Narrative Four: What Do you Value?

by Marian Brown

The activity, “What Do You Value?” (page 103 in the GWTK) was covered over two weeks at Arlington. Cheryl devoted two class periods, one hour each, for the activity and accompanying synthesis. In the first period Cheryl presented the activity. Students were asked to create a map of their own beliefs and values while thinking about the roles they play in their families, in school, and outside activities. They were also asked to think about and draw parallels between the varying roles and sectors they played in their lives.

The students were enthusiastic and many commented on the enjoyment of working in representational form. Zach said, “I like getting the opportunity to share my particular views and beliefs, and to have the space in school to actually think about these things. Often times our (the students’) opinion is rarely asked for.” Cheryl further encouraged this self-exploration and reflection by telling the students to, “Have a ball. Get out the colored pencils, spread out, make yourselves comfortable and spend the hour engrossed in your own thought.”

Any high school educator can tell you how difficult it can be to keep a room full of students quietly engaged with a project for an entire hour. Well, that engagement was not an issue for the students here. The students busily and quietly worked on their diagrams with dedication. The final result was impressive. Please take a moment to look at the student work exemplar below. As you’ll notice, the maps are all incredibly unique, showing the individual student voice and value, as well as differing learning modalities and strengths.

GoodWork at Work in India: Part II

by Elizabeth Kim

Our last “GoodWork at Work” post introduced one Indian colleague’s efforts to sensitize her students towards the importance of GoodWork and another colleague’s innovative work in creating a GoodWork index. But how can we involve other stakeholders in this vision for excellence, ethics, and engagement? This post explores how GoodWork impacts other important stakeholders in education and how they can support students in powerful ways.

Because children and students are at such a formative period in their lives, it is crucial to involve parents in the discussion. Gurvinder Kaur addressed this need at the Punjab Public School. Bringing together parents for a meeting, Gurvinder encouraged parents to take responsibility and “nurture children with strong ethics.” Gurvinder provided several suggestions for the parents such as helping the school ensure discipline, being mindful of providing cash to children, and reminding children of the importance of ethics in life. Parents were receptive to these suggestions and expressed interest in future sessions. Indeed, by reinforcing values of GoodWork at home there is more promise that we will have students and children dedicated to upholding GoodWork. This is something we have tried to encourage in our work in American schools, but depending on the particular community, it has not always proved easy.

The responsibility for good work should not lie solely with the student; instead as the work in India has suggested, other stakeholders in the school ought to be conscious of and further encourage these values. As we have learned in our research, when teachers and parents are in alignment with one another in their goals and the vision for their students, good work is easier to achieve.

Next in our series, we address the question: how can health education be addressed through the  lens of good work?

GoodWork at Work in India: Part I

by Elizabeth Kim

My name is Elizabeth Kim and I have been working with the Good Work team doing research for the Collaboration project as well as the Family Dinner Project. As a Master’s student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Learning and Teaching program, my interests include investigating how to expand teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and what instructional practices are most effective in prompting genuine and meaningful student learning.

Lynn and Wendy recently posted about what the GoodWork project has been doing in India and the great enthusiasm of the teachers that welcomed them. But the danger of such long-spanning professional development programs is that the lessons learned by teachers will not come to fruition by the students. As a challenge to continue promoting good work in their communities, we asked teachers to voluntarily incorporate what they had learned into their classrooms. An overwhelming number of teachers responded and sent us drafts of their lesson summaries – the variations of implementation were truly astounding. This post is the beginning of a series that will be dedicated to highlighting the efforts of teachers in India and the global impact of GoodWork.

Many of the teachers who responded to our challenge reproduced and expanded the training they had received in their lessons. Ritesh Sharma of the Appejay School, for example, sought to introduce the values of good work through a brainstorming session in which students thoughtfully articulated their ideas about good work. There was also a story composition element to the lesson, in which students relayed a personal anecdote of an ethical dilemma they faced. Finally, Ritesh used the value sort cards to help students realize their beliefs and opinions about work. By using tools such as the value cards and questionnaires, Ritesh was able to inculcate an awareness of some of the core concepts of good work:  in addition to the three “E’s”, concepts such as responsibility, and alignment.

One student’s ethical dilemma:

While Ritesh utilized existing GoodWork materials, some teachers ventured to expand the concept. One teacher at TSRS Aravali School, Chavi Behl, recognized how challenging it is to evaluate such a subjective measure as good work. Appropriately titling her lesson “Measuring the ‘Immeasurable’,” she constructed a method of calculating a “GoodWork Index.” By using a Likert scale from 1-10 on students’ levels of excellence, ethics, and engagement, Chavi asked student peers and other teachers to evaluate each individual. With the three scores, she formulated this equation for the Goodwork index:

GWI = Variance

        Mean

Chavi offers a starting point for enabling a comparative measure for good work, and her comment well illuminates her belief in the importance of this index: “What cannot be measured cannot be managed.” In addition to providing a useful index, the teacher also adds a fourth “e” to the GoodWork composition – enjoyment. By experiencing engagement, ethics, and excellence, students consequently experience enjoyment, and this positive attitude fuels further engagement, ethics, and excellence, in a bidirectional loop.  Chavi’s innovative and thoughtful contributions are deeply appreciated and exemplify the various ways GoodWork is being interpreted and transformed around the world.

Next in our series, we will discuss how we can involve different stakeholders of the school in spurring good work in our communities. If you would like access to the full presentations these teacher’s created to detail their work, please let us know!

Narrative Three: An Ethical Dilemma

by Marian Brown

Today’s discussion focused the class’s attention on a debate about “Silence Isn’t Always Golden,” a narrative from the GW Toolkit. To give a little background, Emma is a recent high school graduate who is deciding between attending two prestigious Ivy League schools. It is clear that she is a hard worker, and has a strict ethical code when it comes to her scientific work. However, Emma’s code of conduct is much less clear when it comes to her relationships with her friends.  With Emma’s knowledge, her friends have hacked into the school’s computer system. Not only does she look the other way, but when confronted by a teacher about her friend’s poor choices, Emma lies and says that she knows nothing about the parties responsible for this breach of security.

The dilemma is heightened for Emma because she has conflicting standards between her code of ethics at the lab, and her ethics in dealing with her friends. She clearly wants to keep her friends out of trouble – does this make her unethical?

After reading Emma’s case the students at Arlington got into a contentious, but healthy, debate over how they would have handled a similar situation. Cheryl started the discussion by asking students if it was Emma’s responsibility to keep her classmates from hacking into the computer system. Alexa responded by saying, “It’s generally something you don’t want to encourage”. Sara responded with empathy towards Emma, saying, “She is over-committed. She gives what she can but she can’t possibly do it all”. Then Molly contextualized Emma’s dilemma in relationship to her own, “This is a more extreme example of what most of us high schoolers face, we all have lots of commitments we are trying to balance between. It’s really hard to find that balance, but if you don’t pick one or the other than you just end up giving half an effort to both.”

Molly’s comment was a turning point in the discussion as the focus was now on the pressures that the students in the class experience in their everyday lives. These pressures were explicitly linked to expectations of “fulfilling one’s potential”.  As the students describe it, these expectations are imposed upon them by teachers, parents, and friends. At this point, the discussion ball was rolling, and at a fast pace as students shared and commiserated with one another about the pressures of growing up in this current generation and specifically, at Arlington HS. They have recently been experiencing vandalism at the school: students have been punching holes in the walls, causing substantial damage to the school’s property. Cheryl believed that certain students in the class have friends or acquaintances that were involved in these acts of vandalism, so she turned the attention to focus on that dilemma. Cheryl made sure not to ask the kids to disclose information towards this incident, but she did ask the students to question their place in this learning community. Who are they accountable to? Who makes the rules that govern this community? What happens when someone goes against those norms, and when is it our responsibility to make those instances visible?

Obviously, there are no easy or clear answers to these questions. However, what was so special about today’s discussion is that every student was engaged and weighed in with an opinion, and everyone’s perspective was valued. Cheryl left the students with a final question to ponder, “Is there a time limit on honesty?”

As the students walked out the door to their various next classes, it was clear that they were still considering their roles in protecting and serving the community here at Arlington. Sometimes the best thing an educator can do for his or her students is to create a safe space to discuss the difficult topics that arise in their lives. Today, Cheryl took a very difficult dilemma, made it immediately relevant, and handled the discussion with poise and inquisition. I can’t wait to see how the conversation will continue to unfold next week.

Value Sort Continued

by Marian Brown

At the end of the last class, and our last blog narrative, the students were departing Cheryl’s room with an assignment in hand. Their homework for the week was to take the value sort and ask an adult they admired to fill it out, the exact same exercise they had been asked to do in class. The students were already buzzing with excitement and were discussing the value sort when the period began.

Prior to this week’s session the students had completed the assignment and put it in Cheryl’s box so that she could compile the answers for comparison across the students and their interviewees. Before sharing the results of the two value sorts, Cheryl asked the students which values they believed they chose most frequently. One student, Sarah, commented, “I believe that the values of honesty and integrity will be at the top as they are values that we discuss often at Arlington.” Another student, Liza, gave a varying view, “I think fame and money will be ranked highly amongst us because as young adults the only person we are really responsible for is ourselves, and so it’s ok for us to be more selfish.” A third student, Steve, shared another perspective, “I believe that hard work is important to all of us and will be reflected in our answers.”

Chatter broke out amongst the students as Cheryl displayed the overhead of tally marks illustrating the students’ most highly picked values. The values picked as the most important were honesty, rewarding and supportive relationships, independence and quality. The least important were fame, success, spirituality, wealth and material well-being. Cheryl asked the students how these values related to their good work. Ann, a generally reserved student spoke up, “All of these values affect how we approach our work. If we didn’t value these things then we wouldn’t be doing as high quality of work. A lot of how we came to understand these values comes from our mentors.”

Cheryl built on Ann’s comment about mentors by asking the students who they valued as mentors. Students echoed the importance of parents, grandparents, teachers, siblings, and coaches. Not surprisingly, these were many of the people the students shared the value sort with. Cheryl then displayed the values most frequently picked by the mentors interviewed. The top three values picked were honesty, integrity, and quality. The students were surprised to see so much overlap there was between their mentors and their own answers. Cheryl looked at Ann, and gave her a knowing smirk as Ann’s comment had some validity; there was a strong correlation between mentor and student values in this sampling. The correlation between mentor and student values, as seen in this classroom, points to the idea that our values are indeed influenced and decided by those we admire and look up to. This beckons the question of how important affective mentorship is in one’s development and in one’s understanding of values. How can we as educators create and sustain healthy mentorships where positive values can be instilled?

Teaching Note: Creating Safe Environments:

Cheryl always supports the students in sharing their opinions and refrains from passing judgment on their answers. She simply acknowledges their comments, creating an environment of acceptance and safety. This building of environment is key while discussing difficult and personal issues as and opinions as things like the value sort do. It allows for all opinions to be heard.