruction, and subject-based curricula— remains largely unchanged. Progressive reforms have typically failed to unseat these core elements.
Psychologist Seymour B. Sarason (1990) suggests that educational reforms often fall short because they fail to adequately disrupt entrenched norms, hierarchical relationships, and habitual practices. The enduring culture of schools and the power dynamics among students, teachers, administrators, families, and educational authorities create significant resistance. Reformers frequently underestimate the political, historical, social, and economic complexities that contribute to this institutional inertia, resulting in changes that are typically superficial and short-lived. In addition, the heavy-handed imposition of onerous policies grounded in standardized assessments and accountability has undermined educators who would like to be more adventurous and experimental.
Given these critiques, why do we believe the ideas we offer here are more salient and are likely to gain more traction than those in the past? We argue that our approach takes into much more account the current context, which is unprecedented because of two major factors.
1. Youth mental health is in crisis worldwide, even as recognition grows that many students need more meaningful engagement in their learning and in their lives to feel that they matter.
2. Emerging technologies are causing unprecedented educational, social, and economic disruptions and, at the same time, driving fundamental change in education by creating tools for self-directed, personalized learning.
A Multifaceted Crisis Among Young People
Data from the Office of the Surgeon General (2021) reveal that in 2019, one in three high school students and half of female students in the United States reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, an overall increase of 40 percent from 2009. Of course, that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, a coalition of prominent organizations focused on child and youth health declared the increase in youth mental health problems a national emergency in the United States (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2021). According to a White House (2023) report, the number of public school students who are chronically absent (missing at least 10 percent of school days) roughly doubled from about 15 percent in the 2018–2019 school year to around 30 percent in 2021–2022. Disturbingly, students from low-income communities are significantly more likely to be chronically absent than their more affluent peers, according to researchers Emma García and Elaine Weiss (2018).
Globally, students are experiencing previously unparalleled levels of pressure, depression, and anxiety. Data from the World Health Organization (2024) show one in seven students worldwide are experiencing mental health challenges. Reporting on a major survey conducted by Gallup, Jon Clifton and Zach Hrynowski (2024) note that 38 percent of U.S. youths between the ages of twelve and twenty-six have been medically diagnosed with anxiety or depression. Among girls and young women, 45 percent have received such a diagnosis.
The British scientific journal Lancet Psychiatry’s (2024) Commission on Youth Mental Health describes the megatrends believed to be major factors in these challenges:
Megatrends, an interconnected set of socioeconomic and commercial forces, have over the past two decades seriously undermined young people’s personal and economic security and hope for the future. The growing existential threats of climate change, unregulated and harmful social media, declining social cohesion, and socioeconomic precarity—as reflected in insecure employment, reduced access to affordable housing, rapidly growing intergenerational inequality, and polarisation of political views—have combined to create a bleak present and future for young people. (p. 2)
Perhaps the most alarming trend is the rise in suicide rates. Between 2011 and 2021, suicide and overdose deaths for ten-to-fifteen-year-olds in the United States doubled. Globally, suicide is now the third leading cause of death among fifteento twenty-nine-year-olds, according to the World Health Organization (2024).
Researchers Anna Wong, Carmen C. S. Lai, Angie K. Y. Shum, and Paul S. F. Yip (2022) explain that academic stress is reported as a major factor in 38 percent of suicides among children under eighteen in the United Kingdom, 18.7–22.7 percent of suicides among children under fifteen in Turkey, and 59.1 percent of suicides among children ten to fourteen in Singapore. Unsurprisingly, suicide rates in East Asian countries are higher than those in the West, writes psychiatrist John Snowdon (2018), given the high value that East Asian families and society in general place on educational success. However, the research of Paola Bertuccio and colleagues (2024) reveals that suicide rates are rising in the United States and Central and Eastern Europe.
Moreover, a concerning number of students are simply not engaged in what schools offer. As one U.S. tenth-grade student reports, “People don’t go to school to learn. They go to get good grades, which brings them to college, which brings them a high paying job, which brings them to happiness, or so they think” (Challenge Success, 2024, p. 9). To his point, 45 percent of students in a large-scale survey report that they are just “doing school,” and a mere 13 percent report being fully engaged (Challenge Success, 2024). School, for too many students, is not about learning but about jumping through a series of hoops. In addition, too many students—especially Black students—don’t feel a sense of belonging at school (Challenge Success, 2024).
In sum, young people today are experiencing a multifaceted crisis of mental health, meaningfulness, and well-being. The convergence of societal pressures, economic uncertainties, environmental concerns, and intense academic
expectations is creating an unprecedented burden on youths worldwide. This global pattern of declining mental health among young people is manifesting in increased rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. This represents a critical public health emergency that demands immediate and comprehensive intervention.
Reversing these trends will require systemic changes in education as well as improved mental health support services, regulation of social media, and efforts to create more secure and hopeful futures for young people. Without significant action, the long-term consequences for individuals and societies could be severe, potentially affecting the health, productivity, and well-being of entire generations.
The Power of Mattering
In her book Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It, journalist and author Jennifer Breheny Wallace (2023) draws on her research to argue that many students feel like they matter based primarily—even entirely, in some cases—on their academic performance. Maintaining high grades, achieving high exam scores, and being accepted into a prestigious university are paramount to them and the adults in their orbit. Failure to meet the expectations of their families, teachers, and peers can be devastating to students. Failure can lead to self-doubt, low self-worth, self-harm, and the feeling that their lives are of no significance—in short, that they don’t matter.
Researchers such as Login S. George and Crystal L. Park (2014) use the term existential mattering to describe “the degree to which individuals feel that their existence is of significance and value” (p. 39). Like all of us, students want to feel they are leading lives of meaning and significance. Although it is related to having a purpose—which is about the future—significance is about the present, according to researchers Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger (2016): Do I matter right now? Does my life have meaning? Unsurprisingly, people who feel that their lives have meaning manifest much less suicidal ideation than those who lack such a sense (Martela & Steger, 2016).
Only about half of U.S. students surveyed in a 2024 Gallup survey report that they always feel their lives matter (Clifton & Hrynowski, 2024). That leaves a lot of young people who aren’t always sure their lives matter. When asked whether their life has direction, only 60 percent said they always or often feel it does, while 40 percent responded they sometimes, rarely, or never feel this way. Additionally, 42 percent of those surveyed report that they don’t feel purpose in their daily activities, and nearly half give their schools a grade of C or
worse in “teaching them skills relevant to their futures” (Gallup, 2024b). Only two in ten students “strongly agree” that what they are learning in class feels important or relevant. In short, many students are disaffected, not particularly happy, and not sure they are learning the skills they will need.
Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop (2025) conducted a survey of more than sixty-five thousand students. They found that only 26 percent of tenth graders report “loving school,” significantly less than the 74 percent of third graders who say they love school. Many teens told Anderson and Winthrop (2025) they don’t see the point of school. As the researchers note, students often struggle to understand how topics like geometric proofs are meaningful to their everyday lives and futures. This contributes to students’ sense of disengagement. Paradoxically, many students are disengaged from the very activity that they believe is the source of their significance to others: schooling. That sense of disconnection underlines a related issue: the way students understand their own value and purpose.
Wallace (2023) contends that many students lack a sense of mattering beyond their academic achievement because she sees young people “shifting away from more social values, like caring about community, and moving toward more self-enhancing ones, like pursuing money, fame, and image” (p. 179). She recommends getting students involved in service activities. As they act to help others, they begin to understand themselves as individuals who have the capacity to make a difference outside of their academic performance.
Wallace (2023) offers a list of necessary “ingredients” for students to feel that they matter for reasons other than their academic success. These include the feelings that others really see them, rely on them, care about them, miss them when they’re absent, appreciate their contribution, and regard them as unique. Being taught and supported to make a positive impact on the world can help generate these feelings. In fact, researchers Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Jennifer L. Aaker, and Emily N. Garbinsky (2013) find that meaningfulness is associated with what people give to others—for example, care for children and elders—whereas happiness is more about what people receive from their relationships.
It follows that fostering a sense of mattering and encouraging students to make meaningful impacts can likely play a role in mitigating the youth mental health crisis. By balancing the focus on academic learning with social values and community engagement, students can develop a stronger sense of selfworth and significance. Engaging in projects where they can use their learning
to contribute to others enables young people to see themselves as capable of making a difference, thereby enhancing their sense of existential mattering and their engagement with school. This approach not only reduces feelings of self-doubt and low self-worth but also promotes a deeper sense of significance and belonging. As students feel more valued and recognized for their unique contributions, they are likely to experience improved mental well-being and a more positive outlook on life.
The Unprecedented Disruptions of Emerging Technologies
Every generation since the 1800s has had life disrupted by technological innovations. Some innovations have been more disruptive than others. For instance, the steam engine and electricity led to the factory system. This, in turn, prompted urbanization, often accompanied by urban overcrowding and pollution. Despite these and other impactful innovations, the grammar of school has changed very little. Schools continue to function as if they were still the primary custodians and conveyors of the knowledge that societies consider essential even as knowledge and information have become ubiquitous.
Twenty-first century technologies—specifically, digitized knowledge, the internet, affordable digital devices, and AI—have fundamentally transformed learning. Digitization of knowledge coincided with the creation of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. Early digitizing efforts such as Project Gutenberg quickly expanded beyond books and documents to include digital libraries, music, art, museums and galleries, film, and much more, and made vast amounts of information and artifacts accessible to anyone with a device connected to the internet.
For education, the combination of digitization, affordable digital devices, and the internet has been transformative. Open educational resources and online courses have democratized access to learning sources. AI technologies, such as Carnegie Learning’s MATHia platform, personalize learning by assessing students’ needs and adjusting content accordingly. Online tutors for every imaginable subject are readily available, usually for a fee. AI also assists teachers by assuming fairly routine tasks, such as tracking student progress and evaluating student work, which allows educators to provide more individualized student support and to focus on the quality of students’ ideas and creativity.
Looking ahead, the advent of more advanced AI promises even greater disruption. Unlike previous innovations, advanced AI could affect virtually every human endeavor simultaneously, transforming jobs, manufacturing, health
care, research, and decision-making processes in virtually every field—at an unprecedented speed. Although we know that more disruptions are coming, predicting what these will be and the impact they will have is a shot in the dark. This raises critical questions about how to prepare students for a future we cannot fully predict.
The increasing capabilities of technologies such as AI underscore the necessity that educational systems not only impart knowledge and skills but also foster effective human–AI collaboration and critical thinking. This requires developing students’ ability to understand AI’s potential, limitations, and perils, including placing a strong emphasis on ethical considerations such as biases, transparency, and accountability. Doing so can help ensure students are well equipped to leverage AI tools responsibly, maintain human agency and judgment in decision making, and protect against the harm these powerful technologies could potentially cause.
The Fundamental Change That Advanced Technology Drives in Schools
AI is often used within the existing educational paradigm. However, we believe AI has untapped potential to drive transformation in education. Our vision involves a new educational paradigm based on two assumptions: (1) All students can make significant positive impacts on the world, and (2) rapidly evolving technology, particularly generative AI (genAI), can facilitate these impacts. Learning is no longer confined to schools; it is free range. For educators, this means they must be prepared to assume new roles, transitioning from knowledge transmitters to supporters, guides, providers of critical feedback, and connectors to domain-specific experts beyond the walls of the classroom.
In this new paradigm, schools would become resource centers where students collaborate with peers, educators, and community members to solve problems and innovate. The traditional hierarchical structure of education can be an impediment to collaborative knowledge sharing and problem solving. A flatter organizational structure characterized by distributed leadership would facilitate the work of teams and the sharing of information and ideas, as well as being nimbler to respond to evolving environments.
We recognize that potentially beneficial transformations to education are slow to take place, if they do at all. Old paradigms hang around well past their use-by dates. Evidence suggests that dissatisfaction with the status quo is rising: Gallup (2024a) reports that 55 percent of the people it polled are dissatisfied
with schools in the United States, up 8 percent over the previous four years. In addition, teachers—like students—are voting with their feet: According to journalist Nic Querolo (2024), teacher absenteeism has risen. In short, many people are not satisfied with their schools.
Yet those who are heavily invested—financially, ideologically, psychologically, emotionally, or politically—in the status quo resist anything more than changes at the margins. This group includes textbook and testing companies, politicians and policymakers, school boards, teacher preparation programs, think tanks, lobbyists, and local businesses financially tied to school programs.
At the same time, advances in new technologies like genAI may force the issue, fundamentally disrupting the current educational paradigm and overpowering the vested interests holding back transformative change. As we noted, students no longer depend on schools to access the knowledge and skills that interest them. Personalized learning through existing technologies and rapidly advancing AI systems will increasingly enable students to direct their own learning.
A Vision of Schools Transformed
In rethinking the current educational paradigm, we need to consider why society has become so divided, why so many of our children are anxious and disengaged and do not seem to be able to live lives as good as their parents, and why the relevance gap in education continues to grow. Has our education system already failed to respond to societal and economic changes of the 21st century? The world of work is continuing to transform. Employers are likely to want employees who are comfortable working with advanced technology, mentally flexible, collaborative with diverse colleagues, and equipped to engage with increasingly complex and ill-defined problems. These capabilities are gaining even greater significance as AI assumes more and more of the routine tasks that humans have been performing.
In a survey of nearly seven hundred business practitioners, researcher Peter Cardon and colleagues (2023) find that genAI is already in daily use. Those surveyed who use AI regularly identify the following as the five most important skills and competencies for the “AI age”: (1) integrity, (2) vision, (3) interpersonal skills, (4) innovation and creativity, and (5) the ability to inspire others. Based on their findings, the authors recommend changes in school curricula.
As an indicator of how rapidly large language models are developing, when we began writing this book in 2022, the rough timeline for the emergence
of artificial general intelligence was five to ten years. Now, three years later, according to New York Times technology journalist Kevin Roose (2025), many prominent AI professionals believe artificial general intelligence may be just around the corner. Roose (2025) defines artificial general intelligence as “a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do.” He notes that few people outside the AI bubble have even heard of artificial general intelligence, much less begun planning for it. We have seen no evidence that the education world is any different.
In sum, advanced technology, particularly AI and artificial general intelligence, and its growing capabilities have the potential to drive fundamental change in schools and reshape the entire educational paradigm. However, this transformation is not merely about integrating new tools into existing structures and practices; it requires a complete rethinking of the purpose and processes of education and how educators prepare today’s students for a world they cannot currently envision.
Ultimately, the question is how we harness the potential of advanced technology to create an educational system that prepares students for the complex, rapidly evolving world they will inherit. This will require ongoing dialogue, experimentation, and a willingness to reimagine education from the ground up.
The vision we offer—of schools as collaborative centers for innovation and problem solving where students are empowered to make real-world impacts and educators serve as cocreators, guides, and resources—is both energizing and extremely challenging. It demands a shift in roles and identities for educators, a flattening of traditional hierarchies, a reevaluation of what skills and competencies are most valuable in an artificial general intelligence–driven world, and policies that allow educators to use their professional judgment and expertise to serve their students as they see fit.
As we move forward, the key will be to navigate this transition thoughtfully, balancing the potential of new technologies to improve learning with the enduring human elements of education. The need to exercise sound human judgment and creativity underlines the fact that, even in an age of powerful AI, uniquely human qualities remain essential—maybe more so than ever.
This transformative vision is not about abandoning academic knowledge, as Mencken and other critics have alleged. Rather, it’s about expanding understanding of what constitutes a “good education.” This vision prioritizes traditional academic skills as well as students’ holistic development as engaged, empathetic,
creative, and action-oriented individuals prepared to make positive impacts on the world. By fostering environments where students know that they matter, they can make real-world impacts, and they can collaboratively solve real-world problems, we prepare them to thrive in and help shape an unpredictable future.
Awakening students to their potential to make meaningful impacts—both individually and collectively—and equipping them with the skills and opportunities to do so are among the most critical challenges that educators, families, and policymakers face. As educators, parents, and policymakers, we have a shared responsibility to cultivate learning environments that unlock and nurture students’ potential for creativity, critical thinking, and impactful contributions. Embracing student agency, autonomy, and the ability to challenge assumptions while engaging with complex and ill-defined problems calls for a transformative approach to education.
An Overview of the Book
In this book, we explore what is required to make an impact and offer examples of young people who have made meaningful impacts. We also describe some schools’ efforts to remake themselves to more fully and productively engage students.
In addition, we have included some of our weekly conversations that took place from February 2022 to October 2024 as we worked on this book. These conversations were critical to the book and our ideas. As historian and philosopher Theodore Zeldin (2000) writes:
Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards. (p. 14)
This book was our excuse for getting together on Zoom to talk, play with concepts and AI, mine our diverse experiences for insights and ideas, and introduce one another to unfamiliar scholarship. We also talked about our children, their experiences of school, and what they have taught us.
We hope that readers will engage with these conversations. They represent a journey to answer a question that we felt has not been satisfactorily addressed: Why do some students understand themselves as capable of making an impact and others don’t?
On the surface, it appears to be a simple question. However, as we tested assumptions and analyzed examples of those who have made significant impacts, we soon understood that the answer is far from simple. We also wanted to better understand why explicitly teaching students to make an impact hasn’t been central to the purpose of schools, although, across the decades, many educators have seen this as their moral responsibility.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at what you can expect from the seven main chapters that follow, the seven interspersed conversation sections we refer to as interludes, and the book’s epilogue.
f Chapter 1: The Scale of Impact—This chapter introduces a framework for understanding the levels of impact students can make, ranging from individual and local to societal and global. We emphasize the power of even small-scale actions and present youthled initiatives as examples.
f Interlude I: Time, Energy, and the Promissory Note of School—In this conversation, we foreshadow several ideas that recur throughout the book, including how traditional schools stifle creativity and self-directed learning and leave students without time and energy to pursue their passions. We introduce the idea that schools offer students a promissory note—that is, the assurance that what they are learning will somehow pay off in the future, a future that is increasingly difficult to predict.
f Chapter 2: What Students Need to Make an Impact—Students face a growing youth mental health crisis. Here, we suggest ways schools can promote emotional resilience and mental well-being, and we argue that engaging students in ways to make a difference enhances their sense of mattering to others.
f Interlude II: Impact, Motivation, and the Illusion of Deferred Impact—Schools often promote a mindset of deferred impact, telling students they will make a difference later in life, once they complete their education. We discuss the importance of enabling students to make meaningful impacts now, not just in the future.
f Chapter 3: The Exercise of Agency—Student agency means giving students more autonomy and empowering them to take control of their learning and contributions to society. We present case studies
of students who have exercised their agency and discuss strategies for fostering agency in educational settings.
f Interlude III: Impact, Agency, and Purpose—The traditional school system too often stifles students’ ability to make an impact by not nurturing their sense of agency and purpose. This discussion emphasizes the importance of helping students find meaning in their actions and contributions.
f Chapter 4: Schools, Families, and Policy as Contexts for Student Agency—What shapes students’ sense of agency and their understanding of themselves as capable of making an impact? We describe how schools, families, communities, and policies influence students’ autonomy and decision-making capabilities.
f Interlude IV: Freedom From Systemic Limits—Drawing on insights from education, psychology, and innovation theory— as well as our personal experiences—we continue making the case for transformative change in this interlude. We call for a bold reimagining of learning systems to create personalized, adaptive, equitable, and student-centered environments that align with the challenges and complexities of modern life.
f Chapter 5: Opportunity Finding—This chapter focuses on teaching students how to recognize and seize opportunities. It provides stories of change makers who have successfully identified opportunities to make a difference and offers suggestions for how educators can cultivate an opportunity-seeking mindset in students.
f Interlude V: Risk Taking, Opportunity Finding, Agency, and Creativity—This interlude discusses the importance of risk taking in developing agency and creativity. We reflect on how personal curiosity and external circumstances shape students’ ability to find and act on opportunities for impact.
f Chapter 6: Promising Approaches to Prepare Students to Make an Impact—Innovative educational approaches that empower students to make positive impacts are already in use throughout the world. As we highlight these diverse models, we show that traditional schools can incorporate their intrinsic elements, such as personalized learning, engagement with real-world problems, and an emphasis on critical thinking and other skills.
f Interlude VI: Uncertainty and Struggle as Catalysts for Curiosity and Creativity—Here, we discuss how embracing the elements of uncertainty and struggle can lead to personal growth and impactful actions and how schools should encourage students to take risks and explore the unknown.
f Chapter 7: Impact in the Age of AI—AI is transforming the way students learn and make an impact. We discuss the ethical considerations surrounding AI in education and the importance of preparing students for a future where collaboration with AI will be crucial for success.
f Interlude VII: Conformity, Technology, and Ethical Considerations—In this interlude, we explore AI as an example of a promising and impactful technological innovation that comes with unintended consequences. We highlight the need for teaching young people how to approach making an impact with an ethical mindset.
f Epilogue: We sum up by tying together the key themes of the book, emphasizing the need to remake education to prioritize student agency, autonomy, and capacity for impact. We call on educators, parents, and policymakers to adopt a new vision of education that prepares students not just to survive but to thrive and make meaningful contributions in a rapidly changing world.
We would be remiss if we did not mention how we worked with genAI tools in the writing process. Ever since the public release of ChatGPT, we have experimented with and used various genAI tools to provide us feedback on our thinking and ideas, analyze our writing, poke holes in our arguments, help us find resources, and provide other assistance. We also used these tools to help us develop and refine our examples, summaries, implications, and actionoriented reflective questions throughout this book. In each case, however, we verified and edited the results, and ultimately are responsible for all the text in this book.
For instance, we used Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language models to assist with the annotations and sources for the interludes and to identify terms and concepts that needed explanation. Finally, we often prompted these AI tools to critique our ideas, offer different perspectives, and help ensure that our arguments would be clear and coherent for readers. All the main ideas and arguments are ours and ours alone. In
other words, we used these genAI tools as we would research assistants, thought partners, and editors.
The three of us have been K–12 teachers and college professors. We also have raised children, some of whom succeeded in the traditional academic environment and some of whom rejected what schools offered yet went on to create fulfilling, contributive lives for themselves. In writing this book, we hope to help teachers, school leaders, and policymakers rethink education and intentionally refocus on helping all students realize their potential to make an impact on others and the world. Not only does the world need more young people making positive impacts, but making positive impacts on those around them helps young people understand that they matter—an antidote to negative beliefs about their capabilities and their value.
We hope you get as much out of reading this book as we did in writing it.
Caveats
While this book is a call for fundamental change in education, we acknowledge how extremely difficult bringing about such change would be. Calls to remake educational systems began almost as soon as public schools were created. These calls were made in the context of a future that was somewhat predictable. Most forecasts of the future were largely extrapolations of the present. The assumption was that the world would change but the changes were unlikely to radically alter humans’ understanding of who they are or challenge beliefs about consciousness, identity, creativity, and humanity’s role in the universe. AI and the emergence of artificial general intelligence have the potential to do just that.
Educational systems around the world are unprepared for this. The systems keep grinding along as they have done for decades, like perpetual motion machines. Changes have been at the margins—improved curricula, more progressive pedagogy, increasing use of digital technology, incorporation of project-based learning, and so on. What we are calling for—however difficult to do—is a radical examination of the assumptions that underlie the systems.
We recognize that, day in and day out, educators around the world do the very best they can under often daunting and sometimes oppressive—even dangerous— conditions. We believe many of them also want to see a fundamental reimagining of their roles and responsibilities. Data show increasing numbers are planning to leave the profession (National Education Association, 2022) and schools continue to struggle with recruiting new teachers (National Center for
Education Statistics, n.d.). We also believe educators are not being well prepared to take advantage of new technologies such as AI that have the potential to make their roles more engaging and satisfying. We would not want this book to be read as yet another critique of educators.
Our Purpose
Our hope is to provoke more reconsideration and conversation about the current educational paradigm, given the evidence that student disengagement is contributing to a mounting youth mental health crisis and that technological innovations, especially AI, are reshaping the world in unprecedented ways. These conversations will require the collaborative efforts of educators, families, communities, and policymakers. We hope to open more eyes to students’ potential to make a difference in their communities and beyond if they receive the preparation, support, and opportunities they need. The future literally depends on them.
By reimagining education as an engine for developing students into problem solvers and impact makers, we aim to inform and inspire students, educators, families, and policymakers to create learning environments that prepare young people to address the extraordinarily complex problems we all face.
The Scale of Impact
In this chapter, we introduce a framework for understanding the levels of impact students can achieve. Central to this framework is the cone of contributions, which illustrates how students’ impacts can expand outward from personal to societal. We emphasize that while all students can make meaningful individual and local contributions, achieving larger-scale societal impacts requires a combination of knowledge, desire, resources, collaboration, and sustained effort. Through multiple examples of youth-initiated projects, we show how small actions can have profound and far-reaching effects when supported and multiplied over time. Recognizing the finite nature of time, energy, and focus, we argue that fostering impactful contributions requires not only opportunities but also support. We conclude with practical strategies and reflective questions for educators, offering tools to help students recognize their potential for impact and engage meaningfully with real-world challenges.
A Framework for Understanding Potential Impact
In an article for the Review of General Psychology, James C. Kaufman and Ronald A. Beghetto (2009), one of the authors of this book, propose a model of creativity to advance research in the field. In the text, they describe four levels of creativity: (1) mini-c, or personal; (2) little-c, or everyday; (3) Pro-c, or professional; and (4) Big-C, or eminent, creativity. This framework has facilitated discussions of creativity, offering a shorthand for its different levels of expression. While everyone has the potential for creativity, not everyone achieves professional or eminent creativity. Most people demonstrate this capacity at smaller scales, achieving creativity at the personal, everyday, and occasionally professional levels.
We can categorize impact in a similar way. The impact that students can make when engaging in meaningful learning experiences can be thought of as a cone of contributions (adapted from Beghetto, 2023) that expands outward from the student (see figure 1.1).
Source: Adapted from Beghetto, 2023.
Figure 1.1: Levels of impact.
As illustrated in figure 1.1, the impact students can make ranges from individual to global. All students can make positive impacts in their lives and the world around them. However, to make meaningful impacts at any level, they need to develop their knowledge through different problems and opportunities that align with their personal interests and commitments.
Supporting students to make greater impacts would require that schools provide the experiences and resources necessary to make intentional and positive contributions to others. This, in turn, would call on schools and educators, along with parents and policymakers, to rethink their purpose, organization, and curriculum and the roles and relationships of everyone involved in the school community.
Put simply, the central claim we make throughout this book is this:
Impact requires expending resources. Making a meaningful difference demands time, energy, and focus—without these, even the most capable and committed students will fall short.
Throughout this book, we argue that the ability to create impact relies on the expenditure of limited resources. Passion, knowledge, and interest provide
motivation, but they cannot drive action if students lack the necessary time, energy, and opportunities to act.
Just as a vehicle requires fuel to move, meaningful contributions require personal and social resources that are finite and must be carefully managed. When students are stretched too thin or overwhelmed, their potential to make an impact diminishes, no matter how committed they are. Schools, educators, and policymakers must recognize that enabling students to make intentional and positive impacts means not only providing opportunities but also supporting the strategic use of their resources.
Table 1.1 summarizes the features of the different levels of impact. We then discuss and provide examples of each of these levels in the sections that follow.
Table 1.1: Summary of the Levels of Impact
Level of Impact
Individual Impact
Local Impact
Impacts students make on themselves through learning, self-reflection, and personal growth
Societal Impact
Impacts students make within their schools and communities by collaboratively addressing local problems and challenges
Broader aspirational impacts students can make at national and international levels by addressing systemic or global challenges
Deepening knowledge, refining skills, or uncovering personal strengths from pursuing individual interests sparked by experiences in or beyond the traditional school curriculum
Identifying meaningful problems, developing solutions, and creating lasting contributions in schools or communities
Tackling largerscale issues such as poverty, poor living conditions, climate change, and global health threats, or any initiatives aimed at improving societies through innovative projects, organizations, or partnerships
Time for selfdirected learning; opportunities for reflection; and environments that support autonomy, competence, and agency
Structures and supports from families, schools, and community members; time; collaborative opportunities; and guidance for problem solving and ethical reflection
Substantial support from educational institutions, policymakers, and global organizations; resources like funding, mentorship, and platforms for collaboration; and opportunities to engage with diverse and complex perspectives and systems
Individual: Personal Impact
Students often make significant personal impacts through self-directed learning and reflection on their experiences. These impacts result in increased knowledge on a topic, enhanced skills, and deeper insights into one’s strengths and weaknesses. Individual impacts are driven by curiosities, interests, values, and intrinsic motivations, which are essential for developing a healthy sense of self (Beghetto, 2021a; Hidi & Renninger, 2006) and fulfilling basic psychological needs like autonomy and competence (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
Examples of personal impact are vast and can range from pursuing an interest in culinary arts by experimenting with global cuisines and developing unique recipes to coding and building custom AI applications to address real-world problems, thereby sparking innovation and technical skills. A young person’s interest in fashion design might motivate exploration into creating original garments that reflect diverse cultural influences. A student’s interest in mechanics, which developed through working with a family member who is rebuilding a lawn mower engine, might lead to their own hands-on repair projects.
Self-directed learning journeys, often ignited by chance experiences in students’ environments (such as discovering a passion for traditional weaving techniques or finding inspiration in robotics competitions), can lead to profound personal growth beyond the traditional school curriculum. Although the effects of these actions may not be immediately apparent, students should understand that everyone makes numerous seemingly inconsequential decisions daily that collectively shape their personal identity. The consequences of these decisions are not immediately obvious because most people remain largely unaware of this level of impact.
Personal impacts are the foundation for contributions that extend beyond the self. Students’ personal values, commitments, and interests often result in positive impacts on those around them, particularly their families. Many teenage students contribute to their family incomes and perform household tasks, including caring for siblings and elders. In addition, some young people help with recycling, composting, and conserving energy. Students can encourage family members to adopt healthy habits such as regularly exercising, preparing healthy meals, and avoiding unhealthy snacks and ultra-processed foods. They can also actively contribute to making their homes happier places by sharing their experiences with family members, helping organize family events, and occasionally cooking for their families. Students also help family members— especially parents and grandparents—navigate and take advantage of digital
technology. Similarly, they share new information, ideas, and diverse perspectives they glean from digital media and school.
Students can also help their friends and neighbors. They can stand up for classmates who are being bullied or help neighbors in need. Importantly, personal impacts also serve as the basis for impacts that extend well beyond a person’s local environment. There are numerous aspirational examples, including the following people, whose global impacts started at the personal level.
f Malala Yousafzai: Driven by a personal belief in the importance of education for girls, she began speaking out publicly at a young age, despite facing immense risks. Her early activism, fueled by her personal values, eventually led her to become a Nobel laureate and a global advocate for girls’ education.
f Yo-Yo Ma: The renowned cellist began studying the cello at a young age driven by his genuine fascination with music.
f Steve Jobs: His decision to take calligraphy classes in college, driven by personal curiosity, later influenced the typography and design aesthetic of Apple products.
f Temple Grandin: Diagnosed with autism as a child, she developed a unique understanding of animal behavior through personal observation and interaction. Her early ability to connect with animals helped prepare her to become a leading voice on animal welfare and livestock handling.
Students are often encouraged, or even pressured and required, to engage in activities presented as beneficial to themselves and others. While such guidance may be well intentioned, it risks backfiring if students do not perceive these activities as aligned with their own interests, values, and motives. Without a sense of ownership, their participation can feel forced and externally controlled, leaving them more like puppets of someone else’s vision than active agents of their own lives. Psychologist Johnmarshall Reeve (2009) explains that, over time, this lack of personal connection often leads students to disengage, as these efforts fail to resonate as personally meaningful or impactful.
This is not to say that students always know what is best for them or that they cannot find value in tasks that may initially feel unmotivating. Indeed, growth involves discovering meaning in unexpected places. However, for this discovery to occur, students need some degree of voice and choice in their learning and contributions. The foundational work of psychologist Albert Bandura (2001) shows that when students feel a sense of agency, even in externally structured
tasks, they are more likely to invest effort, persist through challenges, and experience their effort as both personally and collectively impactful.
Making students more aware of how their choices can lead to self-growth starts with encouraging reflection and fostering curiosity. Educators can create opportunities for students to explore their personal interests through openended projects, digital or actual field trips, or “personal interest time” when they pursue topics that intrigue them. Regularly prompting students to think about the small, everyday decisions they make, such as what to read, how to spend free time, or which questions to explore in class, can help them recognize how these choices shape their knowledge, skills, and identities.
To help their students understand that they can make positive impacts, educators might first help them understand the kinds of impacts they are already making, about which they may be unaware. These students might keep a “My Impact Log” in which they document their impacts. This is intended to raise their awareness and acknowledge the positive impacts they make.
Helping students identify their strengths increases their awareness of capabilities they may not have recognized. A good place to start is to have students self-administer the VIA Character Strengths Survey (www.viacharacter.org). Another activity is to have students identify the strengths they see in their classmates. Most of us tend to overemphasize negative views of ourselves, so having others help us see our strengths is an important step in addressing this bias. Celebrating students’ personal discoveries, even if they occur outside traditional curriculum boundaries, reinforces the value of self-directed learning and highlights the meaningful impact of their pursuits.
Local: School and Community Impact
As students endeavor to make impacts beyond themselves in their schools and communities, they need to expend more personal resources as well as find partners to help them realize their goals. This requires opportunities, time, and support from family, school, and members of their local communities.
Specifically, students need to receive structures and supports that help them see beyond themselves and put their learning, interests, and energy toward projects that address school- and community-based problems.
Most educators can quickly come up with examples of ways that students can contribute to their schools and communities, such as the following.
f Volunteering to help with a school fundraiser
f Participating in local cleanup efforts
f Assisting at food banks or homeless shelters
f Tutoring or mentoring younger students
f Helping out on small local farms
f Assisting at retirement communities
Although these types of volunteer experiences are valuable in fostering awareness of the importance of helping others, they often do not achieve the level of local impact emphasized in this book. Local impacts differ from short-term or one-off volunteer activities by requiring a deeper connection to students’ personal interests and a focus on creating meaningful, lasting change.
While traditional service learning and volunteering offer opportunities for contribution, they may not fully engage students’ creative problem-solving abilities or inspire them to address ill-defined, systemic problems. The kind of local impact we envision involves students tackling challenges that matter deeply to them and their communities and developing solutions that endure and evolve over time.
This level of impact can be supported through experiences such as legacy challenges (Beghetto, 2018). Legacy challenges are student-directed, collaborative endeavors that emphasize the process of solving problems and making an impact on others. They are called legacy challenges because the idea is to create sustainable, never-ending projects that incoming students can continue in their schools and communities. Legacy challenges provide structured opportunities for students to engage in creative problem solving by identifying and addressing meaningful problems that extend beyond immediate, surface-level solutions.
Students address four key questions when engaging in a legacy challenge (Beghetto, 2018).
1. What is the problem? This element requires students to actively identify a problem they view as meaningful and relevant to themselves, their school, their community, or the wider world. It encourages students to look beyond the obvious and uncover issues that may not be readily apparent to others.
2. Why does it matter? Students must articulate the rationale behind their chosen problem and explain why it is important to them, others, and the community. This involves exploring the ethical and moral dimensions of the problem, considering the beneficiaries of a solution, the consequences of inaction, and the potential costs or drawbacks of addressing the problem.
3. What are we going to do about it? This question prompts students to break down the problem into smaller, manageable steps and develop solutions that can be tested, refined, and iterated. It emphasizes the importance of collaborating with more skilled partners (for example, outside experts, AI tools, or members of the community), taking action, and adapting strategies as needed.
4. What lasting contribution will we make? This element distinguishes legacy challenges from other kinds of contributions (for example, volunteering or service learning) by requiring students to take a longterm perspective and develop sustainable solutions that can be passed on to future generations. It encourages students to think about how their work will continue to make a positive impact even after they have moved on.
Legacy challenges can develop from students’ personal experiences with a problem or challenge or be sparked by something they learn as part of the existing curriculum. An example of a legacy challenge that emerged from the curriculum involves a group of fourth graders from Marin County, California (Stone & Barlow, 2010).
During a unit on environmental science, the students watched a National Geographic film on endangered species. This sparked one student to ask, “But what can we do?” Inspired by this question, their teacher integrated a real-world challenge into the curriculum by connecting with a California State trainer from an adopt-a-species program.
The class selected a freshwater shrimp as their focus and spent six months deeply engaged in learning about the shrimp and its ecosystem. Through their investigations, the students identified that the shrimp’s challenges were linked to broader watershed issues. This realization led them to initiate habitat restoration efforts.
What began as a class project evolved into a sustainable legacy initiative, with the students’ efforts passed on to future classes. Over time, the project expanded into a collaborative network of teachers, students, parents, farmers, businesses, and environmental agencies, all working together to restore local habitats. This example highlights how a curriculum-driven project can grow into a long-term, communitywide legacy challenge that empowers students to address real-world problems and leave a lasting impact.
The impact of developing legacy challenges based on students’ personal experiences can often extend beyond the local level. Here are a few examples.
f Sit With Us: The Sit With Us mobile app was created by Natalie Hampton, a high school student from California. Having experienced the isolation of eating lunch alone due to bullying, Natalie recognized the persistent issue of social exclusion during school lunch periods. To address this, she developed a free app that allows students to find welcoming lunch groups, which thereby fosters inclusion and reduces bullying (Drake, 2016). According to the AFS Youth Assembly (2021), the Sit With Us app has been downloaded over one hundred thousand times across multiple countries, demonstrating its significant impact.
f IV backpack: While undergoing chemo treatment for cancer in fifth grade, Kylie Simonds of Naugatuck, Connecticut, found moving her IV drip stand around to be awkward and limiting. When her treatment ended, she developed a backpack to take the place of the IV stand. The backpack includes a drip bag protection cage that allows for movement without the possibility of puncturing the medicine bag, as well as a controller to regulate the bag’s flow rate. With her family’s help, Kylie created a GoFundMe page to finance the development of a prototype. Several companies have contacted her about manufacturing her invention (ABC News, 2014).
f Ball4Good: Twelve-year-old Adom Appiah started this organization to leverage sports activity to enhance community cohesion. The origin of the organization can be traced back to Adom’s seventh-grade history teacher, who required students to devote 20 percent of their class time to projects that made an impact (Ball4Good, n.d.).
f Conan Fund: When fourteen-year-old Jacob Grosberg lost his father to suicide, he created the Conan Fund to advocate for mental health care. The fund works with other organizations in the mental health arena to raise awareness and understanding of suicide. It has also started an initiative to raise awareness of mental health issues among people who are homeless (Conan Fund, n.d.).
f EveryChildNow: During a family trip to India in 2012, brothers Vishal and Ishan Vijay (then twelve and eleven years old, respectively) were alarmed to see the level of poverty and the conditions in which children were growing up there. Back home in Canada, they started a nonprofit that initially focused on the issue of child poverty in India but has evolved and expanded to launch initiatives in other countries. Their mission is summed up in three words—inspire, impact, and
advocate. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted their work, they created an e-learning site, SocialEducating.com, which matched fourth through eighth graders with tutors (Khan, 2021).
f FloodGate project: George Cheng, Reichen Schaller, Shubhan Bhattacharya, and Sumedh Kotrannavar, students at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, were concerned about increasingly frequent floods in their area and beyond. They used their knowledge of computational technologies to develop an interactive 3-D flood model, which governmental and community agencies as well as individuals can use to access flood predictions and plan evacuation and relief operations. This model won the 2024 Earth Prize. The students plan to create an app that will enable people globally to be better prepared for floods (Earth.org, 2024).
These examples illustrate how a student’s personal experiences and interests, when coupled with creative problem solving and collaboration, can lead to a lasting contribution that benefits others well beyond the local environment.
Although legacy challenges may serve as extracurricular experiences, they can also be integrated more intentionally into the regular curriculum. Even dedicating just ten minutes of class time per day to these impact projects allows students to make steady progress toward meaningful contributions.
By incorporating legacy challenges into classroom routines, educators can foster a culture of sustained engagement where students are empowered to tackle problems that matter to them and their communities. Making legacy challenges an important part of the educational experience ensures students have opportunities to develop their creative problem-solving skills and leave a lasting local impact. We suggest two strategies for incorporating legacy challenges into the classroom: (1) start small and (2) create collaboration opportunities.
Start Small and Scaffold the Process
Introduce legacy challenges with a simple framework, such as focusing on a single question like, “What’s one small change you can make to improve our school or community?” This can be tied to existing curriculum topics. Establishing partnerships with relevant local mentors or experts can provide additional guidance and inspiration. Importantly, help students recognize that these projects require the expenditure of personal resources, such as time, energy, and focus, and guide them in managing these finite resources effectively to achieve meaningful outcomes.
Create Opportunities for Collaboration and Presentation
Legacy challenges require collaboration and visibility. Encourage students to work in teams to pool their strengths and develop more comprehensive solutions. Allocate class time (even just ten minutes a day) for collaborative problem-solving sessions where students can refine their ideas and share feedback. Additionally, create opportunities for students to present their projects to a wider audience, such as the school board, a community forum, or even a virtual platform. These presentations can highlight students’ initial efforts and help students establish potential partners to support their impact projects, such as local businesses, outside experts, nonprofits, or government agencies. Documenting progress through videos or social media can further amplify the impact and inspire future participation.
By incorporating these strategies, educators can transform their classrooms into launchpads for impactful, sustainable projects that connect students’ personal interests with the needs of their schools and communities.
Societal: National and International Impact
We believe every student can make individual and local impacts. Such actions are within the capabilities and resources of most students globally. The societal level of impact requires greater support, opportunities, collaboration, and resources, which often seem beyond the current reach of many students.
Although this level may seem daunting, it is important to remind students that significant, global impacts start with personal interests and commitments. In fact, if those interests and commitments have not been sufficiently developed, then it is unlikely that they will ever transform into larger-scale impacts because such impacts require knowledge, experience, collaboration with skilled others, and persistence.
The goal is to encourage students to think beyond themselves and their immediate environment. This is not to diminish the importance of individual and local impacts. Rather, we aim to illustrate how personal impacts can scale from students’ local learning and experiences to make broader contributions.
Our message to educators and students when it comes to societal impacts is this:
If every student who has the capacity, opportunity, and resources to aspire and try to act at this level were to do so, it could change the world for the better. We thereby owe it to young people to highlight that such impacts are possible.
Educators may provide students with examples of young people who have successfully contributed to national and international challenges, such as the following. These real-world examples demonstrate how young individuals have scaled personal interests and small, local initiatives to make a positive societal impact.
f Hannah Herbst: At age thirteen, she learned from her African pen pal that many people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to affordable and reliable electricity. This inspired her to create an ocean energy probe prototype capable of providing a stable power source to low-wealth countries that taps into the energy from ocean currents. Attending a summer engineering camp where she was the only girl spurred her interest in science and engineering solutions (Herbst, n.d.).
f Shubham Banerjee: At just twelve years old, he recognized the high cost of braille printers, which averaged around two thousand dollars. Using a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robotics kit and inexpensive electrical components, he created a low-cost braille printer design called Braigo that made them much more accessible to visually impaired individuals. Shubham’s work led to the founding of Braigo Labs to manufacture the printers and further the development of affordable assistive technologies (Shoot, 2015). The company attracted the attention of Intel, which provided start-up funding in 2014.
f Emma Yang: As a twelve-year-old, she was pained to witness her grandmother’s deteriorating memory. She realized that many other elders were suffering from their inability to remember the faces of friends and loved ones and to recall even recent events. Over the next two years, Emma developed, tested, and refined an app named Timeless. Using AI, the app employs a facial recognition system developed by the start-up Kairos to help Alzheimer’s patients identify people in photos, and it reminds them of their relationships. This keeps them connected to their loved ones and friends and reduces confusion—a major problem for elders who have dementia.
f Celestar Hong: Along with two classmates, she won first place in the Young Sustainability Champion program’s competition sponsored by the Science Centre of Singapore in 2021. The competition attracted over four thousand participants, ages thirteen to seventeen. Celestar
and her team created an automatic waste-sorting bin that facilitates separating recyclable plastics from trash. This addresses a problem not confined to Singapore, where 40 percent of items discarded in recycling bins are not recyclable (Schoolbag, 2021).
f Daphne Nederhorst: At the age of seven, she decided to commit herself to addressing the extreme poverty she witnessed in Tanzania, her adopted home. Ultimately, she founded Sawa World, a youth-led organization dedicated to alleviating poverty in Africa and beyond. Headquartered in Uganda, Sawa helps youths start local, small-scale, eco-conscious businesses and learn how to share their business skills with other youths (Sawa World, n.d.).
f Xiuhtezcatl Martinez: He began speaking about environmental issues at age six and became youth director of the Earth Guardians at fifteen. Earth Guardians, founded by Maui high school students in 1992, consists of a network of youth “crews” around the world that focus on local environmental issues while contributing to global campaigns. Xiuhtezcatl has addressed the United Nations General Assembly and, in 2015, was among twenty-one youth plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit against the U.S. federal government for failing to act on climate change (Juliana v. United States; Henry, 2020).
f Blackawton Primary School students: A group of twenty-five students (ages eight to ten) from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England, collaborated with their teacher and a visiting neuroscientist to publish an article based on their questions about and observations of bee behavior in Biology Letters, a Royal Society academic journal (Yong, 2010). Collaborating with supportive and skilled adults, the students were able to make a positive and lasting scientific contribution.
To support students in aspiring to and achieving societal impacts, educators must intentionally cultivate an environment where curiosity, collaboration, and persistence are encouraged. Educators can facilitate this by integrating into the curriculum learning opportunities that address societal and global issues and encouraging students to identify problems that are meaningful to them. Also, by fostering connections with skilled mentors, global organizations, and collaborative networks, educators can equip students with the knowledge, skills, and support necessary to work toward tackling complex societal challenges.
Additionally, educators should emphasize the importance of resource management, helping students recognize that impactful contributions are not immediate; take long-term commitments; and require careful allocation of time, energy, and focus. By embedding opportunities for meaningful, long-term individual and local impacts, educators can help students aspire to greater societal impacts and instill a belief in their potential to make a lasting difference in the world (even if it starts in a small way).
Conclusion
In this chapter, we detailed the levels of impact students can achieve—individual, local, and societal—underscoring the central idea that making a difference requires finite resources, such as time, energy, and focus. Equally important is the provision of opportunities, guidance, and supports that enable students to take meaningful action. At the core of impactful contributions, regardless of their scale, are personal interests, values, knowledge, and commitments that drive motivation and sustain efforts.
Even small actions at the individual level can have profound, long-term effects when multiplied across many people and over time. For example, educators often have profound yet indirect impacts on their students, shaping their lives in ways that may only become evident years later.
Across all levels, the depth of impact can vary—ranging from direct, immediate effects on individuals or environments to indirect ripple effects that extend influence over time, and even to systemic changes that fundamentally reshape structures and systems for lasting, far-reaching contributions.
By creating environments where students can engage deeply with issues they care about, connect with mentors, and collaborate with classmates and others, educators and policymakers can nurture a generation of individuals capable of making impacts at every level. Recognizing that even small beginnings can lead to transformative outcomes ensures that all young people can shape beneficial futures for themselves and others.
Here are some key practical takeaways for educators from this chapter.
1. Raise awareness of personal impact: Help students reflect on how their daily decisions, such as their daily choices, resource use, and interactions with others, shape their immediate environment and influence their personal growth.
2. Implement “My Impact Log” activities: Encourage students to maintain a log documenting their decisions and actions—such as how they use their time and energy, actions they take, and contributions to family or community—for a week or two to heighten awareness of their individual and collective impact.
3. Use character strengths assessments: Tools like the VIA Character Strengths Survey help students recognize their unique strengths and raise self-awareness and confidence in their ability to contribute meaningfully.
4. Facilitate local community engagement: Guide students in identifying local challenges and developing collaborative action plans for sustained community projects.
5. Study youth-led initiatives: Share examples of impactful projects and organizations created by young people to inspire students and show how personal interests can lead to broader contributions.
6. Integrate legacy challenges into learning: Dedicate time within the curriculum for students to investigate real-world issues, brainstorm creative solutions, and implement action plans, developing their problem-solving and impact-making skills.
7. Promote cross-cultural and collaborative opportunities: Create opportunities for virtual exchanges or joint projects with students from other regions or countries, broadening perspectives and building global connections.
8. Teach resource management and impact project planning: Teach students about project planning, including identifying legacy challenges, prioritizing strategies, and developing actionable plans.
9. Emphasize the power of small, consistent actions: Help students understand that even modest efforts—when sustained over time—can have significant cumulative impacts, especially when multiplied across individuals.
10. Encourage an impact mindset: Cultivate systems-oriented, innovative thinking, and support students to approach complex challenges with a can-do mindset.
11. Highlight levels and depths of impact: Teach students about the levels of impact, from individual and direct to systemic and societal.
12. Develop research skills: Teach students the research strategies and skills needed to understand complex issues and develop realistic solutions.
Takeaways
The following questions can stimulate your thinking about the ideas we offered in this chapter.
1. How can you help students become more aware of the individual and local impacts they make in their daily lives?
Reflection Questions
2. What strategies can you implement to encourage students to engage in impactful community projects?
3. How might you incorporate “My Impact Log” into your curriculum?
4. How can you inspire students by discussing youth-led movements and innovations?
5. What resources or support can you provide to students with ambitions for largerscale impact?
6. What kinds of ongoing learning opportunities can you create to address realworld problems and challenges?
7. How can you cultivate critical and creative thinking about systemic issues?
8. In what ways can you collaborate with others to amplify students’ ideas and contributions?
Time, Energy, and the Promissory Note of School
In this conversation, we explore the concept of impact and the role of schools in helping young people find opportunities to make a difference. We discuss how the traditional structure of schooling often stifles creativity, limits opportunities for self-directed learning, and leaves students feeling exhausted and without the time and energy to pursue their passions. The conversation challenges educators to rethink the purpose of school and explore ways to empower students to identify their interests and make meaningful impacts on the world around them.
Business leaders’ and industry’s growing influence on educational reform efforts, particularly on the reform movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, threatens democratic control of public education and narrows the focus to vocational skills (Spring, 2008).
Yong’s observation that “many have already run a business anyway” alludes to the rise of the gig economy and entrepreneurial activities online. This challenges the idea of a linear career path (Manyika et al., 2016).
Yong: There’s a phrase we typically use: “Schools prepare a workforce.” The workforce means you go to work for industry, for businesses. Twenty years ago, any reform in education was always backed by the business roundtables. They were a major influence in what they wanted our students to become. We had industries waiting for our people to graduate and fit in. I don’t think that model works anymore, right? By the time our kids graduate, many have already run a business anyway. We always ask our employers, but the employers change all the time and now jobs are changing all the time.
This refers to Ron’s book Uncertainty x Design: Educating for Possible Futures (Beghetto, 2023).
Tyack (1974), in his seminal work
The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education, provides a compelling analysis of the historical forces that shaped the U.S. education system.
The theory of total institutions is explored in Goffman’s (1961) book Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates
Ron: This is something I explore in my book Uncertainty x Design . Briefly, I describe how the persistent logic of schooling is that everything needs to be determined in advance.
What we’re talking about is giving students the opportunity to make an impact. We can’t really know what impact they’re going to make, what problem they’re going to solve, or what they’re going to be doing—there is much more uncertainty. The future is unmade. There’s not one future but many possible futures. And young people will be the ones who will be defining those futures.
What we’re asking people to do is reconceptualize what happens in school. Rather than do something with what they learn someday, students can learn how to make a positive impact now and into their futures.
This challenges the entire notion and assumptions about school, getting back to something we talked about, which I think is one of the most powerful ideas of this book: Each of us only has a limited number of resources—energy, time, mind-space—to do anything in any given day, and we need to transform schools so students have an opportunity to use those resources to make an impact.
Bill: David Tyack, in The One Best System, which remains one of the best histories of education that I’ve ever read, makes the point that a primary motivation for the establishment of compulsory school laws in New York City was complaints from merchants about rowdy teenagers who roved through the streets creating problems. School was an alternative to jail, right? Schools were a mechanism for controlling youth with raging hormones who caused the good citizens of New York City all kinds of bother. This also calls to mind Erving Goffman’s theory of total institutions that exert near-limitless control over
the time, activities, and behaviors of those in institutions like prisons, the military, and even schools.
Ron: I’ve always wondered why there is so much homework. There are obvious reasons. Rehearsal deepens memory and recall. But is this just another form of filling time? With so much homework, students are completely occupied after school. And there’s little time for them to do anything. What kind of impact are you going to make when you’re exhausted? No wonder kids turn to passive activities like consuming the remaining hours of the day and night with social media and video games.
Bill: Having taught in China as well as Greece, I think it’s not just the schools that are to blame. It’s the education system as a whole. In China, the kids have so many lessons. They have so much work to do at home they hardly have enough time to sleep. I once asked a group of students who were to take the gaokao [the university entrance exam] the following year what they would do if they had some free time. They answered with one voice: “Sleep.”
And it was the same in Greece, you know—the students would take eleven subjects as juniors, and then after school at four thirty, they would go to these schools called frontistiria that are cram schools for the university exam. And then they would go to language schools to be prepared to go to Germany, England, the States, Australia, or some other place for university. And then many played sports and many were also involved in afterschool clubs. No wonder they had trouble staying awake in class. It may be even worse in China.
Ron: My daughter also has a school service requirement, which is good because they are doing something for others. But they must do so many service hours (on top of homework and extracurriculars). There’s limited time to do anything self-directed, by design. Once again, self-directed impact is deferred. It is a broken, or at best questionable, “promissory note”: “Someday you can make your own impact.”
Yong: My honest opinion of school is not to help students become who they can be but rather to consume them as much as possible, so they don’t have time for themselves. Like compulsory attendance laws: You’re off the streets so you can’t cause any trouble on the streets. If you look at teachers—and we’ve all been and continue to be teachers, so we’ve seen this firsthand—they want their students to remember what they are told and do what they are told to do. [Teachers] not only dominate their school time, they dominate their after-school time with homework that may be of no educational value.
And as teachers, we predetermine what [students] should know. We predetermine what they should do and know, and we evaluate whether they’ve done what we want them to do
The phenomenon of shadow education, or private supplementary schooling, is common in many East Asian countries, Greece, and the United States. Shadow education often adds significant pressure and workload to students, particularly within hypercompetitive educational systems focused on high-stakes testing and university entrance exams (Bray & Lykins, 2012).
The influence of parenting on a child’s development, particularly in shaping their values, beliefs, and behaviors, is an active area of study in psychology (Baumrind, 1991). Authoritarian parenting means strictly enforcing rules and boundaries—“my way or the highway.” Authoritative parenting means being somewhat flexible but with high expectations and clear structure as well as praise and affection (American Psychological Association, 2017).
to our satisfaction. It has nothing to do with their impact, their interest. We justify all of this with the false assurance that “this is for your own good,” or “you’ll need this for the future.” As Ron said, it’s a dicey promissory note.
Bill: Ron, I really like your phrase, a “promissory note.” We tell them, “Trust me, you need this for the future. You’ll be able to cash it in for a job or something.”
Yong: It’s like parents always say, “This is for your own good.” Even if they are hitting their child, they say this. I was talking with a Swiss psychologist about authoritarian versus authoritative parenting. We use this tired justification: “This is for your own good.” You know, we pick this up from the culture. “It’s for your own good”—whatever we do to torture kids. We always use these phrases without really thinking: “Someday you’ll thank me.” Really?
Ron: We can’t get to the first principle of impact, which is you first need the energy and time—forget about luck and motivation or anything. Even if you are motivated, if you don’t have the time to do [something], you can’t, right? I mean, some people do. They somehow just make that work. They say, “I’m just not going to do this other stuff. I’m going to do what I’m interested in and forget the rest.” But that’s a very narrow band of folks. Why not provide more time for more young people to explore and find and act on their interests?
Yong: Opportunities for impact, for sure—that’s what I mean, I think.
Some schools are held up as examples. They always have kids doing some of the amazingly entrepreneurial things on YouTube or organizing something impactful. But relatively few schools can provide examples of students who make an impact because of the school subjects they take. When students do amazing things, it is almost always outside of what they are studying in school.
There is a group of students I learned about who have taken on the issue of human trafficking. And they have been very effective. But they—like most of the students we feature in chapter 1 (page 19)—accomplished what they did outside of school. What they did wasn’t related to their school subjects.
A review of Chinese curriculum reforms notes, “Over the past 20 years, while previous curriculum reforms have brought significant changes to basic education, the concept of human cultivation has not been fully embraced by educators due to the deep-rooted influence of traditional exam-oriented education” (Luo, 2023, p. 12).
I remember my son, who is now, of course, thirty. When he was in sixth or seventh grade, he figured out the physics of why the shower curtain goes inside the tub. He found that his textbook was wrong—or rather, that there was another explanation. He told his teacher. He just happened to find another way to explain this. You don’t get a lot of students challenging what they are taught.
Bill: I think the other important thing about what we’re saying is that it’s not just the time that the students attend school. When I was teaching in China, whenever I walked through a university campus, I was amazed at the number of students who were pacing up and down either with notes
or a book in their hands, muttering to themselves. I realized they were memorizing the text. I asked one of my students, “Is this something that is typical?” Her response? “Oh, absolutely. I would spend two or three hours after school memorizing the text for the next day in case I got called on.” So, yeah, it is occupying every moment. By the way, the Ministry of Education has been advocating for “higher-order thinking” for the past two decades and has revised the gaokao to include more open-ended items. But in China, as elsewhere, beliefs about what learning and teaching are, are woven into the society and culture.
Ron: It’s possible that some students will catch an interest in school and, as a result, have an impact based on that interest. Maybe. But think about how limiting this is. It is like a random draw. This happens even with extracurricular activities. Young people can, of course, find meaning in participating in them. But unless they are truly inspired and committed of their own volition, these activities become just one more required thing that takes time from doing something they find more meaningful and impactful.
Yong: People always ask me, “How did you learn English?” Honestly, when I started college, my English was not good, even though I was in an English teacher prep program. I just went to the library, a bookstore that had a foreign publications section, and talked with English-speaking faculty. I was not into any sport. I was not into anything this school organized. I was also listening in my English class. I have to say I am very thankful to all my teachers who did not punish me. When I went to graduate school, my adviser, Gary Ziko, said, “What I did was not to stop you.” I didn’t do what they expect ed me to do. So, I always found a way to do what I wanted to do. I’m sure you did the same, Bill. We all have deviated from what schools want us to be and do. I don’t think we were the best students in the traditional way.
Ron: Yes, when your life is filled with so many required activities, you must reject some of them if you want to make an impact. Otherwise, you won’t have the time or energy.
Makes me think of biographies of self-directed innovators like Steve Jobs. When he was a student at Reed College in Oregon, he dropped into a calligraphy class. He was probably supposed to be doing something else, but he was drawn to the class because he was interested in design. Essentially, people who make an impact often have had to find their own way to explore the things they’re interested in. But this book isn’t aimed at people who are going to pursue their own path anyway. It’s for everybody else who doesn’t because they believe in the “promissory note” that, someday in the future, they will find their interests and have the time and energy to make an impact.
This anecdote, particularly the decision “not to stop,” aligns with the concept of self-directed learning, a key principle in constructivist learning theories (Bruner, 1960).
Although Steve Jobs attended Reed College, he dropped out after one semester. Nonetheless, his story highlights the importance of pursuing one’s passions, even if they fall outside of traditional academic pursuits.
Bill’s and his friend’s behavior was likely a reaction to how boring they each found their high school courses. On a national survey of over twenty-one thousand U.S. high school students, “the most common emotion students reported was tired (58%). The next most-reported emotions—all just under 50%—were stressed, bored, calm, and happy. The ratings scale supported the findings, with students reporting feeling stressed (79.83%) and bored (69.51%) the most” (Belli, 2020).
Yong: This is particularly a problem for students in disadvantaged schools. It does not work for them in the inner cities or rural areas. We pretend the system works for everyone, as in “OK, you do this to get your GPA up, then you go to college.” Individuals in disadvantaged areas have to work hard to discover places they can make an impact. Technology can help. But first, you must have the intention to make an impact. You may become a consumer of TikTok, just flipping through various posts. Some might be intrigued by how to make something. Some people get inspired by what they see. Others never get inspired by anything. They just consume what they see. They don’t bring the same intention to the experience.
Bill: I was talking with a buddy of mine recently. He’s a teacher who has done this amazing job of bringing students who are on the margin in and helping them find a way. We agreed that what we shared as students was we were annoying. And it occurred to me that maybe this is a positive characteristic. We annoyed our teachers, we annoyed our parents, and we annoyed anyone in authority because we were constantly going directions, trying things, saying things that we weren’t supposed to. My friend said many of the students he has managed to convince to finish school were not just marginalized but also annoying. And, of course, if you’re annoying, you get in trouble.
Visit www.youtube.com/@ yongzhao5607 to find episodes of Silver Lining for Learning. Visit www.humanrestorationproject.org for more on the nonprofit.
The decline in enthusiasm for school as students age has been termed the school engagement cliff (National Center on Education and the Economy [NCEE], 2022). See also Hodges (2018).
Jagged profile refers to the relative strengths and needs of individual learners that align with their interests, abilities, and talents (Rose, 2016).
Yong: I invited two teachers onto our YouTube show, Silver Lining for Learning , who have started an organization called the Human Restoration Project. They left teaching to create this nonprofit organization. Now they work with schools and survey teachers to learn how they would change professional development. Neither of them had been good students. They hated school. Both of them. Almost every school innovator I’ve met—whether teacher, school leader, or researcher—told me they weren’t particularly “good” students, just like Bill, who got in trouble a lot.
You say you were “annoying.” The so-called best students might have benefited from the system. It might bestow something upon them that leads to making an impact. But I wonder how often that happens. I think, generally speaking, many annoying students likely end up doing something interesting.
I want to return to an earlier point Ron made. I think you’re saying those students who may be strong and have a jagged profile in their subjects seem to be more creative. If you are good in mathematics but not so good in language, you may be more creative. Is that right?
Ron: In this case, you likely would be more creative in math because you have developed the necessary interest and domain knowledge in that subject to be good at it.
Yong: Creativity seems to have a jagged profile based on domain, interest, and domain knowledge. [John] Baer’s book suggests “there’s no such thing as creativity.” I kind of agree. I think creativity should be replaced with everything
cognitive and noncognitive that leads you to make an impact. Creativity is just a judgment we make. We say, “Oh, that’s new and different. That’s great, that’s creative.”
Ron: Creativity takes effort. If you’re good at doing mathematics creatively, it’s not likely that you’re necessarily going to be creative in poetry at that same level, because you’re putting more time, interest, and energy into mathematics. There are polymaths who can put time, interest, and energy into many domains or learn on their own. Some of those people do interesting, impactful work across domains. But you only have so much time and energy every day. If you’re never getting an opportunity to use that time and energy in ways that interest you or to find your passions, then how are you going to possibly make an impact?
Yong: If you choose to be great in mathematics, you’re not going to be spending as much time doing something else. But then people ask, “What’s our solution?” I say, “You need to allow yourself to be bad in some areas.”
Ron: I remember having this conversation with my daughter. She was telling me about her peers who were good at mathematics and asked, “Why am I not good at math?” I said, “You know a lot about American Girl dolls.” She was an expert on them. We talked about how she spent her time learning about those dolls—their history, costumes, and so on—instead of mathematics. Those other kids obviously spent more time and energy on mathematics.
Bill: Yes, learning, creativity, and impact occur within specific contexts. The physical, social, and cultural environment shapes opportunities for learning and creativity. Resources available in a particular context can enhance or limit potential for impact.
Yong: Ron, your daughter chose to spend time learning about those dolls. If she wanted to make an impact, she could be a doll designer. That’s where creativity and knowledge come in.
Ron: Actually, she did start to design her own accessories for them.
Yong: She could start another business, design a new movie. But she didn’t spend enough time to quit school and create her own store. There are kids who could do that. She might combine it with music or digital media. That’s really where the impact part comes in, if she had time and interest in doing it.
Ron: Our key idea here is that focusing on making an impact doesn’t mean you can’t make an impact on a lot of different things, and they could be at different levels. You must choose where to focus your energy.
Yong: Yes, and if students passively accept whatever their school prescribes as the only valuable thing to
There are diverse perspectives on creativity. While some argue for general creativity, others, like John Baer (2022) and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1988), propose domain-specific creativity, emphasizing the roles of knowledge and expertise.
Each of the American Girl dolls comes with a series of books that tell the doll’s story and describe her particular historical and cultural context. The various dolls represent a range of ethnic backgrounds and cultures, promoting cultural awareness and inclusivity.
learn, then they may believe that is the only thing that is worth knowing.
Look at schools in the United States. We rely on GPA to judge student performance. But do we even know what a 3.5 or a 3.2 or whatever means? What does a 4.5 student really know that is different from a 3.5 student? Everyone wants a 4.5. That makes you feel good, feel that you’ve accomplished something. You are a “good” student. But does it mean anything other than you complied with what was expected of you?
Bill: The other ranking is the perceived value of different domains of knowledge. I was acutely aware of this when I was teaching in Greece. At the school where I was teaching, there were three tracks. The lowest track was called the “classical track.” It was interesting how the students absorbed this label into their thinking and self-image. I gave a challenging assignment once, and a student said, “Sir, we’re classical track students. That’s too hard for us.” He had a little smile, so he knew he was playing the system.
Returning to the jagged profile idea, different subjects are assigned different values, and you can be judged based on your strengths and weaknesses. Someone who’s really good in mathematics typically has a much higher status in the eyes of school administration, teachers, and college admissions personnel than somebody who’s good in woodworking or small engine [repair].
Students often internalize these messages about the value of different domains of knowledge, affecting their self-worth and, then, their self-image as someone who can have an impact.
Ron: There’s also the pressure to be good at everything, and that’s a problem. Very few of us can be good at everything, and trying to do so probably means you are just spreading your limited time and energy thinly across activities and stressing yourself out in the process. Impactful people seem to play to their strengths.
Yong: I think those who actually make big impacts are very often outliers. People always admire them as if they were gods. Think about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. These kinds of iconic people rarely invested much in their formal schooling. We admire them, though we don’t know how they got where they are. If we read their biographies, we find they invested in what interested them that led to something unique and impactful.
Ron: I think we’ve lost an appreciation for different pathways for making an impact, even in more modest and small ways. There does seem to be a bit of a groundswell with current generations looking beyond school and valuing artisanal or craft work. Many of them just go down a deep rabbit hole and become the best at roasting their own coffee and sharing it with friends or whatever.
Bill: My youngest son is a perfect example. He’s a baker in a large industrial bakery in Asheville, but he runs the artisanal kitchen to produce these handcrafted breads. He’s always experimenting with new kinds of bread. What he knows about the chemistry of yeast and the properties of different kinds of flours is pretty phenomenal. Totally self-taught, as is my other son, who is a software engineer. Both learned their skills outside of school.
Ron: When people learn they are good at something, they are driven to hone their craft. But I think there’s a fear. It’s like school wants to make sure that everyone can just do what they’re told and reach a minimal level of competence. One of the most positive aspects of generative AI is it challenges this. A lot of rote tasks can be augmented or supplanted by AI. This affords more people more time and energy to focus on creative work, problem solving, idea generation, critical thinking, and so on.
Yong: We’re under pressure from the educational system. Ron, your daughter is not doing well in mathematics, so she feels, “Oh God, I’m not as good as others.” So many of us have this sense of uncertainty that generates anxiety and stress. We feel guilty, like we are not doing as well as or as much as others.
Bill: I don’t think that’s true of my son. He’s so comfortable in his skin. I envy how comfortable he is. He’s very good at tuning out the expectations to be anyone but who he is.
The question is, Where is the guilt that some young people feel coming from? I think the answer is that it’s coming from not doing what’s expected of you. There are all these barriers that you have to overcome to meet others’ expectations, but some people just don’t care about that. Yet I think the norm is that people do carry that guilt, like, “Shouldn’t I be doing more?”
Yong: We’ve talked about how your family influences your luck and expectations. In my extended family, because we’re the only ones from our Chinese families living in the United States, there’s pressure. My son has a PhD already. So, my daughter feels pressure because my wife’s parents are also professors. She feels like they have this expectation of her. Bill, I wonder about your children. Do they have that pressure like Chinese families seem to have?
Ron: I want to interject something here. I think what you say, Yong, is likely true of many immigrant families. It was very difficult for my dad, who wanted to make an impact beyond his immigrant father’s business in construction. He was a jeweler and inventor. He even secured patents on some of his ideas and wanted to leave Wyoming to develop them into products. But because of family ties, he couldn’t leave. My mother’s immigrant family had a restaurant, and she didn’t want to move away from her family.
He ultimately stopped inventing things.
As a kid, I believed that this is what killed him. I thought, “That’s why he got cancer.” I remember him arguing with my mom: “We have to leave here and go to a city where I can actually have an audience.” But he never did.
Yong: H ow about you, Bill? Did your son have a sense of who you wanted him to become?
Bill: Not really. He went to college, spent a semester in China, learned Mandarin, did some blue-collar jobs, went to work in a bakery where he bakes artisanal breads. I don’t think he felt he had to do anything in particular. His older brother is a high school dropout, and his sister went to Evergreen—very alternative—majored in physics, and then to the Vermont Center for Cartoon Studies for a master’s. Seeing them choose their own paths, he was like, “Yeah, I can do whatever I want to do.”
Yong: At some point, they recognized their interests. Passion is one of the first things that schools leach from students. Many end up not passionate about anything.
Ron: Ironically, even if you did care about what they’re teaching you, it’s difficult to learn deeply, because you don’t have time. Many students likely have an aspiration to do something, but they don’t have time to really explore it. You just must go along with what and how subjects are taught.
Bill: And, of course, students have lots of other things to worry about, like, “What do other people think about me?” That takes up a lot of headspace.
Ron: I can summarize this: Making an impact—regardless of the level of impact—really starts with having or reserving enough time, space, and energy to explore and develop your interests and act on those interests.
In this conversation, we continued our exploration of the complex relationship between existing educational systems and cultivation of students’ ability to make meaningful impacts. Grounded in state and federal policies, the current model of schooling typically prioritizes studying standardized curricula, preparing for high-stakes assessments, conforming to rules, and obeying authority above nurturing individual interests and learning to make real-world impacts. The preoccupation with academic achievement and control over students’ time and energy leaves little opportunity and few resources for self-directed exploration, creativity, and the pursuit of genuine passions.
Students need time and freedom to discover and develop their interests, even if that means deviating from conventional educational paths. Making an impact often requires challenging the status quo, capitalizing on students’ “jagged profiles” of skills, and committing to developing each student’s potential. Reimagining education requires supporting diverse pathways for students to make meaningful contributions to the world.
Students’ enthusiasm for school declines by grade (Hodges, 2018).
The following questions can stimulate your thinking about the ideas we offered in this conversation. (We recognize that current policies focused on standardized assessments and accountability limit educators’ degree of freedom to make the types of changes these questions suggest.)
1. How can schools restructure the school day or week to create more time and space for student-directed learning and exploration of personal interests?
2. How can educators shift away from valuing conformity and high grades to recognizing and celebrating a wider range of talents, passions, and forms of impact, even those considered “annoying” or outside traditional measures of success?
3. How can schools provide more authentic choices in curriculum, projects, and assessments, giving students more ownership over their learning and allowing them to dig deeper into areas that resonate with them?
4. What are some strategies teachers can use within their classrooms to nurture students’ passions and help them connect their interests to meaningful learning experiences?
5. How can schools strike a balance between providing structure and guidance and creating opportunities for self-discovery, risk taking, and independent learning?
6. How can schools and educators challenge societal expectations and family pressures that may limit students’ perceptions of their own potential and the paths available to them?
7. How can educators help students, parents, and communities value a wider range of skills and career paths, moving beyond traditional notions of success that prioritize college and white-collar professions?
8. How can educators leverage technology to empower students as creators, innovators, and change makers rather than passive consumers of digital content?
9. How can educators rethink homework to ensure it is purposeful and engaging and allows students to explore their interests and make connections to the real world?
10. How can educators model their own passions, embrace lifelong learning, and demonstrate a willingness to learn alongside their students, even in areas outside their expertise?
AGENTS OF IMPACT
How Education Can Empower Students to Change Themselves, Their Communities, and Their World
Many students feel at a loss about their contributions, their significance, and their place in the world. In Agents of Impact: How Education Can Empower Students to Change Themselves, Their Communities, and Their World, authors G. Williamson McDiarmid, Ronald A. Beghetto, and Yong Zhao invite readers to seek and inspire educational reform that makes student agency central to the learning process, empowering students with a clear sense of purpose, belonging, and self-realization to approach an uncertain future with hope and confidence.
Grades K–12 teachers and leaders will:
• Validate students’ potential and capability with increased autonomy in their own learning
• Build networks between schools and families to support student learning and belonging
• Encourage active pursuit or creation of opportunities to nurture student interests and aims
• Train students in ethical considerations and applications of AI technology
• Empower students with greater self-confidence in their search for purpose and belonging
“Agents of Impact offers us a dynamic new paradigm for education, including concrete tips, compelling research, and inspiring profiles. This is the book to read if you care deeply about empowering young people to find greater agency, resiliency, and meaning.”
—ARI GERZON-KESSLER
Author of On the Same Team: Bringing Educators and Underrepresented Families Together, IPPY Awards Gold Medal Winner for Best Education Book (Workbook/Resources) of 2024
“This book really reinforced and helped to expand the approach our school is working toward in terms of more student choice and voice in real-world problemsolving scenarios. This resource exposes the reasons why we, as educators, need to rethink traditional schools.”
—STACEY RIENDEAU
Principal, Heritage High School, Littleton, Colorado