Do Students Really Remember What They Learn in School? Life and Career after Exposure to the Good Work Course

by Daniel Mucinskas and Victoria Nichols

At the end of a typical university semester, professors will hand out evaluations to students with the hope of garnering insightful and constructive feedback about a course. Unfortunately, professors will typically distribute these evaluations in the final moments of class or in conjunction with an examination. As such, students will frequently dismiss the questions, providing vague or incomplete responses as they aren’t allowed the time necessary to produce thoughtful answers. Moreover, students are almost never given time to pause and reflect on their experiences before providing an evaluation; rather, the process is sudden and soon over. By requesting responses immediately upon the termination of a course, professors are limiting the scope of student surveys. If instructors were to administer surveys years after students complete a course, the answers would conceivably provide insight into the long-term personal and professional impact of the material. With this in mind, Dr. Howard Gardner, along with a team of Harvard University researchers, set out to investigate the long-term effects of a course on Good Work by surveying a wide range of former students.

At the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Gardner has been teaching a course for 15 years on “Good Work in Education: When Excellence, Ethics, and Engagement Meet.” The course is an overview of the Good Work Project with two major components: in-class discussions of topical events through a Good Work lens and an extensive research paper on a Good Work-related topic. In the fall of 2013, a survey of eight questions was sent via email to 101 former H-175 students, soliciting their feedback on the course. The questions prompted the recipients to recall the most memorable course content and to discuss whether H-175 had changed how they approached situations in their professional and/or personal lives. A total of 47 substantive responses were received. Two graders (the authors of this blog) then scored all answers on a 0-to-3 point scale for five separate measures: assignments/readings/discussions; research paper; professional influence; personal influence; and Good Work concepts. As newly tuned social scientists, we had a crash course in achieving reliability. And, indeed, after many rounds of independent scoring, we eventually reached agreement.

Once scoring was completed, the highest-scored responses were ultimately analyzed for overarching thematic concepts. Detailed coding revealed significant and positive trends amongst former students, with 79% of responses at least mentioning, and many illustrating in anecdotes, how the course has been professionally and/or personally influential. The most rewarding part of the experience was seeing the number of former students who felt as though the course was a key part of their graduate education and that it had given them tools with which to navigate particular situations in their later lives. For example, one former student described using the Good Work framework as a part of her job while selecting recipients of grants, while another alum discussed reevaluating what it means to be personally and professionally successful and where those two realms overlap. As one student said, “My participation in the Good Work course helped me to begin to understand the complexities of ethics and ethical action.” Moreover, 45% of students stated that the final research paper was a powerful experience.

This method of assessment, however, does have limitations. While evaluating a class from the perspective of several months or years after completion appears to provide unique and helpful insights, there is the possibility that participants’ memories may be inaccurate, flawed, or incomplete. It should also be noted that not all students who have taken H-175 were emailed; moreover, not all former students who were contacted responded. In turn, there may have been a participant bias in that those who responded to the survey may have also been those who had the most profound and beneficial experiences in the course.

Nonetheless, student responses revealed that H-175 had a lasting impact on the majority of students’ lives and career. Upon reviewing the results from this survey, Gardner plans to make changes in the H175 course. Educators at all levels would undoubtedly also find it useful to engage in long-term assessment of former students in order to evaluate the effects of assignments and curricula over time. This is particularly true of a course like Good Work. Since the material is practical and adaptable across a wide variety of situations, assessment and evaluation are best done from a vantage of several years By that point, former students can assess whether, and if so, how they have employed the Good Work framework in their lives as a whole.

Sifting Through Your Values

by Amma Marfo

This post, originally published in the blog, “The Dedicated Amateur”, is being reprinted here with permission from the author.

“I don’t just care about making you all good at your jobs, though that is really important. I also want you to be good people. That sounds really cheesy, I’m sure, but it’s important and it’s something I want to help with.”

The statement above is a rough excerpt from my speech at our student organization Fall Planning Day, one of our biggest training opportunities for student organization leaders on campus and a significant platform to get relevant information across to this segment of our student leader population. While we had sessions on procedural items such as reserving space, using our campus events calendar, and financial paperwork, I believe that values education and clarification deserves a place on that stage as well, so I incorporated a values exercise into my section of the day.

The link for the activity and accompanying resources will follow this post, but I do want to explain how we went about this process.

Students were given a packet of slips, thirty slips in all, and told to read through them all and spread them out on their table so all could be seen. Bit by bit, they were told to eliminate some of the values present by flipping them face-down, until five remained. Those five were the most important values to them. This exercise was completed in four rounds: identifying personal values, values as an organization member, values of the organization, and what values they want from OSAMP staff, SGA, and those who work with them.

It was this last part that I want to share here in this blog. We all have values that guide us as professionals, and we like to think those are the ones that students appreciate most. To get an idea of what guides the work of my fellow professionals, I took to Twitter and asked.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

 Amma Marfo @ammamarfo

If you had to distill the values with which you do your work down to three words, which three would you pick? #sachat #sagrad

7:23 AM – 10 Sep 2013

I was really excited to see the responses that I got from everyone, and put them into this Wordle for a more graphical representation of the words selected. Even without a common bank of values to choose from, the larger words will indicate which values rose to the top. Take a look to see which words recurred: “empathy”, “integrity”, “caring”, “service”, and “justice”.

 Now, take note of those words, in comparison to the ones that students deemed essential to good working relationships with student activities staff, organization advisors, and their SGA members who oversee many student organization processes:

Of particular note to me was the recurrence of the values “openness” and “honesty”. While students understand (at least in an academic sense) that we can’t always share all the information we have with them, they are also very aware when they’re being given the run-around, or even flat-out lied out. The degree to which this term came up helped me to remember to continue being straightforward with students- including saying “I don’t know” if I truly don’t know an answer.
Another important observation for me was the number of times that professional conduct and professional demeanor surfaced as a desirable value. We all want to have friendly relationships with students, and the degree to which we successfully create these friendly dynamics varies. But when it came down to it, and we asked close to 200 student leaders what they want from those who they work with, they asked for professionalism. Be it by asking for teaching or mentoring relationships, requesting quality work from us, or stressing their desire for hard work and commitment, they want us to be professional.

To be frank, when I look over this cloud again, I find that the values they appreciate, are ones I would like to see in them. We want our student leaders to approach their work professionally, and with the understanding that some initiatives and projects will take work. We want to learn from them, just as they want to learn from us. We would like them to be respectful. And, most common- we want them to be honest.

Do you see intersections between the two clouds? In my estimation, professionals and students alike value having good working relationships, understanding the feelings and thoughts of the parties involved, and being considerate of the opinions and developmental processes each side is experiencing. In the best case, we are all learning each day, whether we’re professionals or students. Being considerate of those learning moments could be essential to better understanding one another, and being able to work together better as offices, student organizations, agencies, and individuals. As I move forward in the year, I look forward to sharing these results with them, and framing the work we each do through the lens of the values they would like to see in us.

Do you incorporate values education into the work you do with your student leaders? What values do they find important? What values do you want to see in your own student leaders?

For more information on the Value Sort activity, a part of the GoodWork toolkit, click the button below:

How Moments of Good Transformed My High School

by Molly Freed

It was a rare sunny day in a stretch of bleary days in Seattle, so most of the Chief Sealth International (CSI) High School students had shed their jackets and were sporting their World Water Week (WWW) festival t-shirts. In the far corner, my team of highly skilled freshmen and sophomores helped some participants don sheets to affix their five gallon water jugs to their backs. Others had already grabbed a jug and started running. I knew this would stop soon when the blisters on their hands started smarting, and the realization of what “40 pounds” really meant had hit them. Some of our Student Body officers had already begun handing out raffle tickets to those students who were taking the exercise seriously, demonstrating good work ethic, or helping others. They would run out of tickets in ten minutes. I watched some of our East African students demonstrate the way that they had carried water when they lived in Ethiopia, and how they kicked it once their arms got tired. I watched our security guard, Jimbo, make his 31st lap of the day, and Mr. Ezeonwu enjoy the points and gleeful shouts that accompanied his first lap balancing the water on his head. In that moment, I knew that I had actually succeeded in providing our community with a small and heavily diluted glimpse of what it is like for millions of children around the world who must carry water to their families every day.

Because of this moment and hundreds like it that were experienced during WWW, and despite all the stress and sweat and coffee, my team decided to put on WWW again. And again. And though I wasn’t there to facilitate after my own graduation, other students (nearly 80 of them!) stepped up to lead what is still a behavior-altering festival three years later.

Let’s be honest, doing good work is not always the number one concern of a high school student. Especially not at CSI High School in Seattle, where I was among the 75 percent that graduated in 2011. Most of us were either focused on graduating on time, juggling part time jobs, or trying to shine on our college applications. In crunch time, my friends were using library computers to finish applications, and choosing between after-school activities and babysitting their siblings. Sacrifices in excellence, engagement, or even ethics occasionally had to be made.

I was lucky. I was surrounded by a network of some of the most inspirational, hard-working, and diverse high school students in the city, and yet I had been raised with massive amounts of support and opportunity that many of my fellow students had not. This combination (thanks Mom and Dad!) granted me the unique ability to apply to the Bezos Scholars Program (BSP) in 2010, a leadership development program that fully funds the journey of 12 rising seniors and their educators from across the country to meet at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Once there, we participated in discussions around the most pressing issues of our time. We also had small group meetings with change-makers from around the world who were doing good work to address these issues.

The most essential part of the Program, however, was the leadership training that equipped me to bring the experience back to Seattle and the halls of Chief Sealth. I was tasked with creating a Local Ideas Festival (LIF) in my own community, and engaging them on an issue of my choosing. My BSP Educator Noah Zeichner and I chose to focus on water (but honestly it was kind of a non-decision, since it encompassed poverty, hunger, education and health – issues we were both passionate about).We put this passion into action by launching WWW, which we hoped would mobilize our school and community by connecting critical needs in our own backyard to water issues around the globe.

As we started planning our festival in August, we set lofty goals. Reality set in around December, when we realized that the to-do list on Mr. Zeichner’s whiteboard covered an entire wall, I was studying for finals and applying to colleges, and Mr. Zeichner was essentially working three jobs with a newborn daughter at home. We relied on the passion of our faculty, the unrelenting energy of our student team, and the faith and support provided by community stakeholders to get us through winter.

As spring and the week of our festival arrived, so too did grant money, nationally renowned speakers, and current Governor Jay Inslee. We ate homemade Mexican food provided by the moms of some of our team, and we (under)sold shirts and water bottles to attendees and students. We painted posters after school, choreographed and chickened out of doing a flash mob, and raised about $3,000 for Water 1st International.

On the final day of WWW, as students cycled through their choice of 17 different locally and globally themed water workshops, I took the time to actually absorb what was happening. I was running the Walk for Water, and I had just finished hyping up the kids and their teachers by pitting them against the other study halls and challenging them to carry more water than 7 year old girls in developing nations must carry every day. I saw variations of this scene repeated throughout the day, in every session I attended, among a demographic that’s usually painted as the most apathetic in our society.

Upon reflection, I don’t think these students participated or stepped up to lead because they were passionate about water – I don’t even think I did it because I was passionate about water. It was a huge factor, obviously, and I’m pretty confident it’s an issue I will work with for the rest of my life. Yet the components of my festival experience that I remember most vividly could have revolved around any world issue. The parts that I remember were truly moments of good work – little moments where high school students, faculty, or community members found themselves in a position to make a difference, and took it. A girl giving up her allowance to help build a well. A teacher breaking from her curriculum of 20 years to do a unit on our local watershed. A parent telling his children stories of his own experience with water scarcity.

So no, doing good work isn’t easy in high school. The structures are rigid, and the models of success are often narrow. Mr. Zeichner and I knew that operating inside of this paradigm wouldn’t impact our students. We knew that in order to inspire we had to produce examples of good that students could relate to across a huge spectrum of interests and passions. In the same way that I had been ignited by my experience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, we wanted to create a ripple effect that would radiate out from WWW.

Most high school students have way too many things to think about, especially in communities of lower socio-economic class. Surrounding them with an environment of positive examples, igniting their interests and capturing their attention made them want to do good. That’s what we did with WWW, and that’s what we think will be successful for other school-wide festivals that want to make an impact.

Molly Freed is a 2010 Bezos Scholar and rising junior at Scripps College in Claremont, CA. 

The Bezos Scholars Program @ the Aspen Institute is a year-long leadership development program for public high school juniors and educators to put their education into action. It begins with a scholarship to the Aspen Ideas Festival and continues through the following school year when Bezos Scholar teams return home to launch sustainable, Local Ideas Festivals that transform their schools and communities. Learn more: www.bezosfamilyfoundation.org/Scholars, www.facebook.com/BSPAspen, twitter.com/BezosScholars