What is Harkness, and How Do You Teach It?

What is Harkness, and How Do You Teach It? 

Shelby Clark

I started my first day at the GCI Summit and Seminar for Educators observing the Seminar for Educators– nine educators from all over the world who had come together to learn more about the "GCI Method." GCI– Global Citizens Initiative– brings together student fellows and educators from all over the world each summer for a week to learn more about Design Thinking, student-centered learning (the Harkness Method), and intercultural citizenship and human connectivity. Student fellows leave the week prepared to engage in a nine-month "glocal" project oriented around making changes on a UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). As some of you might not be familiar with this pedagogy, I wanted to share some reflections for you to think about as you consider bringing Harkness pedagogy into your classrooms. 

Educators spent their first day at the Summit learning about Design Thinking and, on the second day, engaged in learning about Harkness as a student-centered discussion pedagogy. What were some take-aways? 

How is Harkness different from a Socratic Seminar? 

Figure 1.

Schrodt, K., Smith, L., FitzPatrick, E., & Liu, J. (2023). Facilitating Critical Discussion of Picturebooks Through Socratic Seminars in a Kindergarten Classroom. Early Childhood Education Journal, 1-18. Retrieved here. 

In a Socratic Seminar, students may speak to one another. However, more often than not, the teacher is still in charge of the discussion and has an end goal in mind for where they want the conversation to go. For the most part, students still look to the teacher to guide the discussion. 

In a Harkness discussion, teachers do not have a content-related end goal in mind– students should be the leaders of the conversation. They should not be looking at the teacher but should instead be looking at each other. 

See the image above. In the first, a more traditional Socratic Seminar, the discussion is continually guided by the teacher. In contrast, in the second, the kindergarten class has moved towards a Harkness discussion, wherein the conversation is equally distributed among all class members. 

Facilitator Molly Simmons noted that teachers should think of Harkness as "learning as play." 

What's happening at the table? What are students discussing? 

Students are analyzing a text, whether a book, an article, a podcast, a media clip, etc. Molly Simmons noted that you, as the teacher, must be "VERY intentional about the texts that you choose." Preparation for a Harkness teacher is:

• Finding useful and evocative texts for the table.

• Annotating the texts.

• Figuring out what questions you have about the texts as a teacher.

• Determining your questions for students. 

Students should be prepared for class by reviewing and annotating this text. Ms. Simmons noted that students often learn how to annotate a text through Harkness. Anytime they make a point and do not provide evidence to back it up, teachers can ask, "Where do you SEE that in the text?" Through such questions, students begin to mark the evidence they need in their texts. 

Ms. Simmons also noted that there were several other ways that she prompted students to annotate their texts, including asking students: 

• "What are words you don't get? Note those"

• "Show me the page where you talked to the text the most."

• To "Note questions in the margins." 

• "Show me how you're preparing, and I'll give you an 'in' tomorrow in the conversation." 

She stated that this last prompt was particularly useful for quieter students who have not yet figured out how to enter the conversation.  

Notably, Ms. Simmons commented that, above all, it is about letting students bring to the table what they are noticing and what will help the students come to a deeper understanding of the text. She noted, "What you get curious about is what you remember,"-- reiterating that Harkness is about the teacher putting their ego aside and allowing students to come to their own realizations. 

How do you involve students who are not participating? What about students who talk too much? 

The idea of tracking the Harkness discussion was discussed several times throughout the day (learn more here). During a discussion, Harkness teachers often draw a Harkness table on a sheet of paper, mark the students around the table, and then draw lines across the table to indicate who is talking when to whom. Teachers sometimes include reference letters to tell if a student has referenced the text, asked a question, brought someone else into the conversation, and more. 

At the Harkness table, students who talk too much are often called "Harkness warriors." Ms. Simmons observed that these students often need to practice their listening skills and tend to "LOVE tracking the conversation." 

The tracking strategy can also work well for larger classes, where not all students can participate in a Harkness discussion simultaneously. Seminar Educators discussed using a fishbowl strategy with 12 students engaged in the Harkness discussion, while another eight students tracked the conversation from the outside. Then, if time permits, the teacher could "flip flop" so the other students could discuss – or, if not, they could periodically pause until the next class for the other students to contribute. 

How do you start a Harkness class? 

Do students sit down and start discussing? Ms. Simmons shared that perhaps in older grades (11th & 12th), she might sit down and ask, "Where do you guys want to start?" Otherwise, Ms. Simmons and the other Harkness instructors at the Seminar all shared ways to help open classes with icebreakers or additional ways to "ground" their students in their texts. 

These included: 

• Pair and share, then share out with the table 

• Read the line of the text that impacted you the most 

• Put up a quote on the board that we should dive into 

• Do a quick reading quiz 

• Draw your favorite scene on the board 

How do you assess Harkness? 

Ms. Simmons was clear that "if part of your grade is discussion, it needs to be explicit." One way to create an assessment for Harkness discussed was to develop a clear rubric, such as using the 22 traits of a Harkness classroom to outline student expectations. 

In particular, it was noted that teachers often need to be explicit with younger grade students (e.g., 9th graders), such as stating that they must speak 3 times per class. While this might encourage statements such as "I agree," Ms. Simmons noted that it's often okay for students to start this way as it gets them normalized towards speaking at the table. 

If teachers need more objective assessments, Ms. Simmons suggested reading quizzes or creating precise 1-5 rating scales on your rubrics (such as ratings for how students move the discussion forward). 

Summing Up

Ultimately, Ms. Simmons noted that Harkness "comes down to being an exercise in listening." She will call out students for repeating something another student says and does not want students to think that "loud is right." She similarly remains firm that Harkness is rooted in texts. She noted, "It's debate when no one is analyzing the text"-- not Harkness. Finally, Harkness means finding ways to create the psychological safety students need to participate at the table. Ms. Simmons spoke about "giving inroads" at the table for quieter students, teaching students not to call one another out but instead focus on learning how to help one another, doing warm-ups together, learning phrases such as "What I'm really interested in…" or "What I'm really curious about…" to respond to one another and more. 

Later on my first day at the Summit, I watched student fellows engage in a Harkness warm-up with another Harkness teacher. The goal was for the student fellows to get through the entire alphabet with a fellow saying one letter and passing it off to another fellow without calling on one another; they needed to use body language or other means to indicate who could go next. If fellows spoke at the same time, they had to restart. These fellows had only known each other for a few days, yet just through this brief warm-up, I could see the magic of Harkness beginning to happen. Students laughed; they attended to each other's body language carefully; they listened intently. They didn't want to stop, sure that they just needed one more time to get it right. They were already joined as a group in search of a common goal. By the time they actually pulled out their texts for their Harkness discussion, they were ready to go.

CHAT GPT: FIRST MUSINGS

Howard Gardner © 2023

How will ChatGPT—and other Large Language Instruments—affect our educational system—and our broader society? How should they?

I’m frequently asked questions like these—and they are much on my mind.

Something akin to ChatGPT—human or super-human levels of performance—has long been portrayed in science fiction: I’m familiar with the American, British, French, and Russian varieties. But few observers expected such excellent performance so fast, so impressively, so threatening (or enabling)—depending on your stance.

As suggested by historian Yuval Harari, we may be approaching the end of the Anthropocene era.

We can anticipate that large language instruments—like Open AI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E—will continually improve.

They will be able to do anything that can be described, captured in some kind of notation. Already they are able to conduct psychotherapy with patients, write credible college application essays, and create works of visual art or pieces of music in the style of well-known human creators as well as in newly invented styles. Soon one of their creations may be considered for the Nobel Prize in physics or literature, the Pulitzer Prize for musical composition or journalism.

Of course, superior AI performance does not—and need not—prevent human beings from engaging in such activities. We humans can still paint, compose music, sculpt, compete in chess, conduct psychotherapy sessions—even if AI systems turn out to outperform us in some or most ways.

Open AI introduced ChatGPT 3 in 2020 and DALL-E in 2021

We can also work in conjunction with AI programs. A painter may ask DALL-E to create something, after which the painter may alter what the program has furnished. A researcher may present ChatGPT with a hypothesis and ask the system to come up with ways to test that hypothesis—after which the researcher can carry out one or more of these approaches herself. Such activities can alternate, going back and forth between the human provision and the computational program.

We fear what could go wrong—and rightly so. AI systems like ChatGPT have not undergone a million-plus years of evolutionary history (including near extinction or sudden vaults in skill); such recently devised systems do not inhabit our planet in the same way that the hominid species has. They are not necessarily—and certainly not existentially—afraid of cataclysmic climate change, or nuclear war, or viruses that prove fatal to homo sapiens. Indeed, such systems could spread misinformation rapidly and thereby contribute to destructive climate change and the probability of nuclear war (recall “The Doomsday Machine” featured in the dystopic movie Dr. Strangelove). These destructive outcomes are certainly possible, although (admittedly) such calamities might happen even had there been no digital revolution.

And what about the effects of Large Language Instruments on our schools, our broader educational system?

Many fear that systems like ChatGPT will make it unnecessary for students to learn anything, since ChatGPT can tell them everything they might want or need to know—almost instantaneously and almost always accurately (or at least as accurately as an 20th century encyclopedia or today’s “edition” of Wikipedia!). I think that AI will have a huge impact on education, but not in that way.

Now that machines are rivalling or even surpassing us in so many ways, I have an ambitious and perhaps radical recommendation. What education of members of our species should do—increasingly and thoughtfully—is to focus on the human condition: what it means to be human, what our strengths and frailties are, what we have accomplished (for good or evil) over many centuries of biological and cultural evolution, what opportunities are afforded by our stature and our status, what we should avoid, what we should pursue, in what ways, and with what indices of success...or of concern.

But to forestall an immediate and appropriate reservation: I don’t intend to be homo sapiens centric. Rather, I want us to focus on our species as part of the wider world, indeed the wider universe. That universe includes the biological and geological worlds that are known to us.

Psychologist-turned-educator (and my teacher) Jerome Bruner inspired me. His curriculum for middle school children, developed nearly sixty years ago, centered on three questions:

Bruner in the Chanticleer 1936, Duke University (Source: Wikipedia)

• What makes human beings human?

• How did they get to be that way?

• How can they be made more so?

To approach these framing topics intelligently, we need disciplinary knowledge, rigor, and tools. We may not need to completely scuttle earlier curricular frameworks (e.g., those posed in the United States in the 1890s by the “Committee of Ten” or the more recent “Common Core”); but we need to rethink how they can be taught, modelled, and activated to address such over-arching questions.

We need to understand our human nature—biologically, psychologically, culturally, historically, and pre-historically. That’s the way to preserve the planet, all of us on it. It’s also the optimal way to launch joint human-computational ventures—ranging from robots that construct or re-construct environments to programs dedicated (as examples) to economic planning, political positioning, military strategies and decisions.

To emphasize: this approach is not intended to glorify; homo sapiens has done much that is regrettable, and lamentable. Rather, it is to explain and to understand —so that, as a species, we can do better as we move forward in a human-computer era.

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Against this background, how have I re-considered or re-conceptualized the three issues that, as a scholar, I’ve long pondered?

1. Synthesizing is the most straightforward. Anything that can be laid out and formulated—by humans or machines—will be synthesized well by ChatGPT and its ilk. It’s hard to imagine that a human being—or even a large team of well-educated human beings—will do better synthesis than ChatGPT4, 5, or n.

   We could imagine a “Howard Gardner ChatGPT”—one that synthesizes the way that I do, only better—it would be like an ever-improving chess program in that way. Whether ChatGPT-HG is a dream or a nightmare I leave to your (human) judgment.

2. Good work and good citizenship pose different challenges. Our aspirational conceptions of work and of membership in a community have emerged in the course of human history over the last several thousand years—within and across hundreds of cultures. Looking ahead, these aspirations indicate what we are likely to have to do if we want to survive as a planet and as a species.

   All cultures have views, conceptions, of these “goods,” but of course—and understandably, these views are not the same. What is good—and what is bad, or evil, or neutral—in 2023 is not the same as in 1723. What is valued today in China is not necessarily what is admired in Scandinavia or Brazil. And there are different versions of “the good” in the US—just think of the deep south compared to the East and West coasts.

   ChatGPT could synthesize different senses of “good,” in the realms of both “work” and “citizenship.” But there’s little reason to think that human beings will necessarily abide by such syntheses—the League of Nations, the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva convention were certainly created with good will by human beings—but they have been honored as much in the breach as in the observance.

A Personal Perspective

We won’t survive as a planet unless we institute and subscribe to some kind of world belief system. It needs the prevalence of Christianity in the Occident a millennium ago, or of Confucianism or Buddhism over the centuries in Asia, and it should incorporate tactics like “peaceful disobedience” in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela. This form of faith needs to be constructed so as to enable the survival and thriving of the planet, and the entities on it, including plants, non-human animals, and the range of chemical elements and compounds.

Personally, I do not have reservations about terming this a “world religion”—so long as it does not posit a specific view of an Almighty Figure—and require allegiance to that entity. But a better analogy might be a “world language”—one that could be like Esperanto or a string of bits 00010101111….

And if such a school of thought is akin to a religion, it can’t be one that favors one culture over others—it needs to be catholic, rather than Catholic, judicious rather than Jewish. Such a belief-and-action system needs to center on the recognition and the resolution of challenges—in the spirit of controlling climate change, or conquering illness, or combatting a comet directed at earth from outer space, or a variety of ChatGPT that threatens to “do us in” from within….Of the philosophical or epistemological choices known to me, I resonate most to humanism—as described well by Sarah Bakewell in her recent book Humanly Possible.

Multiple Intelligences (MI)

And, finally, I turn to MI. Without question, any work by any intelligence, or combination of intelligences, that can be specified with clarity will soon be mastered by Large Language Instruments—indeed, such performances by now constitute a trivial achievement with respect to linguistic, logical, musical, spatial intelligences—at least as we know them, via their human instantiations.

How—or even whether —such computational instruments can display bodily intelligences or the personal intelligences is a different matter. The answer depends on how broad a formulation one is willing to accept.

To be specific:

Taylor Swift at 2019 American Music Awards (Source: Wikipedia)

• Does a robotic version of ChatGPT need to be able to perform ballet à la Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn? And must it also show how these performers might dance in 2023 rather than in 1963?

• Does it need to inspire people, the way Joan of Arc or Martin Luther King did?

• Should it be able to conduct successful psychotherapy in the manner of Erik Erikson or Carl Rogers ?

• Or are non-human attempts to instantiate these intelligences seen as category errors— the way that we would likely dismiss a chimpanzee that purported to create poetry on a keyboard?

The answers, in turn, are determined by what we mean by a human intelligence—is it certain behavioral outputs alone (the proverbial monkey that types out Shakespeare, or the songbird that can emulate Maria Callas or Luciano Pavarotti, Mick Jagger or Taylor Swift)? Or is it what a human or group of humans can express through that intelligence to other human beings—the meanings that can be created. conveyed, comprehended among members of the species.

I’m reminded of Thomas Nagel’s question: “What is it like to be a bat?” ChatGPT can certainly simulate human beings. But perhaps only human beings can realize—feel, experience, dream—what it’s like to be a human being. And perhaps only human beings can and will care—existentially—about that question. And this is what I believe education in our post-ChatGPT world should focus on.

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For comments on earlier versions of this far-ranging blog, I am grateful to Shinri Furuzawa, Jay Gardner, Annie Stachura, and Ellen Winner.

REFERENCES:

Bakewell, S. (2024). Humanly possible: Seven hundred years of humanist freethinking, inquiry, and hope. Vintage Canada.

Nagel, T. (1974). what is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674594623.c15

Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, August 21). Man: A course of study. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man:_A_Course_of_Study

Top 5 Articles: Back to School Season

by The Good Project Team

It’s that time of year again when many students on Northern Hemisphere schedules are going back to school after a summer break. The start of the academic year brings with it new routines, opportunities, and pressures for teachers, young people, and families. Whether you’re working behind the scenes to prepare your classroom, wondering about how best to support your child through the transition, or moving on to new education adventures yourself, we wish you the best of luck with the start of the new academic year. 

Here are five articles that have recently come across our desks that might be of interest, especially in this time of transition.

1. 4 Ways to Start Connecting With Students in the First Week Back

   This research-based video from Edutopia focuses on the importance of building strong relationships and asking students to be metacognitive about their worries and needs at the beginning of the school year. A classroom that is welcoming and reflective of students’ own experiences and backgrounds, as well as shared classroom responsibilities, can enable young people to feel connected and seen.

2. How to invite introverted students to share their thinking in class

   While extroverts may thrive by getting energy from traditional forms of participation in a classroom, like talking in front of groups, introverts may feel drained or want to avoid raising their hands. This quick NPR broadcast spotlights one teacher who has tried to implement more introvert-friendly modes of participation in his ninth-grade classroom, such as prioritizing partner/small group sharing.

3. University Departures Put Student Journalists in Spotlight

   Young journalists have been in the spotlight recently as college newspapers have brought down prominent figures. As described by The New York Times, Theo Baker, a Stanford student reporter, amplified claims that Stanford’s president had forged research data. Baker’s actions exemplify “good work” in action by standing up for what is ethical, even when it might be hard (Baker was reportedly threatened with legal action).

4. AI Can Make Education More Personal (Yes, Really)

   Much of the coverage of AI tools like ChatGPT has focused on their disruptive capabilities that threaten to make traditional educational tasks like writing essays or work tasks like writing code obsolete. However, an EducationWeek op-ed argues that AI technology can free up time for teachers to build more meaningful student relationships and also provide real-time, personalized feedback that will prepare teachers for success.

5. How to Help Kids Become Skilled Citizens

   The Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Usable Knowledge published the results of research into the capacities needed for good citizens, finding that experts and non-experts discussed the most critical aspects of citizenship as “political engagement, interpersonal tasks, building an informed community, and volunteering.” For educators, there are big and small ways to embed experiences into schools to encourage students to be engaged citizens in their communities.

Reflections on Project Zero Classroom 2023

Well, the 25th Project Zero Classroom (PZC) has come to an end! What is PZC? PZC is a week-long professional development conference for educators from around the world. At the conference, school leaders and teachers can learn about PZ tools and frameworks that can be implemented upon return to their schools and classrooms. 

What were some of The Good Project staff’s key take-aways from this year’s event? 

During Ron Ritchhart’s plenary, we used the fun “conversation dance” thinking routine to learn more about the ten Cultures of Thinking in Action mindsets, such as “we can’t teach dispositions, we must enculturate them” and “learning occurs at the point of challenge.” During the conversation dance each participant begins with one of the mindsets on a card and discusses one of the questions on the back of their card in relation to their mindset with a partner (e.g. “What’s your take?” or “What might it look like?”). After both partners share, the partners switch cards and discuss their mindsets with new partners. 

Later on Monday, our team members Lynn Barendsen, Danny Mucinskas, and Shelby Clark were able to share Good Project activities and research with PZC participants in a mini course entitled “Good Work: What It Is and How to Teach It.” During the session, participants explored their ideas of a good worker in small groups, noting the particular attributes they associate with these role models. Later, participants discussed whether and how these attributes merged with the Good Project framework of the three Es of good work: excellence, ethics, and engagement. This activity also serves as the first activity in our Good Project lesson plans. 

Liz Dawes-Duraisingh spoke in her plenary “Learning to Dialogue: Dialoguing to Learn” about the importance of intercultural dialogue, and, importantly, of giving students  specific tools to learn how to speak to one another. Her project’s “Dialogue Toolkit” gives students nine different ways that they can interact with each other’s comments in their online intercultural chatboard. For example, students are instructed to notice what stands out in another student’s post, or to make a connection between another student’s post and something in their own lives. Alternatively, students can name an aspect of their lives, identities, or contexts that influences how they see another student’s post. We’re excited to try out the dialogue toolkit in our Good Project teacher community of practice.

From Tina Grotzer’s “Educating for a Changing Climate: Helping Students to Live Sustainably and Equitably as Global Citizens” came the idea of “moral musical chairs.” In the activity, students are presented with an ethical dilemma; then, chairs are set up for each student, with each chair representing a different perspective a student could take on the dilemma. Music is played, and when the music stops students have to assume the perspective of the chair they are at and discuss the dilemma from this perspective. While Tina Grotzer applies this activity to numerous environmental dilemmas, our team is excited to try this out with many of the dilemmas located in our dilemma database. 

So much other great learning happened at the PZC this year, particularly in the small study groups where educators were able to gather after plenaries and mini course sessions in order to reflect and learn together. Just type in #pzc2023 into your social media platform of choice to see examples from this year’s PZC of different activities the study groups did together. One of our particular favorites was “Bumper cars mixed with red light, green light”.

The week ended with the PZC community reaffirming its commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). In the closing plenary session, speakers addressed the importance of recognizing identity, inclusive of race, class, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and more, in confronting systemic oppression. At The Good Project, we will continue interrogating these issues as we collaborate with diverse educators and investigate our own positionality as researchers, with the goal of promoting human development for learners across many contexts and environments.

Managing Career Transitions: A New White Paper about a Course for Mid-Career Adults

by Danny Mucinskas

We live in an era of rapid change. Events of the past few years alone have demonstrated that for humanity to proceed with “business as usual” is not only unrealistic but is actually not possible. Climate change, new technologies (such as generative AI), and demographic shifts are set to touch all of our lives, even in the short-term. Economic, political, and social systems are being reshaped by necessity. While it can be easy to forget that we are living through exceptional times, our lives will be altered in concrete ways in the years and decades to come, including at work and in workplaces. According to the Future of Jobs Report 2023, 23% of jobs are expected to change in the next 4 years alone, which will require people to respond by changing roles and even career fields. Well-executed programs and frameworks that will help workers handle transitions in thoughtful ways will be in demand.

Against this backdrop, from 2020 to 2023, a team from Project Zero (PZ) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education developed a course to help working adults process and manage changes in their careers. Made possible by funding from the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM), which collaborated with the PZ team throughout the project, the course is titled “Navigating Changes Successfully at Work.” It brings together insights from both the Learning Innovations Laboratory, under the direction of Marga Biller, and from The Good Project, with contributions led by Danny Mucinskas and Howard Gardner. (See the previous two blog posts that have been written about this effort here and here.) The course has been piloted, refined, and offered iteratively with Singaporean mid-career adult learners thanks to SIM’s connections and partnerships, including with SIM employees, unemployed professionals, and a group of facilitators who have now been trained to teach the course independently.

Based on the activities of this project, PZ has released a new white paper that details the background, creation process, and content of the course, as well as the challenges encountered and possible future directions. The paper is intended for a wide audience, including scholars, learning designers, and policymakers who may be interested in this particular set of ideas and in general professional development opportunities for workers.

As the paper explains, the course is structured as a series of four 3-hour session meetings, during which participants are led through a series of discussion and reflection prompts about the meanings of two core frameworks developed in recent decades at PZ: Unlearning and Good Work. 

Regarding Unlearning, participants explore three different lenses that may uncover ways of thinking and doing that “get in the way” of adapting effectively to change. First, the course looks at Mindsets, or the sets of assumptions and patterns of thinking we have about the world and how it functions. Specifically, the course prompts learners to uncover their values (such as honesty or accomplishment); to map their various identities; and to consider how expertise may help or hinder transitions. Participants then think about how each of these may need to shift. Second, the course covers Habits by analyzing how habit cycles function as patterns of cues or triggers, regular routines, and rewards or goals, and how these cycles may need to shift when our goals change. Third, the final session reviews Systems, zooming out and asking learners to diagram their learning ecosystem and also diagnose their alignment or misalignment with the views and goals of others. 

Throughout the sessions, learners are furthermore asked to consider the relationship between the lenses of Unlearning and the 3 Es of Good Work: Engagement (a sense of connection or enjoyment to work), Excellence (quality, involved in work that is well-done or meets a certain standard), and Ethics (social responsibility related to concerns of right and wrong). Course participants think about their own personal manifestations of Good Work that align with these elements. At-home extension activities completed between sessions allow for application of the concepts to learners’ daily lives and work.

The following video, developed by the course team, provides an overview of how Unlearning and Good Work may be helpful in moments of workplace change and also may interact with one another.

Several learning design principles guided the structure, pace, and activities included in the course, namely:

• Collaboration, to increase participant engagement and to ensure diverse perspectives are shared;

• Learner-centric facilitation, focusing on participants’ personal experiences rather than knowledge of the instructor;

• Relevance to relatable, real-life scenarios; and

• Metacognitive evaluation, in which participants reflect on their learning over time.

Based on the Unlearning and Good Work frameworks from this course, a team at SIM is continuing to design new learning experiences, including a core skills program focused on outcomes like learning agility and self-management. Furthermore, the standalone course will continue to be offered to Singaporean mid-career learners via SIM’s partnership with e2i as well as via SIM’s usual public enrollment and corporate channels.

As we look ahead at the trajectory of this course and its potential to aid adult learners, we recognize that we live in a continuously changing world with concomitant workplace transitions.  The PZ team is therefore considering additional audiences who may benefit from the learning materials, including younger learners (e.g., college seniors) and new cohorts of adult workers (e.g., participants drawn from a single company or organization). Additionally, in order to ensure that the course has maximum impact and staying power, it is important for the ideas to be periodically reinforced. This goal may be realized through additional follow-up workshops or the establishment of a community of learners who continue to discuss their workplace transitions with one another beyond the conclusion of the formal course.

We welcome comments below and look forward to continuing to share updates about the direction of this work in future posts.