GoodWork Pilot in Radboud Academic Hospital, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

by Alexandrien Van Der Burgt-Franken

The GoodWork Project has been working with Stichting Beroepseer (The Professional Pride Foundation) in the Netherlands  for many months, and we are very excited about the  work they are doing. They started a GoodWork Hub this year, and now are piloting GoodWork sessions using the Toolkit in various professional settings. Below, read an account of the first of these sessions at the Radboud Hospital in Nijmegen and the plans for future sessions.

The Professional Pride Foundation in the Netherlands is starting to use  the GoodWork Toolkit  to lead sessions on GoodWork in an academic hospital. The translated GoodWork Toolkit will be used during four sessions.  For these sessions, three groups of hospital employees will be selected: the junior staff, the nurses, and the heads of the different departments of the hospital, including senior doctors and educators. The first session took place in April, and the second session will start this week.

Yolande Witman, doctor and researcher, and Alexandrien van der Burgt, trainer, coach and chairman of the Stichting Beroepseer (Professional Pride Foundation) are the process leaders of these sessions.

The central theme of the first session was, “GoodWork in general”. The main questions here included: what is GoodWork? Why is it important? What do we need to achieve GoodWork? What questions do we have about GoodWork?

The session started with interviews. The participants were asked to interview one another. They discussed the question “What makes you a good professional?”.

After the interviews, the facilitators led a discussion about GoodWork and the inherent challenges in achieving GoodWork.  This discussion enabled the participants to think about their own criteria for GoodWork in their professions.  At the end of this first session the participants were asked to sort the value-sort cards to determine which values they prioritize in their careers.

In the second session, participants will talk about excellence. Two narratives from the Toolkit will be used:  one about Alfred Bloom (“Chasing Excellence”) and Lauren (“The Price of Principles). The target of this session is to formulate a useful definition for excellence and to explore the criteria included in excellence.  Participants will also investigate the difference between professional and personal standards for excellent work.

In the third session, the focus will turn to ethics and GoodWork.  The fourth session will involve a discussion about engagement, or the meaning professionals find in their work.

At the end of these sessions facilitators plan to organize a central meeting where the three different groups will be brought together. During this final meeting, they will share their experiences from previous sessions and exchange ideas. The hope is that these disparate groups will learn from one another.

In September the results of the GoodWork pilot in the Radboud Hospital in Nijmegen will be presented and discussed.

Stay tuned for updates on the next few sessions and on the final session in September.

Coaching at the Frontiers

by Christina Congleton

Compare and contrast:  Marshall Goldsmith, Jayson Blair, and me. First, I’ll tell you how we are different.  Dr. Goldsmith has a reputation for doing “good work”.  He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author, and according to Forbes one of the most influential business thinkers in the world.  Mr. Blair is a former reporter for the New York Times.  He notoriously engaged in “compromised work” by plagiarizing and fabricating news stories and was forced to resign, along with two editors, in 2003.  As for me, I am a master’s student in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, currently reflecting on my professional aspirations.

Aside from a connection to the Times (yes, I am a reader, building a stomach for the digital subscription transition), what all three of us have in common is that we call ourselves “coaches”.  Dr. Goldsmith is an authority on executive coaching.  Mr. Blair, having left the journalism profession, now works as a life and career coach. After completing a year-long training and certification program, I’ve been building my own coaching business focused on human development.  This year I’ll be mentoring a group of students through the same coach training process.

Beyond our shared professional titles, what are the similarities in our work?  The troubling answer is that, even as one of the three coaches mentioned above, I don’t know.  Coaching is an emerging field of practice, still in the process of finding its identity.  It began attracting attention in the 1980’s, and has steadily gained in popularity.  The number of coaching-related articles in peer-reviewed journals has climbed steadily and coaching has been estimated to be a billion dollar industry.  It has also been called a “Wild West”, devoid of barriers to entry or clear selection criteria for consumers.

This wild western terrain is populated by practitioners offering a wide range of services: from Six Sigma business coaching to aura coaching; from Tony Robbins-style motivational work to ADD coaching.  People call themselves “coach” after having read a book, taken a day-long seminar, or dedicated months or even years of their lives to training.

The coaching community did its best to bring a sheriff to town in 1995 by establishing the International Coach Federation (ICF).  The ICF has delineated standards of practice for coaching called Core Competencies, and it has established a Code of Ethics.  These two sets of symbolic codes—one for knowledge and practice, the other for ethics—are what the industry presumptively needs in order to be considered a bona fide profession.  Yet debate continues: whether coaching should be a profession, how it should be monitored,whether its focus should be delineated.

For a study conducted last fall, I interviewed thirteen full-time coaches. A few endorsed the ethics and standards proposed by the ICF, while others said, “I don’t know if the ICF is the answer”, and “I don’t agree with all the ICF has to say”.  Interviewees indicated concerns about the continued lack of barriers to entry, since anyone can “hang a shingle” and call him or herself a coach.  One coach said she was keeping up her ICF certification, but that it held little meaning for her clients. Interestingly, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith does not claim to be certified, yet of the three coaches mentioned in my original comparison he has had the greatest impact on the field.

I’m left with the puzzle of  how best to establish coaching as a profession characterized by good work—work that is excellent, ethical, and engaging.  The good news is that if coaches are “cowboys” exploring the frontiers of a new profession, we certainly represent the warmest hearted of mavericks.  The coaches I interviewed in the fall expressed deep dedication to their work and an impressive sense of responsibility to their clients, their own integrity, and the wider world.  Indeed, such a sense of responsibility is integral to good coaching.  To cultivate a culture of good work, the coaching community will need to do more than tip its hat and ride off into the sunset.  We must reflect on how we can keep ourselves and each other on a well-traveled path,and how we will invite others to advance toward horizons that are still hazy in the distance, but worth pursuing.

Needed: A Reversal of Figure/Ground

by Howard Gardner

Those who remember their introductory psychology will recall the concept of ‘figure /ground.’ Most graphic displays, like photographs or paintings, feature a dominant object (or ‘figure’) in the foreground; to the extent that background is noticeable, its function is to support perception of the central figure.

In considering education in the United States today, what’s wrong with the picture? In a word, we’ve focused so exclusively on one figure–performance on a certain kind of standardized test instrument–that all other considerations are obscure or absent. I recommend a dramatic reversal of figure and ground. At the center of the image called American Education, I propose three dominant figures: the kinds of Persons we value; the kinds of Workers we cherish; the kinds of local, national, and global Citizens that we need.

A tall order, you are thinking. But in fact, over the course of history, these considerations have loomed large. The greatest educational thinkers–from Plato to John Dewey–have thought much about the human beings we would like to have, in the neighborhood, the individuals we’d like to encounter at the workplace, and the citizens needed for a well-functioning society.

Why, as a a nation, have we embarked on a well-meaning but misguided pathway? Principally, I propose, because a model of human existence, based heavily on market considerations, has come to dominate educational discourse worldwide, and the United States has absorbed this model totally and uncritically. I have much more to say on this topic, and I hope that those who are interested will inform themselves about The GoodWork Project and our Toolkit, our effort to move such considerations to the fore.

To forestall the most obvious rejoinder (and with a nod to my colleagues in this series of Harvard-emanating blogs): I am not for a moment saying that literacy, or numeracy, or the scholarly disciplines are unimportant. Nor am I saying that learning in these areas should remain unassessed. Nor am I doubting the importance of the biological, digital, or global revolutions. What I am saying is that unless we place in the foreground the individuals and society that we long for, all the rest will be in vain.

It has become commonplace, in this “Waiting for Superman” era, to blame the problems of U.S. society on our schools and our teachers. But that is nonsense. As David Halberstam pointed out decades ago, our misadventure in Vietnam was brought about by ‘the best and the brightest.’ Whether it is the massive deceptions at Enron, the greed of the financial world, or the prostitution of the academy, those with high SAT scores have lots to answer for. (The movie “Inside Job” provides far more insight into our troubles than does “Waiting for Superman“). These facts about American society today constitute the principal reason why we need a new guiding figure at the center of the educational landscape.

Check out more blogs on school reform topics.

It’s Time for Universities to Apply the Mirror Test

by Margot Locker

On April 13, Professors David Korn and Max Bazerman facilitated a several hour symposium at HLS on conflict of interest (COI, as it is called) in professions, particularly medicine. The papers were of high quality but they did not discuss the issue as it pertains to universities, and Harvard was not mentioned, except incidentally in opening remarks.

I raised the question of what universities in general, and Harvard in particular, should do, with respect to high profile and less dramatic cases of COI and other ethical lapses, such as plagiarism or data manipulation or creation by faculty. I mentioned that at Harvard, in the absence of ‘official’ statements by the President, Deans , and/or the Corporation, or posting on Richard Bradley’s (or Harry Lewis’) blog, there was no ‘commons’ at which these issues could be discussed, both by individuals themselves (I have cases in which I’ve been involved) and by thoughtful observers (like many readers of this blog). (The question was raised as to whether such a site should be curated).

Anyway I’d be quite interested in participating in such a Harvard- or University- endeavor, and I think that our recommendations about other professions and other ’sectors’ would be taken far more seriously if we also held up a mirror toward our own actions and activities.

Toolkit in Action: A Conversation with Teacher Kathleen FitzGerald

by Margot Locker

I recently spoke with Kathleen FitzGerald, a teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, about her internship and service-learning course. Ms. Fitzgerald has taught this course for the past 3 years to seniors at CRLS, and uses portions of the GoodWork Toolkit as a framing device and as a text for the course.

Ms. FitzGerald was hired to initiate the internship program at CRLS, and designed a class where students are placed in internships (which they attend 10 hours per week) supported by a seminar in school every other week. She was given the Toolkit by a mentor teacher at her school and found it the perfect way to discuss ideas of meaningful work and personal values with respect to her students’ internships. She has devised a course where students begin their semester discussing ideas of good work, and the meaning of engagement, ethics, and excellence in their lives and in a broader sense. When asked about her goals for the course, she replied, “I would love to allow them to reflect on their values. I also want to discuss the transition from school to career, work readiness, and engage in bigger picture questions with my students.” Students reflect on their weekly experiences at their internships, answering the question “how does my work relate to good work?”

Ms. FitzGerald’s thoughts on how her 17 and 18 year old students interact with the concepts of good work were interesting and thought-provoking. In talking about engagement, she reflected that this is often a priority for the teenagers in her course. She explained, “they are really interested in the question of engagement, wanting to make sure they are having a good time no matter where they are. There is a balancing act, there are always moments when you are doing something that is are not thrilling, but it is fulfilling a larger goal for you, are you connected to it, is it taking you where you want to go?” She hopes her students can leave the course understanding engagement in a broader sense, especially in its relation to excellence and ethics.

She attributes their perspectives on the 3 E’s to their social development, their position as high school seniors and limited “real world” work experience. In thinking about excellence, Ms. FitzGerald worries that students have developed a skewed notion of what it means to be excellent. “I worry about their construction of excellence. To some, it seems to mean they have tried hard enough, rather than met a standard. I worry about what will happen when there are fewer formal evaluations and they need to determine excellence from within.”

In her class, Ms. FitzGerald hopes to help develop students’ thinking about themselves, meaningful work, and their personal values. She finds it frustrating that high schools today do not give students the space to pause and reflect on their work in relation to their lives and their values, and thus hopes to provide her students with this space in her class. She has them grapple with bigger picture questions, and as she told me, wants them “thinking about who they are and what their ethics are,” and hopes “they can leave the course with a deeper understanding of themselves as a student and worker.”