The Tikkun Project
Lesson
5
What Does It Mean to Be a Difference Maker?
Concept
To transition from passive observers into active civic agents, students must develop a clear, criteria-based evaluation framework for what constitutes a "Difference Maker." By analyzing both global figures and everyday community helpers through the dual lens of action and underlying values, students learn to extract actionable wisdom from role models to refine their own local project plans.
Focus Question
What makes someone a true Difference Maker, and how can we use the lessons of other change-makers to strengthen our own plans?
Knowledge & Understanding Goals
Language, Comprehension Strand C, Grade 3: Synthesize information from oral presentations, interviews, and primary sources to construct persuasive arguments and refine personal writing.
Language, Oral Communication Strand B, Grade 3: Present a reasoned argument to a group, citing evidence to support a debatable claim.
Thinking & Learning Skills
Thinking Skills (Criteria Application): Testing genuinely ambiguous, debatable cases against explicit criteria, not just clear-cut examples.
Research Skills (Case Study): Researching and presenting a real figure's actions and underlying values.
Context
Now that students have established their core values (Lesson 4) and targeted their personal action domain (Lesson 2), this lesson provides the diagnostic engine for the remainder of the unit - and is where all three of the unit's criteria-based tools converge: the observable-action habit from Lesson 1, the value-naming vocabulary from Lesson 4, and a third, more demanding criteria set applied to genuinely ambiguous cases.
Lesson Outline
BUILDING A DEFINITION
Pose: people change things every day - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. How do we decide if someone is truly acting as a positive Difference Maker? Introduce three criteria: helps solve an important challenge for individuals, society, or the environment; acts in a way that demonstrates core attributes (Chesed, Ometz Lev, Acharayut); inspires and guides others who want to make a difference.
TESTING THE CRITERIA ON CLEAR AND DEBATABLE CASES
In groups, students apply the criteria to a mix of individuals - clear examples (Greta Thunberg, Rosalie Abella, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Wangari Maathai, Autumn Peltier, David Suzuki, and Biblical figures including Deborah, Ruth, Esther, and Judah Maccabee) and genuinely debatable ones (a crossing guard just doing their job, a student who puts money in a Tzedakah box weekly, a teacher, a doctor, a government official). Discuss questions like: does a crossing guard make a difference if they're just doing their job? Students should ground their answer in the same evidence-based habit from Lesson 1: what does the crossing guard actually do, specifically, and does that action meet the three criteria - not just whether the job title sounds impressive or ordinary. Is everyone who wears a supportive t-shirt a difference-maker? Students may reconsider or affirm their criteria based on these test cases.
BUILDING OUR OWN LIST
Groups list five people who meet the criteria for being a Difference-Maker (from their own lives or well-known figures) and, for each, answer: how effectively did they help solve an important problem? How did their action demonstrate a positive value?
RESEARCHING AND PRESENTING
In small teams, students select one Difference Maker to research (or use one already discussed) and create a short presentation or "Change-Maker Trading Card" explaining their actions and how they exemplify the three criteria.
Notes for Teaching and Evaluation
Deliberately including genuinely debatable cases alongside clear-cut historical figures is what makes this a real test of the criteria, not a confirmation exercise.
Including named Biblical figures (Deborah, Ruth, Esther, Judah Maccabee) rather than a vague 'Moses or other Biblical figures' placeholder gives students concrete, researchable individuals whose specific actions can actually be tested against the three criteria.
The Change-Maker Trading Card format gives the research task a concrete, bounded output appropriate for Grade 3, while still requiring the same three-criteria justification used throughout the lesson.