Announcing The Good Project Fundamental Lessons

We are excited to announce The Good Project Fundamental Lessons, which can be found on our website here. 

This set of 16 lessons organized into 4 units serves as an introduction to the core concepts of The Good Project. Adapted from our longer 45-minute lessons (here), each fundamental lesson is approximately 15-minutes long. They are designed for secondary school students but are adaptable to middle school, and some lessons may well work with younger audiences.

Similar to our longer curriculum, the Fundamental Lessons include introductory material to familiarize teachers with The Good Project’s approach and theory of change. Each individual lesson includes an overarching goal, lists the core concepts covered in the lesson, and indicates any prerequisite lessons. The lesson instructions are detailed and broken down into separate steps with recommended timing in order to help adhere to the 15-minute window. All necessary worksheets and reading materials are also included. 

While we wish all students had the opportunity to delve deeply into the ideas and frameworks related to “good work”, we realize classroom time is at a premium. Our hope is that this abbreviated curriculum sparks interest in both students and educators, and that it provides enough of an overview for students to begin to think about how they might view themselves as “good workers.”

We would like to thank The Argosy Foundation for providing the generous funding that made this work possible. The Good Project has also received significant support from The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation, The Endeavour Foundation, and additional anonymous funders. 

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want to connect as you implement these lessons with your students. We are available via our “contact us” page, which can be found here.

New Resource! The complete Civics Blog Series

Good Citizenship: Concluding Note

 In this blog series, The Good Project team has sought to illuminate the relationship between good work and good citizenship.

• What is Good Citizenship? explains that we have extended the 3 Es of Good Work—excellence, ethics and engagement—to elucidate the concepts of “good citizenship.”

• Good Person, Good Worker, Good Citizen investigates the distinctions between these various roles, drawing on two key Good Project concepts: neighborly morality and ethics of roles.

•  5Ds, 3Es and One Good Citizen applies the five “Ds” of Dilemmas (Define, Discuss, Debate, Decide, and Debrief) to analyze a difficult decision faced by a social entrepreneur. We consider her choices and reflect upon what we can surmise about both good work and good citizenship.

•  Good Citizenship Through Good Work proposes that these two concepts may in fact coexist. Personal reflection is used to unpack ways in which good citizenship might be achieved through good work.

•  The Hope of Global Citizenship traces some of the many meanings of citizenship; it describes the increasing importance of a newly developed concept, global citizenship.

 We are delighted to share the series in full, in PDF form. You can access the series by clicking the button below:

New Dilemma: The Pediatric Protector

by The Good Project Research Team

Have you ever felt torn between your professional responsibilities and your friends and family? Perhaps you are one of the 56% of American adults who find it difficult to balance work and family responsibilities. Or perhaps you’re a student who struggles to balance your responsibilities to school while also finding time to hang out with your peers--how much time do you have to spend on homework, and how much time is it okay to spend texting with friends? 

At The Good Project, we talk about this balancing act between professional and more personal responsibilities as a balance between neighborly morality and ethics of roles. Neighborly morality refers to how an individual might show kindness and respect to those in their immediate social circles; it includes behaviors such as honesty and other prosocial actions. In contrast, ethics of roles refers to the standards, norms, and regulations expected of those acting in a professional capacity (including students); one might think of the Hippocratic Oath for those in the medical field.

A new dilemma posted on our website deals with this tension between wanting to maintain one’s duty to one’s profession versus wanting to uphold one’s responsibilities to one’s neighbors. Please keep in mind that this dilemma deals with the sensitive topic of child abuse. Entitled The Pediatric Protector, it reads: 

Eliza is a retired former pediatrician who now works as a private language tutor. She often spends time bringing her grandchildren, ages eight and five, to their nearby playground. Her grandchildren recently struck up a friendship with a new six year old girl on the playground, who told them that her mother had “banged her up” at her home for playing on the stairs, so much so that she was in pain on the playground. After hearing about this from both her grandchildren, Eliza is not sure what to do. As a pediatrician, she was a mandated reporter, required to report any child abuse to the appropriate authorities. But she also knows that children can exaggerate or make mistakes; perhaps the mother was trying to keep the child safe, or she had fallen on her own. Eliza is told by a child welfare hotline that it is her decision whether to report or not. Her pediatrician friends urge her to report, and she feels obligated to as a former doctor. But Eliza worries the child could end up in a foster home where she might not be cared for.

The full dilemma can be read here. How would you describe the tension between the ethics of roles and neighborly morality Eliza is feeling? If you were in a similar situation, is there someone you would consult for advice?

On the one hand, as a former practicing pediatrician, Eliza is dealing with the requirements of her former responsibilities as a mandated reporter, an ethics of roles issue. On the other hand, Eliza cares for the children involved and is worried about their welfare should they end up in poor care, an issue of neighborly morality. What decision should she make, and what factors should she weigh in her decision making?