Commencement Speech Roundup!

by Margot Locker

With graduation season officially coming to a close, we have compiled a roundup of the some of the top graduation speeches from around the country. We noticed many speakers touched on GoodWork threads in their words to graduating seniors. What were your favorite speeches this year?

President Barack Obama, Barnard College

“So don’t accept somebody else’s construction of the way things ought to be. It’s up to you to right wrongs. It’s up to you to point out injustice. It’s up to you to hold the system accountable and sometimes upend it entirely. It’s up to you to stand up and to be heard, to write and to lobby, to march, to organize, to vote. Don’t be content to just sit back and watch.”

Jane Lynch, Smith College

“If I could do so much of my early life over, I would have taken more moments like this to breathe. I would have spent more time focusing on what was right in front of me, instead of recoiling from what is because it didn’t look or feel exactly as I imagined it. I wouldn’t have been forever trying to look around the corner to see “What’s next, what’s next?!”

Oprah Winfrey, Spelman College

“You must have some vision for your life. Even if you don’t know the plan, you have to have a direction in which you choose to go,” Winfrey said. “What I learned is that that’s a great metaphor for life. You want to be in the driver’s seat of your own life because if you are not, life will drive you.”

Aaron Sorkin, Syracuse University

“Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt”

“Don’t ever forget that you’re a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character.”

Michael Bloomberg, UNC Chapel Hill

“Don’t be afraid to shoot the long ball. Take the risk. Life is too short to spend your time avoiding failure. If I had worried about failure – or listened to those who do – I would never have started my company, and never run for mayor. I can’t imagine my life if I hadn’t taken those risks. Not every risk will work out, but that’s ok. Failure is the world’s best teacher.”

Adam Savage, Sarah Lawrence College

“Stay obsessed. That thing you can’t stop thinking about? Keep indulging it. Obsession is the better part of success. You will be great at the things that you can’t not do.”

“Be willing to be wrong. Don’t fight for your idea just because you want the credit. Fight for your idea because it’s the right one. If it’s not, let it go and put your muscle behind the right one. Trust your instincts.”

Colin Powell, Northeastern University

“Make public service a part of your life.”

“Do something that gives you satisfaction every day and makes our society a better place.”

Bob Woodruff, Boston College

“Let me say that I do understand that not every single person gets to find passion in their job—for some people what they do is a vocation—but people find passion in other aspects of their life, whether it’s playing music or writing books, building boats, cooking or running marathons.  Whatever it may be, I urge you to find and feed a passion.”

A Major Bank Scandal: Where does the Buck Stop?

by Amelia Peterson

In recent weeks, the press in England (or Britain) has been full of stories of the fallout from  a startling revelation: At various points over the past five years, Barclays bank has been fiddling with the LIBOR rate. LIBOR, or the London interbank lending rate, (in theory) reflects the interest rate banks are charged when they borrow from each other. The rate is set by banks all self-reporting the charge they have had to pay in recent weeks. However, the rate then goes on to influence the short term interest rate for loans all around the world, so it is of some import that it be an accurate estimate.The scandal is idiomatic of most cases of corporate wrongdoing: it is unclear who should be deemed ‘responsible’. As is usually the case in Britain, the CEO, in this case Bob Diamond, has left. Most commentators appear to have favour this ‘buck stops at the top’ approach.

A more diffuse picture of responsibility appears in comments that this scandal is yet another sign that the ‘culture’ of financial services must change. I fully acknowledge the power of norms, but I wonder if the LIBOR case is not an important opportunity to highlight individual responsibility throughout an organisation. In the Financial Services Authority report of the case, the individual traders, managers and rate submitters whose e-mails evidence the action are referred to only by letters of the alphabet. Yet it is these individuals who should be facing questions from MPs. In his session, Bob Diamond could claim repeatedly, ‘I did not know’, and the MPs could press him no further. But the traders and submitters would have had to provide some answer for their actions, some account of what they were thinking and why they did it.

Ultimately, this scandal came about at the level of individual decisions. We may trace those decisions back to wider factors about industry norms and incentives but further missteps will only be avoided if in the future an individual bank worker steps back and thinks: I do have another option here; and if I choose to participate in a fraud, I will be and should be held fully culpable.

So far I’ve described only one particular model of responsibility– one where we are responsible for what we directly cause.  There are other understandings of responsibility. Journalist Deborah Orr here describes Bob Diamond and Barclays as symptomatic of a private sector that, on the one hand, calls for small government but, on the other, does not take ‘responsibility’ for meeting society’s needs. This view presents a picture where we all share in responsibility for a good society. Likewise a current series of articles on ‘sustainable business’ asks about the limits of corporations’ responsibility, posing the question in terms of environmental concerns. This is responsibility as taking heed of the long-term view and ‘doing your bit’ to help us get there.

We would do well to endorse as broad a conception of responsibility as possible, but there is also a liability in the above approaches. In defining responsibility too widely, companies can pick and choose which areas they will take a stand on, and which they will quietly shirk. ‘Corporate social responsibility’ is often mocked as a cover for greater sins, and sometimes this stance seems warranted. Barclays had a very comprehensive CSR policy under the banner of ‘citizenship’. By some comparative measures it was doing well with regards volunteering hours and environmental impact. But this strand of corporate citizenship cannot discount wrongdoing in another domain – its primary domain, its professional core – that has caused unnecessary losses in the wider society.

A lack of clarity about our spheres of responsibility makes it harder to ascertain when someone has been negligent. In a modern world where individual decisions can have complex—sometimes worldwide– impacts, it is increasingly difficult to decide what we should hold each other accountable for. This makes it easier to take actions which, if we were forced to account for, might be hard to justify. Dan Ariely’s recently published The Honest Truth About Dishonesty offers a comprehensive take on our capacity for self-deception and the extent to which dishonesty is rationalized away at the personal level. There is an interesting side consideration here about the impact of bringing all these tendencies to our attention: I always wonder whether the behavioral psychology of ‘irrationality’ only gives us another tool with which to placate our conscience – it’s okay, everybody suffers from ethical fading.  As Ariely has explained in press interviews, the response to this heightened awareness must be to put more effort into reminding ourselves of moral responsibility.

To be responsible has two sets of connotations: on the one hand responsibility is a burden, a weight that we bear more or less reluctantly. Yet on the other it is a mark of adulthood. To be responsible is to be mature, trusted. It may be that foreseeing the consequences of our actions in the modern, complex world is in many cases beyond our cognitive powers. If, to use a phrase of psychologst Robert Kegan’s, we are ‘in over our heads’, how should we think about responsibility?

To start with, we must think differently about risk when others would lose from a bad outcome. Secondly, lack of foresight can no longer be a blanket excuse: the default must be that organisations are responsible for indirect as well as direct effects. Lastly, as far as possible specific individuals should held accountable for the outcomes of specifically theiractions. As we understand more and more about our behavior as social animals, we hold onto the notion of individual responsibility by a thread. We cannot afford to lose it—indeed we must strengthen this fiber and make it a seamless part of our working lives.

Towards a Quality Course

by Lynn Barendsen

At our annual Project Zero Summer Institute, we taught a new course called Quality: Does it Matter? For the past five years, with generous funding from Faber Castell, a company that shares our own GoodWork values, we have been studying the topic of quality—how people define and understand quality, how they make decisions and judgments about quality, and how perceptions of quality change over time, due to life changes as well as societal changes, including the influx of new technologies. We have wondered how quality relates to GoodWork (certainly we hope that individuals strive to do excellent, high quality work) and how aiming for quality in work and other realms helps individuals to lead and live a “quality life.”  This study of quality is one of many related topics of research:  in addition to good work, our team has been investigating good play, good citizenship, and the elements necessary to a good life.

After completing an in-depth study of individuals in the United States, we also surveyed 5000 other individuals around the world, including Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Indonesia. We are about to launch the survey in Turkey. We decided to teach a “minicourse” at this summer’s Institute because we believe that many of our findings are relevant to teaching and learning in the 21st century.

The goals of the course were for participants to explore their own definitions of “quality” and to unpack what this term really means to them personally and professionally. Interestingly, throughout the course, we validated many of the findings from individuals all around the world—quality is most important in terms of time, and decisions about how to use time wisely (rather than to waste it, or just let it pass) is paramount. Spending time with family and friends—being around those who you care about—is much more important than spending time on the computer or running errands. With this in mind, we asked participants about how we can ensure that students experience “quality” learning and teaching in school, and asked them as well to think further about how they define “quality” learning and teaching.

As part of our course, participants worked with a book we have written (currently unpublished) called Quality Through the Ages. The book is a compilation of 45 examples of quality over time—spanning some of the earliest inventions (e.g. clay and painting) to modern day monuments, professions, and other examples and spheres of quality (e.g. Shakespeare, tracking of time, the Internet). All of the participants read a short essay discussing the Olympics. We chose this essay because we thought that it brought up interesting issues for teachers and because it was timely. Please click here to read this example (link).

Indeed, the essay about the Olympics raised many important issues for teachers, even more than we had anticipated (no doubt the fact that the 2012 Olympics had just begun in London had a priming effect!). As we moved from table to table, we heard many important points including:

– How is quality really judged? How do we judge the level of quality work in the classroom? Do students feel that we judge work in objective ways, or is  the process necessarily more subjective?

– How far can we (or should we) push students to produce high quality work? Just as some athletes are pushed too far, should we be expecting perfection from our students?

– Some Olympian athletes are motivated to win and compete for intrinsic reasons (e.g. personal satisfaction) rather than some “professional” athletes who like to compete and win for money. How does this apply to students? How can we encourage kids to work hard for intrinsic reasons (rather than extrinsic purposes, e.g. winning awards, getting high scores and GPAs)?

-How do we know when our standards of quality are unrealistic?  Is quality dependent upon the values we bring to the table?

-Time (a constant theme in our research) can determine who wins (e.g. who is the fastest runner) or who is the most prepared (who has put in the most time in training).  In the classroom, knowing how to judge time is a crucial skill students need to learn.  When is a paper “done”?  When is it time to move on to the next assignment?

In addition to the discussion of this vignette, a few other interesting “findings” emerged from the course. Specifically, participants seemed guarded about discussing traits or markers of a “quality student.” This came up at the end of the course, when we asked participants to roam the room and write thoughts about a variety of categories, including “quality student,” “quality teaching,” and “relationship of quality and balance.” Some teachers were offended by having to describe or define a quality student, yet they did not have the same reaction to being asked to describe quality teaching. Were teachers being defensive about their students? Their craft? Or, if we had asked about a “quality teacher,” would we have had the same reaction? Furthermore, the relationship of quality and balance proved a very useful concept for teachers. Balance related to many aspects of the course—how to strive for quality work and at the same time keep balance in our personal lives, how to balance the double-edged sword of technology use (it helps people be more efficient, but is also labeled as a waste of time), and how to encourage deep passion and “flow” in work, but not lose sight of the ultimate goal.

In sum, we were pleased that the topics and our research findings resonated with participants. Quality is very much at the center of GoodWork, and indeed, many of the sentiments shared throughout the course could have been articulated at the Toolkit minicourse that we’ve offered for several years.  As a result of this course, we have begun to think about ways to adapt Quality Through the Ages into a Quality Toolkit or to infuse it into our current GoodWork Toolkit…so stay tuned!

The GoodWork Bloomsburg Initative

by Joan Miller, Mary Katherine Waibel, Jennifer Johnson

When Dr. Howard Gardner visited Bloomsburg University in the Fall 2010, he spoke about the value of self-reflection on what it means to do Good Work as persons, workers, and citizens. Inspired by Dr. Gardner’s visit and informed by the GoodWork Toolkit, we sought to explore undergraduate students’ concepts of what it means to do Good Work in higher education and to strengthen the culture of Good Work on our campus. Through small group discussions, we hoped to 1) explore students’ concepts of what it means to do Good Work as college students, 2) enrich students’ definitions of Good Work as work that is of the highest quality (i.e., excellent), socially responsible (i.e., ethical), and meaningful (i.e., engagement), 3) engage students in an examination of their role models of Good Work, and 4) encourage students to reflect upon how they have exhibited Good Work during their first few months at Bloomsburg University.

As we developed the BU Good Work Initiative in consultation with the GoodWork Team at Project Zero, we sought possible outlets for piloting our small group discussions. Without hesitation, the Director of the University’s ACT 101/Educational Opportunities Program, Dr. Irvin Wright, invited us to pilot the BU Good Work Initiative with incoming first-year students enrolled in the program. ACT 101/EOP assists students who are at a financial, cultural, social and/or educational disadvantage in making a successful transition to Bloomsburg University. We expected thatdata from this group of historically under-represented students would provide a unique perspective and valuable information about incoming first-year undergraduates’ concepts of Good Work and inform future endeavors to promote Good Workamong all students at Bloomsburg University.

The BU Good Work Initiative included 140 students. All students completed a pre-program assessment in which they described what it means to do Good Work as college students and wrote about examples of Good Work at Bloomsburg University. Following the pre-program assessment, half of the students were randomly assigned to an experimental group. The experimental group was further split into small discussion groups (approximately 10 students per group).  Each small discussion group was led by two advanced students (Teaching Assistants from the Department of Psychology’s mass lecture General Psychology course) and a faculty/staff facilitator. Students assigned to the experimental group participated in a 6-week series of 50-minute discussions about the three Es of Good Work—Excellence, Ethics, and Engagement. During the first two weeks (Sessions 1 and 2), students discussed what it means to do excellent work as a college student, role models of excellence, and examples of how they have demonstrated academic excellence during their past three months at the University. During the next two weeks (Sessions 3 and 4), students discussed what it means to do ethical work as a college student, role models of ethical behavior, and examples of how they demonstrated ethical behavior during their past three months at the University. During the final two weeks (Sessions 5 and 6), students discussed what it means to do engaged work as a college student, role models of engagement, and examples of how they demonstrated engagement during their past three months at the University. The other half of the students (i.e., the control group) remained in their regularly scheduled University Seminar course and did not participate in small group discussions about Good Work. Upon completion of the 6-week series of small group discussions, the experimental and control groups reunited for a post-program assessment.

Analysis of the pre-program data revealed that few incoming first-year students described Good Work as work that is of the highest quality, socially responsible, or meaningful. Instead, students tended to describe Good Work as effortful (i.e., trying one’s hardest) and empathic (i.e., helping another person). Although post-program data showed that students assigned to the experimental group had not yet incorporated the concepts of Excellence or Engagement into their definitions of Good Work, data did reveal that students who participated in small group discussions about Good Work had begun to include the concept of Ethics in their understanding of what it means to do Good Work as an undergraduate student. Students who were assigned to the experimental group also noted the overall value of participating in the small group discussions. Comments included the following:

The value of participating in the Good Work Initiative is that we know how to be an ethical student and a student of excellence.

Participating in Good Work Initiative has made me realize that I needed to pick up my slack and do the right thing.

You learn a lot that you didn’t know already and it opens your eyes to role models in your life.

A forthcoming manuscript will detail the BU Good Work Initiative’s curriculum, research methodology, and findings. We have been pleased to find several published papers that validate our findings and we hope that our efforts will add to the growing body of literature on promoting Good Work on college campuses.

During the 2012-2013 academic year, the Bloomsburg University Good Work Team will continue to pursue its mission to strengthen the culture of Good Work on our campus by increasing individuals’ awareness of what it means to do Good Work, identifying role models of Good Work, encouraging self-reflection on Good Work, and supporting Good Work wherever it exists on our campus and in our broader community. Data from this initial study have informed not only the content but also the format of how we will introduce the concept of Good Work to incoming first-year students during the Fall 2012. Data from this study also have sparked a number of other lines of inquiry and best practices related to advancing Good Work in higher education.  More on that to come…

Bloomsburg University Good Work Initiative Experience

by Elizabeth Lucas

Four years ago my parents made the bittersweet decision to move from Costa Rica to Pennsylvania after 19 years. Here and there I asked myself if getting an education in the USA was truly better than one I could be getting back at home. Most of the time the answer was “no, not really.” It was not until my senior year that I finally realized how privileged I was as I would not have been given the same opportunities and experiences in Costa Rica as I had here in the USA. One of the main reasons for this was my involvement with GoodWork.

The Bloomsburg GoodWork Initiative took off during the Fall 2011. Psychology Teaching Assistants (myself included) were asked to participate and run small discussion sessions with half of the ACT101 incoming freshmen (students who are at a financial, cultural, social or educational disadvantage). The sessions ran for 6 weeks. Two sessions were dedicated to each of the 3 E’s of GoodWork. We encouraged students to reflect and talk about what each E meant to them, who were their role models for that E, and how they as students have demonstrated that E. Students were very much engaged and participated even more enthusiastically than I would have imagined.

Teaching Assistants would meet after each session and discuss if we needed to modify anything and compare notes on how students did that day. We had some common threads between all groups. When the students were asked to define Excellence and Engagement they had a good grasp on the meaning, but when they were asked to give an example they would sometimes say something like: “going to all of your classes.” In regards to Ethics, students had a hard time defining it, giving examples and for the most part they had all partaken in unethical behaviors. Personally, what was most shocking was that some of the students were not able to come up with role models in their lives. As Teaching Assistants, we encouraged students to explore these ideas further and talked about how these ideas could be applied in their next four years as students.

I hope that there was as much value to these discussion sessions for each of the students that participated as there was for me. The questions that we asked them every week were also questions that I was asking myself. I think that as human beings we go through the motions of every day life without taking the time to reflect about what it is that we are doing or the purpose to it. Some of us might know what we want to do “when we grow up” and we want to be the best we can be at it. For others, we might still be trying to find that passion that will motivate us to wake up and go to work every morning. Some of us might already know the answer to those two, but we are trying to figure out a way to do it the right way because we are conscious of the demands society has.

It was because of that initial participation, that when Dr. Jennifer Johnson asked if any one of the Teaching Assistants would like to take GoodWork any further as an independent study, I jumped right in. At first, my focus was to look at what worked and what did not work during this first initiative and finding improvements for future GoodWork activities. I created surveys for everyone who participated in the sessions (Teaching Assistants, Facilitators and students) and from there, I focused on areas that needed improvement. I presented a poster at the Eastern Psychological Association conference in March 2012.

In the spring of 2012, I also began to work with Dr. Jennifer Johnson, Dr. Mary Katherine Duncan and Dr. Joan Miller. We met weekly to assess another set of data from students and kept thinking of ways to keep GoodWork moving forward at Bloomsburg University. We were granted permission to create the Freshman Orientation Summer Reading for the incoming students in the fall of 2012. One of the videos I proposed is going to be used for this assignment. The four of us along with Dan Haverstock (GoodWork independent study student for the upcoming year) were also invited to attend a meeting at Project Zero with Wendy Fischman, Lynn Barendsen, Margot Locker and Howard Gardner. It was of great pleasure to finally meet the people whose papers and research I had been reading about all year. It was also incredibly rewarding to share everything that we had worked on so hard during the last year. We were given great feedback and suggestions for the ideas we had for moving forward.

Previously I mentioned that if I had not gone to college in the USA I would have not gotten involved with GoodWork. I might have not been given some of the opportunities and learned as much about myself as I would have back at home. GoodWork allowed me to reflect on what it means to do GoodWork as a student and a young professional and how it affects our daily life. It got me thinking about what kind of professional I want to be and what values I want to take with me. My involvement in the discussion sessions taught me how to lead a group and improved my ability to present research and talk in public. I learned that even though I was only a student, my opinion was important, I could work hand in hand with professors I considered my mentors in order to create something bigger and make a difference.

I’ve successfully graduated from Bloomsburg and will be starting the next chapter of my life as a graduate student at Temple University in the fall. I will be taking everything that I have learned these last four years and especially this last one and applying it to my life as a student there and eventually my professional life. I am hoping that in some way I can still stay involved with GoodWork at Bloomsburg University and perhaps start GoodWork awareness at Temple.