Professor Carl Gombrich on Interdisciplinary Learning and Nurturing Curiosity

This episode of the Getting Smart Podcast is sponsored by Mrs. Wordsmith, learn more at mrswordsmith.com

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Tom Vander Ark is joined by Dr. Carl Gombrich, the Dean at the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS), to discuss his transition from University College London (UCL) to LIS, motivated by a desire for educational innovation. 

Throughout the conversation, Dr. Gombrich shared his experience of fostering interdisciplinary education at UCL and his subsequent decision to establish a new institution dedicated to this approach. He explained that traditional educational structures often inhibit interdisciplinary learning, as they are organized around distinct disciplines that do not reflect the interconnected nature of real-world problems.

Dr. Gombrich also elaborated on the LIS curriculum, which emphasizes tackling real-world problems and teaching methods such as data science, ethnography, and experimental design. Together, they highlighted the importance of methodological rigor and the application of these methods to address complex issues like inequality and sustainability. LIS encourages students to think conceptually about using these tools to solve problems they care about. Dr. Gombrich also discussed the integration of interdisciplinary learning into students’ daily experiences, focusing on real-world projects, team-based problem-solving, and continuous assessment through coursework. He stressed the value of multiple perspectives and network thinking in education, drawing parallels with design thinking and underscoring the need for educational institutions to adapt to the evolving demands of society and technology.

Dr. Carl Gombrich

Carl is the Lead Academic at LIS and oversees curriculum design, teaching, and learning. He was previously a Professorial Teaching Fellow of Interdisciplinary Education at UCL and is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Before moving into higher education leadership, he studied and taught maths, physics and philosophy. He has also studied and taught music and was a professional opera singer, having trained at the National Opera Studio in the UK, where he was the Royal Opera House scholar. 

Links:

• Carl Gombrich
• London Interdisciplinary School
• Minerva Project
• Mike Magee on Minvera University
• Minerva University
• Hank Stratton and Ted Kraus on the Importance of the Performing Arts

Outline

• Introduction to Interdisciplinary Learning
• The Case for Interdisciplinary Education
• Innovative Curriculum at London Interdisciplinary School
• Student Experience and Project-Based Learning
• Future of Interdisciplinary Learning and AI

Introduction to Interdisciplinary Learning

Tom Vander Ark: We’re big fans of inviting young people to do work that matters, big interdisciplinary problems, and making a difference for their community. We think it’s a shortcut to developing valuable skills and mindsets along with a real sense of identity and purpose. I’m Tom Vander Ark. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast and today we’re talking about interdisciplinary learning with Dr. Carl Gombrich. He’s the Dean at the London Interdisciplinary School, a relatively new school founded by Dr. seven years ago. Dr. Galbraith, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Very nice to be here, Tom. I’m speaking to you from the UK and it’s great to be speaking to our cousins across the pond.

Tom Vander Ark: You had a great career at University College London and really led efforts to create an interdisciplinary college there. Why leave this 200-year-old venerable institution for the startup London interdisciplinary school? 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah, it’s a great question. I got a real taste for educational entrepreneurship or maybe intrapreneurship at UCL, which as you say, is this grand old beast, the third oldest university in the UK.

And when I actually decided to leave my boss, who I was very fond of, she was very nice to me, said, But Carl, after UCL, there’s only Oxford and Cambridge. Probably time to leave, right? Because that’s not how we’re going to get innovation or real forward thinking in education. And I had a taste for it and I wanted to do something really challenging and different, which was start a whole new institution after having started A successful program within an institution.

The Case for Interdisciplinary Education

Tom Vander Ark: All right, I want to come back and unpack what you are able to do at London Interdisciplinary School that was difficult to do in a traditional institution. But before we do that, let’s make the case for interdisciplinary learning. How do you think about what it is and why it’s important? 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: I think there are two new pressures in the world and certainly on education which are coming not to a peak because I don’t think they’ve ended yet, but they’re huge compared to what we had in the 20th century. One is the complex real-world problems, which we’re all confronted with sustainability, migration, AI and ethics —the other is the Internet. So, complex real-world problems require many disciplinary inputs just to be able to be understood, let alone tackled, and the internet doesn’t see any disciplinary boundaries.

If you’re a curious person on the web now, as so many of the next generation are, you question why, why is this so important. English literature and history, or where’s the boundary between chemistry, biology, physics, and data science? And when you put those two pressures together, one sort of from the outside, if you like, what are complex real-world problems?

How can I tackle them? And how can I learn the stuff to tackle them? Both point in the direction of interdisciplinarity. So you have a kind of pincer movement, just requiring more interdisciplinarity everywhere. 

Tom Vander Ark: Is it fair to say that the way that we’ve structured high schools and colleges around the world for the last 200 years systematically inhibits interdisciplinary learning?

We really organize formal Education around disciplines that makes it quite difficult to do what you just described. 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah, a hundred percent. And there was a period when this really worked and I think maybe it was even needed, but these silos have their own kind of path dependence, right?

They’re set up and then they propagate themselves, whether it’s a silo of culture or a silo of practice. And a lot of the disciplinary structures are self-serving in that they train. Certain people in a certain way who then want to see the next generation trained in a similar way. The exams are the products of those people’s minds and they form the next generation in the same way.

But obviously, history and culture and technology and economics evolve around that. And sometimes you get this disconnect between the sort of detached self serving silos and what’s really going onoutside of education, in many cases. There is ,I think a really strong tension now that’s built up over the years because of that disconnect 

Tom Vander Ark: How do you organize learning at the London Interdisciplinary School?

Innovative Curriculum at London Interdisciplinary School

Dr. Carl Gombrich: At the London Interdisciplinary School, we basically structure the curriculum in a very simple way, but we think it allows us to build in rigor. And that is that the students study real-world problems. So inequality, sustainability, technology and ethics and so on, but they also study methods to tackle those problems.

And that is things like data science, ethnography, ethnographic methods, and how to make a great video. Experimental design. And it’s really in a way in the methods that we get a lot of rigor because you can’t progress in data science without really knowing how to do Python, use data frames and so on. So those things, of course, have some connection to the disciplines, methods and disciplines are connected, but we don’t emphasize canons of knowledge, bodies of knowledge, which constitute disciplines.

We emphasize the methods, that allow the students to do stuff, and use those methods. to tackle these real-world problems that they’re confronting. So that is, if you like, where we emphasize the rigorous part of our curriculum. It’s through the methodological stuff that we teach, the methods that we teach, and we want the students to think more conceptually, if you like, about real-world problems.

How can I actually use this, these tools, to actually tackle problems I care about, rather than just reproducing stuff in a disciplinary way. 

Tom Vander Ark: Do you like modern consulting firms have a, an institution wide approach to how to frame a project, how to manage a project do you have a common design thinking methodology?Or is that part of the methods? 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: We don’t have one methodology. We’re very plural in what we do, but we have some, I think, really good and useful meta skills that we tack onto the problem. So students learn about framing a problem. They learn about stakeholder management. They learn about critical appraisal of a problem.

They’re more guiding principles of the curriculum than things the students would learn directly. And I think this is important in any curriculum design. What can be in the heads of the people designing the curriculum is not necessarily exactly what the students learn, but it guides the curriculum for the people designing and delivering it.

Yes, there are Many things which govern the process of designing our curriculum, but we don’t teach templates. In fact we emphasize to students principles rather than templates. Actually, I’ll just tell you there are two guiding principles of our curriculum, which I really like because they’re really simple and they’re really different to anything I think you see in most education institutions.

One is, we believe in order to tackle problems, You need to pursue multiple perspectives, that’s principle one, and in order to tackle complex problems, you need to think in terms of networks and relationships. And I, the last one is actually not very academic in some ways, but I really like it because it means at university we’re constantly getting our students to think, who will actually be involved in tackling this problem?

Who’s out there that I need to reach out to? Who would care about this? Who has the power to implement some of my ideas? So you get the rigor, you get the academic stuff, but we also then oblige students to think, how does this ever become real? What relationships do I need to build among the network, my own network and external network, so that this thing I’m learning can actually become a reality?

Tom Vander Ark: Carl, it sounds a cousin to design thinking. So this reminded me of design thinking, but I like the language of naming, the need for multiple perspectives, and then relationships and network. We sometimes talk about empathy, but this is relationships and networks is a slightly more metacognitive concept of it because it’s studying relationships and connections. 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah, 100%. Again, it’s quite difficult to teach, but it’s hard to be scientific about. But of course, we talk a lot about connecting the dots and encouraging students to actively integrate their knowledge. 

Student Experience and Project-Based Learning

Tom Vander Ark: So what’s a student’s day look like? Are there things called courses or is it all organized around projects? How do you organize the learner experience? 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah. So the first year, in particular, is actually all compulsory, interestingly, because although we’re a bit like an applied liberal arts and sciences program, just one for the 21st century, we don’t have any choice in the first year. So the students all will study a module on inequality together in the first semester and all the inability in the second semester, and then flanking that.

They do experimental design and data science in the first term. Then they use more, kind of, verbal methods. So survey design, interview techniques, ethnography, discourse, analysis, and qualitative methods. And then the second semester, they carry on. They do more advanced data science and data frames or with Python.

And they do a really nice course in visual methods. I’m a scientist by background and a musician. I’ve been really convinced by our brilliant head of arts of the power of the visual to change hearts and minds in the modern world. They trace a really nice trajectory in a visual methods module from the visual, literal visual representation of information, sort of infographics, systems diagramming, right through to the symbolic, where she teaches them the power of kind of symbolic, non verbal images. And they learn how to make videos and images and photographs in that way. Second year, they have more electives and they have to progress in those methods.

They have to be able to get better at data science or better at ethnographic methods or whatever it might be. So there is a sort of through line, which is obliged of them. So they progress in one of the methods, Constantly have an eye on the problems and then last thing, at the end of each year, there’s a complete free reign.

There they do their own project, their own problem statement, but they just have to apply. one qualitative method they’ve learned and one quantitative method they’ve learned to that problem. 

Tom Vander Ark: So there’s a question about student-directed projects over the course of study as I know you have undergraduate and graduate programs, but is there a progression towards more student agency in project authoring?

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah, there is because the So the end of the years one and two, as I mentioned, they have their own project, but it’s only seven weeks. Very free, but it’s only, it’s short. So we have to keep them quite focused on doing something tractable in that time. But in the third year, which is our final year, they have a whole year long capstone, which is like an extended, So they have, it starts right at the beginning of the year, runs right to the end of the year, and they have to produce a project there which combines quantitative and qualitative methods in an interdisciplinary way.

So that has a lot more autonomy, and they keep a logbook, and we touch base with them to check that logbook or that, sometimes it’s a mirror board or something, but there’s evidence of progress through that year. 

Tom Vander Ark: Carl, I’m thinking back to the founding of Minerva University, which is probably another Innovative school that Ben Nelson started about 10 years ago.

When Ben launched Minerva, the Minerva project and Minerva University he organized an outcome framework around a set of important competencies. I wonder to what extent you have an outcome framework at LIS? Or how do you think about naming developing and tracking the growth of important competencies?

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah it’s a great question. And I do admire Minerva’s first year curriculum. I haven’t looked at it for a while actually, but when it first came out, I thought it was really smart and really interesting. We do of course have learning outcomes because we’re fully regulated, we’re required to produce these things, but they’re more in terms of evidencing interdisciplinary mindsets and skill sets.

They are able to take those multiple perspectives. They are able to produce work that evidences the use of two or more disciplines and two or more disciplinary perspectives. We’ve squeaked in where we can some metacognitive stuff about evidence of students’ ability to plan and execute a complex project, work in a team.

We do all the compulsory real-world problems in teams. They’re team assessed and all the methods are individual because we want the individuals to learn the methods, but for the real-world problems, we want them to work in teams to work out. How that works as a team, and actually we think that’s the best way to produce good results in those courses.

A lot of the outcomes are couched in terms of evidencing that you can do that perspective taking, you can do that network building, you can create academic and work and products which show that. 

Tom Vander Ark: How do you help learners track their progress and then how do you help them share their capabilities with the world?

Dr. Carl Gombrich: 

We don’t do any exams. I think that’s important to say — it’s all coursework. We do what are called process pieces which could be called continual assessment I guess where students have very small chunks which they have to submit throughout the course so they know they’re keeping up to date and on track.

Almost all our classes are flipped. So they get the content before the class and in the classes, a lot of interactive stuff, writing short paragraphs, short presentations, group work and so on. So highly interactive classes. And then there’s at least one or two larger summative pieces per module, which should build on in some ways, curate and consolidate those process pieces that the students have learned throughout that time.

Basically we have external organizations, it could be public or private, usually small but sometimes a bit bigger. And the students often work with those organizations to produce a report or do a pitch back to that organization or something they’re interested in. So there we get some interesting external validation of the value of what those students do.

And they get validation too. Although it doesn’t feel like what a lot of their other friends are doing at school It’s actually what a lot of people outside the education sector are pleased to see students doing 

Tom Vander Ark: When a student leaves LIS they leave with a transcript that includes a list of courses. What do they typically have a portfolio of some evidence of work they’ve done?

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yes, all of the above. It’s interesting, actually, when we first started, we had all sorts of ideals. We produced a very nice animated gif of all their curriculum connected together, like a kind of a solar system with connections.

They look beautiful, but no hiring manager cares about that at all. So it was like beautiful to produce. It might look great on your LinkedIn page, but actually the cost benefit was pretty negative. We’re just about to graduate our first cohort, to be honest, so we’re learning what’s really important to employers, and the funny, the gateway here is hiring managers and HR departments.

They’re the people that you have to be. talking to and understanding what they want to see. So I think we’ll learn through this process now. And if they say, look, we just the transcript because it says they studied inequality, they can do some coding and great and create a great video, then that’s all we need to give the students.

We don’t need to give them things that aren’t useful to them. But yeah, we’re learning a lot as our first graduate cohort comes up to getting jobs this summer. 

Tom Vander Ark: Do you feel an obligation to help students find or create work after they leave? And is that a thread through their experience? Are they exploring careers? Are they engaging in any work based learning? 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Oh, very much. That, that’s definitely part of our mission. So one of our mission statements is we want to be a porous university. That means we let the outside world in and we take what we do to the outside. We have some really nice courses. We have a final year course that’s just run for the first time called campaign and communities and campaigns, which was literally going out in London, finding a community that needs something done, talking to them about it, and then trying to work out a campaign to achieve that.

Tom Vander Ark: I love that idea. I wrote a book called Difference Making that sort of argued school should include opportunities to make a difference in your community. Cause I, I just think those are super charged experiences for young people. So I love hearing that you that you do that. 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: We’ve had some good placements already.

Kids haven’t graduated, but they’ve been offered some good jobs. Some of the people you might not expect, standard big corporates, but we had a guy get a job in the police recently. Someone got a job in a software company. So it’s the normal thing, really. I’m always a bit amazed around the neurosis around, Bright kids getting out of university, and getting a job.

They’re going to get jobs. There are jobs out there for anyone who’s interested and got some skills and had some experience at doing stuff, people want bright kids with skills and able to do things. And I’m very relaxed about this aspect, actually. That’s not to say all kids are going to get jobs because the kids themselves sometimes don’t know yet what they want to do.

And that’s okay, too. They’re still only 21, 22. They’re all going to work till they’re 81 or 82. So let’s just chill out about this. And they’ll get there. Because they’ve got, they’ve learned a lot of useful things while they’re with us. 

Tom Vander Ark: Do you do you value internships? Or is most of the work based learning these sort of client projects?

Dr. Carl Gombrich: In the summer we broker internships to our students and yeah, they’ve done all sorts of things. Some work with transport companies — there’s a company on this side of the pond called Innocent Smoothies, a very big smoothie maker.

Tom Vander Ark: So there’s a lot of what we might call career connected learning here of these client projects and internships and service learning that there’s, it feels like there’s a pretty constant engagement with community partners that are often customers for projects. That sounds like a fun place. 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: We like it. It’s intense. People have said to us it’s pretty intense, and you need the holidays, but it’s lively and that connection making keeps it very energizing. 

Tom Vander Ark: So you have your first your first undergraduate cohort graduating in this year?

Dr. Carl Gombrich: That’s right. So we had our first master’s graduates last year. That’s right. The first undergrad this year. 

Tom Vander Ark: And do you have a single master’s program or are there a couple? 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: There’s only one at the moment, but we’re launching a challenger MBA next year, which is an exciting venture for us. We want to do something very different in the MBA space.

Future of Interdisciplinary Learning and AI

Tom Vander Ark: That is that’s very exciting. I was a miseducated engineer and MBA and neither had any interdisciplinary learning. I think that’s fair to say. And MBAs have fallen a bit out of favor on this side of the pond. And I think are ripe for re-imagining. 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: We’ve got some interesting ideas. I think it’s going to be very creative.

It’s going to be a very big picture. We’re going to really dial down, the usual four functions of business, maybe teach them in a small part of the degree, but not prioritize them and that kind of thing. 

Tom Vander Ark: Earlier, you mentioned art visual perhaps performing art. I want to. I want to dive into that just a little bit and particularly given your background as a professional musician it strikes me that particularly the performing arts are an unusually good, often compressed and accelerated learning journey where you can enter individually and collectively in a novice place when you get that new score or script.

And then over the course of a couple of months, go through this rapid upscaling, if you want to use modern language, both individually and collectively. to a point that you’re doing a public performance. And that compressed, accelerated, supported, collective learning journey is really, can be a beautiful thing and a a powerful experience for young people.Does any of that resonate with you? 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah. Or even like learning jazz piano, you can, when you finally get what two five ones are and you can get around the real book and suddenly you’re from nowhere, you think, You can see, oh, actually, if I spent some time on this, I can have a lot of fun.

I think. I don’t honestly know if we have enough of that where we are. It’s a really nice thing to consider how you would encourage that and then map it so that you saw that cognitive advance and improvement. I think, music and sport for me are just the archetypes of learning environments because the feedback loop is so tight.

The costs are so high for getting it wrong. And they’re just brilliant crucibles to understand learning. And so I talk about them a lot, but they’re quite difficult to actually make happen when you’re learning to write an essay or do some coding. The analogy doesn’t pass over as easily as one would like. 

Tom Vander Ark: Carl, i’m channeling two professors from here at the University of Arizona who were on the show a couple years ago and they teach music theater at Arizona .They really encourage everyone in high school and college To have a performing arts experience and they would argue that the experience could be front of the house or back of the house, but you’re part of this team in taking on a complex challenge over a very short period of time, usually under resourced, ending in a planned public appearance a public demonstration. And they would argue that is just a super valuable learning experience.And in many respects, it’s interdisciplinary given the nature of these productions. 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah, Imean, I totally agree. Even things like punctuality are showing up, right? There’s a saying in opera that once is a mistake, twice is a reputation, right? You can’t go on stage twice late and have much of a career.

And that’s incredible. And you think how long, how many times people go on stage during a career, and you try transferring that to a philosophy class. How many times are kids late for a philosophy class? So I agree. I think it’s a fantastic example of when learning really matters, but getting that transfer over is challenging.

Tom Vander Ark: We also wrote a book at the beginning of the pandemic called The Power of Place. And we would argue that place based learning has an unusual potential to provoke awe and wonder. And that usually means getting outside. It doesn’t have to mean a fancy field trip. But it can mean opening the door and just noticing what’s happening, right?

But it is a break from your traditional experience and and experiencing something unexpected that challenges your mental model. And that can be art, but as you noted, it is often an outdoor experience. And so we’re really big fans of that. And I guess that’s part of why I appreciated your attention to art and the visual arts —he experiences that at LSI, cause they, they can be provocative in inviting learners to experience something new and different that, as you said, requires a new perspective, requires them to examine connections. 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah, I think our art teacher does a good job on the aesthetic, which is another thing which has been flattened by the internet.

So you have to revitalize the young people’s feeling of beauty, frankly, I think she does a good job at subtle, but she gets them to create beautiful photographs of themselves and of her. 

Tom Vander Ark: Are you at all bullish on VR, these immersive digital environments, can they? 

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah, we don’t do enough in VR, we we haven’t really pushed for it. I’m yes. I’m perhaps less than I was. I’m quite bullish on AI. I thought we might touch on that.  I think the evidence is mounting that it’s got a lot of applications in cognitive rewiring, which might be very interesting. I haven’t, as that’s not something we teach directly, I haven’t found a place where it’s necessary yet, but we do a course on on storytelling.

And one of the. The teacher, who is also a practitioner who worked with the BBC and did a lot with VR early on. So they do, yeah, they do work with some headsets occasionally and things like that. I don’t know. It hasn’t caught on as I thought it might like five, six years ago, but now there’s a new, is it a new eye goggles thing that some people are wearing?

So maybe it’s just, it’s time is coming. 

Tom Vander Ark: We’re seeing some good evidence here at Arizona State University. Their Dreamscape Learn program is now across the curriculum and there’s some evidence that it these compelling immersive environments are a promising instructional strategy.

You mentioned AI. You’re beginning to use some generative AI in projects?

Dr. Carl Gombrich: Yeah Okay. There’s a big debate in the faculty, actually. Our data science teacher’s really concerned about AI because he thinks people do not understand the fundamentals at all, and that’s his real concern.

So I guess he’s, there’s this end of the argument. At the other end, the people using it very creatively for generating stuff. I used it on my course this year, and I love the outputs. I don’t think it’s that hard to get students to use it well. So basically without going into too much detail, the students had to write an essay, but it was actually called a vision paper, a particular type of essay, very advanced conceptually, which is extremely hard work ‘til AI came along.

Now it’s become very easy to do with AI. It can synthesize beautifully. But I got my students, the main part of their assignment was not just the essay, it was an explainer, a five minute video explainer of how they use the AI to construct the essay.

I think if we can somehow start to assess the use of the AI, we can get to that kind of meta place which is actually very important for interdisciplinarity as well. The students are actively reflecting on their own questions, the use of information that they’re seeing, and we are starting to assess those things.

And I don’t think there’s any excuse for teachers not doing that actually. You go, you have to just go a level up and there’s no excuse then for students also not engaging with that. If I say to a student, they say, I don’t know and I say what don’t you know? And they say, I don’t even know what I know.

And I go, okay. At some point, you have to be able to start to articulate what you don’t know. Otherwise, you’re not going to get any kind of grade for this. I think that’s a good challenge to a student. Just to be able to surface what they’re struggling with and then ask the machine that just gets you going.

That’s not going to get your final grade, but that’s a great first step towards if I can use this word, enforcing curiosity. 

Tom Vander Ark: There was thank you for that. There was a beautiful description of how AI can improve interdisciplinary learning. I want to just name a couple of things you mentioned.

One is just knowledge scaffolding. Because students are entering into such complex subjects, often multiple subjects, that this AI can scaffold, accelerate knowledge development in multiple subjects. So that’s one that I hadn’t really thought about. Two was just problem framing. Three was producing a product, be that a visual product or or, and brain, you also mentioned brainstorming solutions. Ethan Mollick has helped us all understand that more effectively. So that’s a really interesting variety of ways that AI is improving interdisciplinary learning. I’ve kept you well into the dinner hour there in London.

Just as a last question, maybe a few thoughts for some of the ed leaders that that are listening to the show, thinking about high school — should you be doing interdisciplinary learning in high school,?

Dr. Carl Gombrich: It’s a great question. And I’m very respectful of the challenges of high school teachers because they’re dealing with people at a different stage of development.

So I think in the primary school, the first sector interdisciplinarity makes complete sense. You don’t want to trammel kids minds, let them explore, let them do what we call topic work in the UK. My kids always loved that in school. Then you’ve got the kind of university level where I think it’s becoming more and more important.

It’s just, it’s what’s required. You have these complex problems. You have the internet. You have the real-world, which is completely nondisciplinary. And then you’ve got high school, right? And I do understand that teachers want more structure more discipline in the old sense in high school, because adolescents are going through a lot of revolutions.

And if that goes wild, I think it’s very hard to manage. So I would say you need a place for it. You need a place where the students are encouraged or required to bring together these different things and make connections. Otherwise they lose the point of what they’re doing. But I’m actually quite cautious about totally interdisciplinary curricula between the ages of 13 and 18 because I think adolescents are in such a ferment, whatever it is, of their own thinking, taking so many risks. They need that guidance. They need to see some kind of structure as well. So I put the two together in some kind of mix. 

Tom Vander Ark: On this side of the pond, we’re seeing a lot of client connected projects showing up in high school courses.

So it might be an English project or an engineering project and then a growing number of schools are creating a capstone experience at a senior level. And so they’re still pretty well defined experiences with a set of domain outcomes built into them but I think I am optimistic that we’re beginning to see more in a interdisciplinary learning showing up within high school pathways.

We’ve been talking to Dr. Carl Gombrich. He’s the Dean at the London Interdisciplinary School. It’s another reason to go to London. Carl, thank you so much for joining us. What a treat. Dr. Carl Gombrich: Pleasure. Thanks, Tom. I’m sorry we couldn’t go on longer, but we’ve got lives to lead. So thank you for your time.