News from India

by Lynn Barendsen

Our colleague and inspired educator Kiran Sethi has sent us news about the Design for Change (DFC) initiative. The DFC Contest is an international contest encouraging children to make positive change happen in their communities. In India, an international jury narrowed the children’s stories from 2000 to 225 and the national jury met to further filter the stories to the top 100, and then the top 20. 10 special jury awards were also announced.

This year, over 200,000 children across all 29 states of India became “Changemakers.” The stories grew bolder and several age old superstitions and rituals like Mrityu Bhoj (rituals based on feeding people when a family member dies) and Black Magic were challenged. Children designed solutions for a range of problems such as traffic, rainwater harvesting, drug addiction, science aids for the visually impaired, bullying, heavy school bags and garbage. In Kiran’s words, “The children showed all of us what can be achieved when we say ‘I CAN’, instead of ‘Can I’!!”

Several of the top 100 stories are going to be documented and published as part of value and character building curriculum for schools.

Below, please find links to some of the outstanding stories of DFC ’10, and to the contest’s website:

Contest website: designforchangecontest.com

Mrityu Bhoj, Satya Bharti School, Alwar

Jal Hai to Kal Hai, Satya Bharti School, Jaipur

Every Child is an Entrepreneur, Sunrise English Medium School, Pune

Go Garbage, Amrit Vidyalaya, Kalol, Gujarat

The First Rule of Teaching: Do No Harm

by Holly Robinson

It wasn’t until I went on a field trip with my son and his eighth grade teacher that I started pondering the recent debates about how a teacher’s performance in the classroom should be evaluated.

My son and his teacher, Jennifer, were deep in conversation about some machine that my son had built at home out of spare parts. Jennifer listened, asked questions, then listened some more. She’s a former engineer, so she has lots of high-powered technical knowledge she might have sprinkled onto my son’s head like falling leaves. Instead, she focused on getting my son to ask the right questions, inserting facts only where she had to, until at last he said, “Oh! I know what I could try next. Thanks!” I couldn’t follow their conversation in detail – I barely passed high school physics – but it was suddenly clear that I was in the presence of one of those brilliant teachers who we hope like hell our children have at least a few times in their lives.

What makes a teacher brilliant? It’s not easy for me to say, despite the fact that I’ve ushered three children and two stepchildren through school and into college. Along the way, I’ve attended countless parent-teacher conferences and PTO meetings. I’ve been a school volunteer. But it was only at that moment, with Jennifer and my son, that I really considered what makes a teacher brilliant and not just okay, or downright evil. While we’ve never had a teacher as evil as Miss Trunchbull in Roald Dahl’s brilliant book, Matilda – the one who locked children in a tiny room with spikes on the walls – we’ve certainly had our share of scary teachers.

There was, for instance, the elementary school teacher who made fun of my youngest son because he was anxious and had facial tics. When he told her that he wanted to be a mathematician, she laughed and said, “You’ll never be a mathematician if you keep making those faces!” He also had a teacher who, when it was time to make gingerbread houses for Christmas, called him “defiant” because he didn’t follow her A-frame plan and created his own design. The very next year, a teacher told my son that he would “grow up to be another Unibomber” because he had drawn a sketch of a gun he’d seen on YouTube.

Most teachers, thankfully, have not been so woefully ignorant or mean. Among the many teachers in the lives of our five children, most have simply followed their hearts in an effort to do good in the world. They get up every morning, balancing family life with work like most of us – only their work involves the emotional and exhausting rigors of caring for other people’s children. They fight for what their students need, and sometimes, like the rest of us, they are irritable or too exhausted to be kind. They snap at the kids, or even, in the case of one math teacher at our junior high who, after being pushed to the limit by a wayward kid taunting him from the doorway, chase kids down the hall while waving chairs over their heads. Really.

Burnout isn’t their fault, or at least not entirely. The educational system is overburdened – we all know that – and often more of a premium is placed on crowd control and compliance among students than on anything else. Students come to class unprepared or are confrontational, and parents are equally so. It’s no wonder that our teachers are stressed and overwhelmed. If they’d wanted to be cops, they would have signed up for the police academy.

Yet, a few rare teachers continue to do their jobs well, or even brilliantly. My oldest daughter, always fearful of writing, became an avid writer because her sixth grade English teacher made her believe that she could do it – even as that teacher was battling breast cancer. My oldest son’s first social studies teacher inspired in him a lifelong love of politics. A French teacher’s encouragement led our younger daughter to study in Paris.

What sets those teachers apart? Brilliance in the classroom isn’t about a teacher’s education, training, or classroom experience. No, the kind of teacher who inspires students to learn because they want to, instead of because they have to, has more to do with elusive qualities, like being willing to meet a child where he is, having a keen and sturdy sense of humor, respecting every child’s strengths, and bravely setting forth every day ready to try something new.

There has been a lot of debate about how best to test our teachers, such as asking whether we should use standardized student test scores to evaluate a teacher’s performance. But the most important things to measure in a teacher are things you can’t test for, like the willingness to trust that, within every child, there is a better person who just needs to be coaxed to come out. How do you test for that? While we figure that out, the first rule to follow when evaluating teachers should be the same one we use in medicine. Teachers, like doctors, should First, do no harm.

Learn more about Holly and her work at her website.

Educating for Failure, Seeking Succes

by Yael Karakowsky

Antonio arrives to the classroom, greets the children and sits with them. He is holding under his arm a box of wooden toys. Kids are excited by his visit; it seems like a fun activity. One by one, Antonio takes out the wooden characters from the box, and so, the adventure begins. He gives each child a character in the story, and all of them, unwittingly, become involved in his history.

Antonio was born in Veracruz, and he remembers his departure to Mexico City as if it were yesterday. He was around 5 years old when his father got a better job opportunity. For him, “Goodbyes on trains are just like in the movies…. The saddest ones.” “Have you seen one?” He asks the children, and while he does so, he takes out a wooden train from his box. It was time to leave Veracruz, time to start a new life and deal with new challenges as a family.

While listening to his words and seeing the movement of the train, it was clear that the children were filled with sadness. It was certainly different from what Antonio experienced…but they were attentive both to his words and his heart.

– “Goodbye to my cat.” (Antonio asks a child for the wooden cat, and removes it from the scene while mentioning these words.)

– “Goodbye to my friends.” (Again, he asks those who are holding these characters to put them away.)

– “Now…My grandparents? Goodbye, too.” (And again, he removes pieces from the game.)

Little by little, the staging remains with fewer characters and the children’s’ faces show surprise, sadness and empathy.

Suddenly, there is a twist in the story. Even though Antonio recalls this experience as a sad and difficult moment, Mexico City had its charms. After some time and while requiring some effort on his part, he now perceives Mexico City as a city that gave him many opportunities. He found new friends, learned new things, met his wife, and has formed a beautiful family. Today, he is in the classroom in order to share a life experience with Mariana, his daughter. (In anticipation of his visit to the classroom, Mariana and the rest of the children prepared a thank you note for him. She greeted her father eagerly on the day of his visit.)

This is how Antonio participates in the Project Educating for Failure, Seeking Success. We narrate real stories to children, or as Antonio wrote in his own story and said to Mariana: “I have been asked to tell you a story, but this is not a story Mariana…this is part of my history.”

Educating for Failure, Seeking Success seeks to involve parents actively in their children’s education. How? By providing children with real stories, life experiences through which parents become “humanized” and are much more than “perfect” images. Through this project, each parent is invited to write about a personal encounter with failure, pain or difficulty that can be used to teach and be an example of a learning experience.

Why? Because we were probably all educated to seek success, not realizing that failure is inevitably a part of the journey. Because dealing with failure at the outset can be the first step to success. Because a person that grows by learning may be more prepared to face an unpredictable life and have better tools while dealing with future frustrations. What for? To share a life lesson, to teach children that in life it may take many plantings before you can, successfully, harvest your crops.

Like all stories, our stories have an introduction, a body and a conclusion. It is important to consider that the conclusion of these stories does not refer to a solution, but a proposal to address the challenge. The project seeks to share with children that not all stories have a solution, since life doesn’t offer solutions for everything.

I considered the Project a success. After these experiences and by their own initiative, kids started writing and sharing their own stories. Suddenly, the classroom was full of stories, all being heard and respected. The librarian was amazed after receiving a donation from one of the kids – he wanted to keep his “book” on the library shelf, expecting everyone in school to be able to read and understand him. Would I do it again? The more I read, the more I hear, and the more I perceive…the more I learn. So yes, I would do it again, and again.

Announcing Shelter – a new book by one of our GW Alumni

by Scott Seider

Scott Seider is an assistant professor of education at Boston University. He completed his doctorate in education at Harvard University where he worked under Professor Howard Gardner on the GoodWork Project. His research focuses on the ethical development of teenagers and emerging adults — the ethical “E” of the GoodWork Project. In ‘Shelter,’ he considers the impact upon college students of volunteering at an entirely student-run homeless shelter.

Every winter night the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter brings together society’s most privileged and marginalized groups under one roof: Harvard students and the homeless. What makes the Harvard Square Shelter unique is that it is operated entirely by Harvard College students. It is the only student-run homeless shelter in the United States.

Shelter demonstrates how the juxtaposition of privilege and poverty inside the Harvard Square Shelter proves transformative for the homeless men and women taking shelter there, the Harvard students volunteering there, and the wider society into which both groups emerge each morning. In so doing, Shelter makes the case for the replication of this student-run model in major cities across the United States.

Inspiring and energizing, Shelter offers a unique window into the lives of America’s poorest and most privileged citizens as well as a testament to the powerful effects that can result when members of these opposing groups come together.

Shelter can be purchased on Amazon.com.

My Summer Job

by Lucy Curran

I have so loved working on the Good Work Project this summer. The Good Work Team is a wonderful and inspiring group of people, and it has truly been a pleasure to work with them. In addition, it was difficult for me to immerse myself in the ideas of Good Work and not come away with a fresh perspective on my own life. As I typed up discussion questions for the Toolkit, I mulled over the questions myself. How would I have acted if faced with this or that dilemma in my academic work? As I drafted reflective activities, I imagined how the core idea of each activity might illuminate the places in my own work that needed improvement. Was my own current academic work excellent? I found myself wondering. Was it ethical? Engaging?

The answer that emerged struck me with particular force with regard to the third quality of Good Work: engagement. This is not to say that I do not also struggle to make my work excellent at school, or that I never face ethical dilemmas in my work. It is simply that excellence and ethics tend to be more at the forefront of my mind when I think of what I strive for in my school work. When I asked myself if my own work was engaging to me, my answer was sometimes. I find that I often disregard the importance of finding work that is personally meaningful. I have a tendency to discount work that is fun and exciting for me because it somehow seems less serious and important! An academic mentor who knows this tendency of mine well once encouraged me to pursue work that “made my heart sing,” and I think this gets to the core of what engagement means. When I find work that truly engages me, it makes me feel energized and impatient to begin. For me, the arts have this effect: there is nothing more exciting than having a fresh canvas before me and a paintbrush in my hand; and there is nothing more exhilarating than performing a dramatic scene onstage with a group of committed actors.

It is also becoming easier for me to sense when work is not engaging to me. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote: “If your morals make you dreary, depend on it: they are wrong.” I think the same could be said of work. Work that makes me dreary is not engaging, and is not work that I should be pursuing. Of course, it is easier said than done, I have found. It is easy to convince myself that soul-deadening work is too important, or too serious to give up. And yet, I have at times paid the price for blindly pursuing work that makes me dreary. It is not helpful to me or to anybody for me to slog—feeling martyrish—through a sea of work that I dislike.

I have come to understand that when I find work that truly engages me, I cannot wait to get out of bed in the morning. Instead of waking up with a sense of dread and hitting the snooze button, I am excited to start the day. This does not have to be true every day; but it ought to be the trend. In his recent commencement speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs said he tries to look the mirror every day and ask himself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” He said that “whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” This is his way of keeping himself honest. As I look ahead to my final year of college and further still to the great wide unknown of life after college, my goal is to keep myself honest. I want to find out what makes my heart sing, and then I want to pursue this work whole-heartedly.

I feel so honored to have had a chance to help out a little bit with Good Work this summer, and I know that I will be drawing upon tools from the Toolkit in the coming months as I figure out my plans for the next few years. Working with the Good Work Team has been a true pleasure, and the work has been—among many other things—very engaging!