Announcement: The Good Project Receives Grant From The John Templeton Foundation

The Good Project is pleased to announce that we have received over $1 million in funding from The John Templeton Foundation to study the impact of the recently developed Good Project Lesson Plans.

In the three year, mixed-methods study, we will investigate the effects of these lesson plans across a variety of educational settings and probe how engagement with the curriculum might result in student character change. In addition, participating teachers will partake in a community of practice in which they will be able to learn from one another's successes and challenges with the curriculum.

As described to the Templeton Foundation:

"The world of work is rapidly changing. Although adolescence is a period of identity development, few students are taught to think about how to behave ethically at the workplace. The Good Project, originally the Good Work Project (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, & Damon, 2001), has developed lesson plans focused on personal reflection related to workplace and school-based dilemmas. The curriculum aims to help adolescents develop and internalize moral (i.e., a good neighbor), civic (i.e., a good citizen), performance (i.e., a good student/worker), and intellectual (i.e., a good thinker) virtues. These virtues embody The Good Project’s 3 Es of good work: Ethical (for the greater good); Excellent (high quality); and Engaging (meaningful).

This mixed-methods national study will build upon current work with a diverse group of teachers who are committed to exploring deep questions about the nature of work, its connection to one’s values and identity, and its relationship to social good. In Year 1, we will use surveys, focus groups, and student portfolios to assess teacher fidelity to the curriculum and students’ potential growth in character virtues and ability to navigate complex dilemmas. In Year 2, we will adapt curricular content for teacher use and gain feedback through focus groups. In Year 3, we will focus on scalability and sustainability of the curriculum. Educators at participating schools will be led through three phases to build an online community of practice where they can exchange ideas, strategies, and materials as they implement the lesson plans. Overall, the project aims to create a community of practitioners who will help build a strong, scalable character program."

The Good Project thanks The John Templeton Foundation for the generous funding of this project. We are eager to begin and look forward to releasing announcements, lessons learned, and materials developed in the course of our research.

If you have questions regarding the study, please contact Shelby Clark, Senior Research Manager, at shelby_clark@gse.harvard.edu.

Announcement: Spanish and Chinese Translations

The Good Project is pleased to present Spanish and Chinese translations of our Lesson Plans. These have been designed to foster the ideas and practices of Good Work, based on many years of research, teaching, and informal experimentation. Please find the translations on our website here. 

The curriculum consists of 16 45-minute lessons, organized into 4 separate units. Each lesson is organized through timed activities and includes a specific lesson goal along with assessment recommendations. All necessary readings and worksheets are also included. Students will collect the work they generate in a portfolio; that collection can then be evaluated with respect to the central ideas and skills foregrounded in the curriculum.

Also included in the packet are introductory materials to familiarize teachers with The Good Project’s approach and theory of change. Additionally, there are two appendices–a guideline for a whole school initiative, as well as a long-term project that can be used as a capstone.  

The sequence of lessons in the full curriculum guide students in four ways: to think deeply about The Good Project’s framework of “good work;” to develop reflective habits that will allow them to navigate complexity, to understand and articulate their own beliefs and values; and to make well-informed decisions in the future.

Our hope is that the translated lesson plans will make our work accessible to the large number of educators who speak or work primarily with students in Spanish or Chinese, within the United States and across the world. 

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 Endeavor 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.

Commencement Wrap Up 2022

by Lynn Barendsen

For the first time in a couple of years, it appears that a majority of Commencement celebrations have taken place in person. College seniors—who have certainly seen their share of disruption over the past two years—gathered together with family, friends and mentors to celebrate their accomplishments and mark the transition into their next stage of life.

And, in another return to relative “normalcy,” dignitaries from multiple worlds stood behind podiums to offer wisdom to the class of 2022, many of whom are poised to enter the working world. Perhaps not surprisingly, we see a number of good-work related themes in their words.

Vice President Kamala Harris, addressing the graduating class at Tennessee State University, emphasized the unique promise of this class. Here at The Good Project, we might understand her advice as turning “obstacles into opportunity” as she points to their particular vantage point and the possibilities they might see from their perspective:

“As the class of 2022, you bring possibility to the table.  You are a generation that grew up online and survived a pandemic.  You are familiar with a world that, for many of us, feels a bit strange and new.  You have been engaged with this world since you were little… Most importantly, you have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been.  To look at the challenges facing us and find solutions that generations before could have never imagined.”

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, addressing the graduating class at the University of Pennsylvania, used the moment to talk about responsibility, and to place the responsibility for change squarely on the shoulders of the graduates:

"We've nearly broken this Republic of ours, but somehow you've got to fix it. You're going to have to initiate a new movement, a new Union Army, that must be dedicated above all else—including your career and personal advancement—to the preservation of this country's civic ideals. You'll have to learn, and then re-teach the rest of us that equality—real equality is the hallmark and birthright of all Americans."

Grammy award winning musician Taylor Swift, addressing the graduating class at NYU, emphasized the importance of learning and resilience (or, in good work terms, pausing to find time to reflect before moving forward):

“There will be times in life when you need to stand up for yourself. Times when the right thing is to back down and apologize. Times when the right thing is to fight, times when the right thing is to turn and run. Times to hold on with all you have and times to let go with grace. Sometimes the right thing to do is to throw out the old schools of thought in the name of progress and reform. Sometimes the right thing to do is to listen to the wisdom of those who have come before us. How will you know what the right choice is in these crucial moments? You won’t… hard things will happen to us. We will recover. We will learn from it. We will grow more resilient because of it.”

Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and chief executive of Chobani, spoke to the graduating class at Northeastern University. He told a classic “good work” story, one in which he was torn between responsibilities as he tried to build a business that was at once, good to his employees and good for business. Ulakaya explained that as Chobani started to grow, he realized that there was a community of refugees close by who were eager for employment. He was advised not to hire them, that his company would be boycotted, and that IF he decided to hire them, he should certainly keep this fact quiet. His response—and his encouragement to new graduates—was to find and speak their own truth:

“I said, ‘If I’m going to lose everything, I’m going to speak the truth!’ That’s what we did. We hired a few refugees, and then we hired more, and we hired more. Today, we are the leading brand of Greek yogurt in America—and we have hundreds and hundreds of immigrants and refugees working for us in Idaho and upstate New York.”

Finally, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Adern, speaking at Harvard’s Commencement, spoke to the importance of embracing diverse opinions, productive disagreement and trust: 

“The issues we navigate as a society will only intensify. The disinformation will only increase. The pull into the comfort of our tribes will be magnified. But we have it within us to ensure that this doesn’t mean we fracture. We are the richer for our difference, and poorer for our division. Through genuine debate and dialogue, through rebuilding trust in information and one another, through empathy – let us reclaim the space in between. After all, there are some things in life that make the world feel small and connected, let kindness be one of them.”

These commencement speakers relayed messages of hope and overcoming obstacles with tenacity at a time when the challenges we face feel unprecedented. Originally intended for the graduates, their words offer a source of much-needed inspiration for all of us.

The Good Project Core Concepts: Alignment and Misalignment

by Danny Mucinskas

Think about your current work and the organization or team that you are a part of. Take a moment to ask yourself some of the following questions:

• What are my goals? What are my colleagues’ goals? What are the goals of our organization or workplace?

• Do my colleagues share my opinions about our shared goals?

• How are the goals of our work made visible or tangible?

• What can I do to understand and bridge areas where others do not share my own views of our work?

It might be the case that you feel you know your goals well, that common goals are shared and discussed in your organization, and that others around you also subscribe to them. Or, less fortunately, you might feel the opposite.

In a previous blog post (linked), I emphasized the importance of personal and institutional mission statements and the role they can play in answering some of these questions and in guiding work to common purposes. Mission statements can help clarify the goals of individual and shared work and help to guide decisions.

When our team began The Good Project and researched a variety of professions, we looked not only at individuals but at all the constituencies involved in the work (e.g., in education, we spoke to students, teachers, administrators, and parents). In surveying the opinions of the various constituencies, we found two general states among the sectors we studied.

• Alignment: The people involved in a workplace or profession share the same goals as one another and have similar views of what constitutes success. Using the dimensions of “good work,” people in aligned workplaces or sectors have common understandings of excellence, of ethical behavior, and of what engages them in the work. This makes it easier for people to do good work with one another. It makes it more likely that quality, enjoyable work will be done together and less likely that ethical breaches will occur.

• Misalignment: The people involved in work together do not share similar goals or views about what their work should achieve. This situation can be due to differences of opinions at the individual level or to underlying structural issues. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to agree upon what successful work looks like. People are likely to work at cross-purposes, and “good work” is less likely to be achieved. Workers may feel disconnected from one another, and ethical mistakes can be made.

At the time of our investigation, we observed prototypical examples of aligned and misaligned professional domains.

First, genetics represented an aligned area. The interviewees we spoke to were united in a single common vision of bettering human life through scientific discovery. The common purpose united workers, providing them with a shared sense of excellence and a conviction that the work was serving ethical ends.  

Second, and not as happily, journalism was misaligned, especially between constituency groups. Depending upon their role, workers in the field seemed to have different priorities for what journalism was supposed to be or achieve. For example, while editors might have wanted to ensure profitability and involvement of their media outlets with high profile issues, rank-and-file journalists wanted to take part in investigative reporting that interested them, and readers and viewers of news largely just wanted to obtain information quickly and for free.

These two examples serve as models that might apply or relate to numerous workplaces today. Many of our readers come from the education sector, and if we were to guess, we might say that education is likely misaligned as a whole, although there are specific schools and institutions that have been able to help resolve or bring these misalignments together to form something new. For example, Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner’s new book The Real World of College describes how higher education institutions are today torn between the desires of multiple constituencies (e.g., should colleges be places that prepare students to get jobs, to learn about a topic area in-depth, or to be personally transformed?). The authors make recommendations regarding how colleges today might react to these misalignments via better onboarding processes, for instance.

It is also possible to think about alignment and misalignment through a political lens. At the national level, the federal government of the United States has moved from a period of relative alignment about issues like environmental protection in the 1970s and 1980s and being “tough on crime” in the 1990s to extreme misalignment today about issues including climate change, healthcare, gun control, and abortion. As in workplaces, “good work” politically is easier to achieve when people are aligned. Congress was able to cooperate in the past to pass legislation that was effective. In the present, it is extremely difficult to see a productive path forward, given considerable misalignments in perspectives about the work that the government should be doing.

However, we also believe that misalignment is not a hopeless situation and can result in great creativity. Misalignments about the goals and purposes of work represent an opportunity for those who can to invest in repairing them and to problem-solve with others. If people within a workplace are experiencing misaligned perspectives, it may be time to launch a new program or protocol that will help people find commonality. While in most cases not simple or easy, the benefits of attempting to bridge misalignments will be worth it if doing “good work” becomes easier as a result.

In the end, none of us does our work completely alone without interfacing or at least having an effect on others, and we will all contend with areas of alignment and misalignment in daily practice. It is also likely to be the case that most organizations and fields aren’t completely aligned or misaligned but fall somewhere in the middle, with these two states as opposite ends of a spectrum. 

Consider where your workplace falls and how you might wish to open up conversations with others about the purposes of your work and what excellence, ethics, and engagement should look like in your context. It may also be useful to take stock of who the parties or constituencies are that influence your work, taking time to deliberately step back and reflect on where differences in views might cause difficulties or disagreements. For example, certain colleagues might make decisions influenced by personal pressures not experienced by others, or a supervisor might see the work of your organization fulfilling a different purpose than you do.

Below are some resources you might use to explore alignment and misalignment.

• A video explaining alignment and misalignment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4jkCNA48xg&list=PL5sNbw1uznitpzLCwnv49tgumEAh1bcxG

• The Good Collaboration Toolkit, a resource that attempts to create better alignment between partners in a collaborative endeavor

• “When In Doubt… Make It Excellent,” a dilemma about a teen working at a school newspaper and navigating expectations of others

• A blog on the meaning of solidarity at work