The Good Project Core Concepts: Reflection

By Danny Mucinskas

Every day, many of us are confronted with numerous responsibilities and decisions. In addition to the professional obligations, personal care needs, and family relationships we prioritize, today’s media and information environment is saturated and pervasive, driven by devices and social platforms. A 2022 survey of American adults by the American Psychological Association showed that a full 27% of respondents were feeling so stressed that they could not function. In the working world, Gallup has found that only a third of workers feel engaged in their work in 2024, while 1 in 6 are actively disengaged, largely due to a lack of clarity about roles, little feedback, and profound ongoing changes in working patterns. We might ask ourselves:

• When we might feel overwhelmed, what practices can help each of us feel more grounded and prepared to take on new challenges? 

• When seeking to do “good work,” what day-to-day habits can support us in making ethical decisions with high standards? 

• How can we take advantage of “down-time” to pause, center ourselves, and prepare for the road ahead?

Learning to reflect more fully can help to answer these questions and more. As a practice, reflection allows us to take advantage of opportunities to stop and think introspectively, to develop connections, and to construct a path forward. Defined as “the process of engaging in attentive, critical, exploratory and iterative interactions with one’s thoughts and actions, and their underlying conceptual frame, with a view to change” (Nguyen et al., 2014), reflection can help people conceptualize and achieve goals, become aware of themselves as learners (Kiaei & Reio, Jr., 2014), and reinforce a sense of purpose (Kosine, Steger, & Duncan, 2008). Reflection is related to and overlaps with metacognition, or “thinking about one’s thinking” (Chick, 2013).

Much of The Good Project’s work has focused on cultivating a habit of reflection related to work, whether that is a profession, a hobby, a community position, or another role that we may hold. We know from research that reflection in the workplace is not only beneficial but necessary. Schools, companies, and other institutions involve people collaborating together. Because human behavior and organizations are complicated and multilayered, deep reflection is required by all of us in order to develop professional competence (Cattaneo, 2020) and to make career decisions (Bassot & Reid, 2013). Reflection can also support people in becoming self-aware, effective leaders (Kontostavlou & Drigas, 2021). In his book The Reflective Practitioner (1983), focused on professionals at work, Donald Schön proposed a dual nature of reflection for workers: reflection-in-action, which occurs within situations and involves immediate reaction and testing, and reflection-on-action, which involves revisiting an experience after it has taken place to understand what happened and what could have gone differently. The benefits of worker reflection are therefore manifold.

Students who are not yet workers also benefit from reflective practices. Activities that ask adolescents to reflect upon their future careers promote both career adaptability and well-being (Ran et al., 2023). A meta-analysis has further found strong evidence of metacognition’s positive effect on direct student outcomes in school (Perry, Lundie, & Golder, 2019). 

Reflective capacities, then, are important for young people and older working professionals alike. Reflection allows each of us to build on our rich history of experiences through continuous consideration of our thoughts and actions, in the moment and retrospectively. Reflection reinforces the idea that we are all lifelong learners with room to grow as we come to understand ourselves more deeply.

The Good Project’s focus on reflection has also aimed to help people reflect consistently as a habit, or a regularly practiced routine, as opposed to occasionally or when it suits them. Regular reflection can become automatic when it is tied to a habitual ritual. For instance, actions like taking just a few minutes for daily individual journaling, or specific methods of debriefing in teams at the end of a meeting (to talk about what went well, what did not, and plans for the future) can become routine. These practices facilitate “thinking about thinking” in critical and attentive ways that meet the standard of reflection. Other habitual actions that support reflection may include use of mindfulness apps, reflective writing assignments in classrooms, or Socratic seminars that routinely ask learners to be intentional about how their ideas, thoughts, and behaviors are changing.

Furthermore, we have often spoken of the idea of reflection simply as a “Mirror Test,” or a chance to look at oneself in a hypothetical mirror, asking, “What do you see?” The answers to this question may vary widely from one person to another, involving aspects of identity, values, community affiliations, and life experiences that have influenced work. But collectively, thinking about each of these aspects of who we are and what we see when we examine ourselves can put our thoughts and actions into sharper focus, highlighting what we appreciate and what we would like to change by setting new goals or ideals. 

Because The Good Project has focused so intently on cultivating reflective abilities, our curricular materials and lessons rely heavily on thought-provoking questions to encourage learners of all ages to reflect individually and in groups. For example:

• In our lesson plans, we ask students to complete self-reflections that ask them to think metacognitively about their learning over the course of each one of the units.

• Our dilemmas are intended as opportunities for people to work together to dissect a particular set of circumstances faced by another person before turning the lens inward to one’s own circumstances.

• Our activity database contains a variety of journaling exercises asking people to write about situations in which they faced dilemmas or made a decision that they would like to change.

When we have used these materials with learners, or teachers have used them with students, we have often witnessed reactions that express appreciation for the chance to be introspective and to develop new insights. These reactions indicate not only that reflection is beneficial but can also be enjoyable and enriching. However, it is worth noting that reflection overload may be possible. For example, Tasha Eurich suggests that highly reflective people can sometimes experience negative emotions caused by constant and unproductive introspection that does not lead to any new insights. In such cases, we may need to shift from asking ourselves “Why?” questions to “What?” questions during reflective moments. This shift can lower stress and result in more solution-oriented thinking.

The ultimate goal of encouraging people to reflect, specifically on their working lives, is that they will hopefully be equipped with the ability to slow down, strategize, and make thoughtful decisions in their professional lives. In order to prioritize reflection, we must shift our mindsets and begin to view metacognitive practices not as a luxury but rather as a necessity for personal growth. The ability to reflect thoroughly is particularly crucial when circumstances become difficult or challenging, such as when our values are challenged or we feel torn between conflicting responsibilities. Too often in the rush of life, especially in today’s pace of quick attention spans, there is a temptation to make quick decisions. As an alternative, we advocate  slowing down to take the time necessary to deeply reflect, practicing both reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.

Through reflection, we hope that people will be able to do “good work” aligned with The Good Project’s framework that is excellent, ethical, and engaged for themselves and others. As author and educator Margaret J. Wheatley has said, “Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.”

Below, we share some resources related to the concept of reflection and its practice:

• Project Zero’s Thinking Routines, many of which are intended to help people to be metacognitive (e.g., “I Used to Think… Now I Think…”).

• Shari Tishman and David Perkins’ episode on “The Power and Pleasure of a Pause,” which may be an opportunity to reflect, from the Thinkability podcast.

• These activities specifically focused on reflection.

The Good Project Core Concepts: Ethics

by Lynn Barendsen

One of the key three “Es” of “good work”, “ethics” is often the most fraught. Excellence is fairly straightforward: excellence means doing high quality work, or putting in your best effort. Engagement also seems relatively easy to understand because many of us feel it as we work: it’s what keeps us going when work gets hard, and can involve some combination of finding meaning, purpose or enjoyment in our work. But ethics - and doing ethical work - are more complicated. Ethics involve more than questions of “right” or “wrong” because sometimes there can be multiple “right” answers, no “good” answers or sometimes, very few if any positive choices. Ask yourself:

• Have you ever been conflicted about a difficult decision at work? 

• Have you perceived something that seems unfair, been unsure about whether or not to speak up, or doubtful about whether anything will change if you do? 

• Have you been placed in an uncomfortable position when a colleague confides in you, feeling that you need to cover or bend the truth to protect that confidence?

On The Good Project, we are not philosophers by training. Nonetheless, we recognize the roots of moral philosophy in ethical considerations. The study of ethics addresses conceptions of right and wrong, of good versus evil but is also about weighing choices while considering values. Ethical thinking provides a framework with which we can consider our decisions and our actions. In terms of good work, we ask if and how individuals consider the impact of their work beyond themselves. 

In previous writings, and relevant to this discussion, are the concepts of “neighborly morality” and the “ethics of roles.” Neighborly morality might also be understood as the Golden Rule, or treating others as you would like to be treated. Most of us make decisions on an almost daily basis taking this type of consideration into account: keeping sidewalks shoveled during the winter, or helping strangers at the grocery store with hard-to-reach goods. Whereas these types of actions typically occur in our everyday, non-working lives, the ethics of roles involve the standards by which we measure work. They may be as formal as the Hippocratic oath taken by all physicians or more informal, such as ethical codes developed and carried out within a particular business or workplace. Ideally, ethical work takes into account the standards of that particular workplace or profession, asking workers to take responsibility for their efforts.

Most often, we’re made aware of ethics when we’re faced with a difficult decision. During the original good work research, carried out in the mid 1990s, we asked participants a wide variety of questions about their work, their beliefs and values, and the influences that were most formative in their lives. When we first began interviews, we would ask, “Have you ever been faced with an ethical dilemma?” We quickly realized that this question did not solicit interesting responses; typically, we’d be met with blank stares. But this changed when we reframed the question to, “Have you ever been in a situation where you weren’t sure about the best course of action, or where you weren’t sure what to do?” As long as we didn’t ask specifically about “ethics,” we heard multiple stories about individuals faced with difficult decisions. Many of these stories are now in our dilemmas database.

As we have deepened our work in school settings, we have developed more detailed tools to support educators. Tackling ethical dilemmas can be difficult for all of us; it can be even more difficult to help students navigate their decision-making, especially in increasingly polarized, sometimes politically fraught classroom settings. As a result, we now offer a variety of resources to help educators, students and individuals navigate ethical choices.

For example, we offer a few basic frames to explain how individuals often approach ethical dilemmas. Consider, for example, a classic trolley problem, where an individual is faced with an impossible choice. A trolley is barrelling towards 5 people who are tied down across the tracks. If you pull a switch the trolley will be diverted to a track where there is only one person tied down. What do you do? Here are three approaches to unpacking this decision:

1. Utilitarianism, or ends-based thinking would argue that you should do the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. You should consider the end result and how the greatest number of people might be helped by your decision, and consider any associated costs. In this scenario, you should pull the lever, save five people, and sacrifice one.

2. Deontological thinking is a rule-based perspective, based on principles, do as you would want others to do, ends do not justify the means. In other words, it is wrong to take part in any action that would hurt another human being. This perspective would argue for taking no action at all.

3. Virtue-based thinking involves a perspective that relies on particular character strengths, such as bravery, curiosity, or open-mindedness. The “right” decision is the decision that someone with strong character strengths would do. A classic “thinking outside the box” example, this perspective would argue for trying to free or untie the individual or individuals, to jump on the trolley or try to stop it in some way, to demonstrate selflessness and bravery.

We often think of virtue-based thinking as the most complex of the three, or put another way, the least straightforward. It’s also the frame we mostly closely adhere to on The Good Project. We have developed additional frames useful to approaching ethical dilemmas, including responsibility, roles, alignment, and, in particular, values.

Ethics are in fact informed by our personal values, which serve as a foundation for ethical decision-making, influencing the choices we make in both our personal and professional lives. Exploring and understanding our own values are essential for cultivating a strong ethical framework. Similar to “virtue-based thinking,” we encourage the exploration of values via our Value Sort tool. Ideally, individuals are aware of and cultivating values in support of good work long before they are faced with difficult ethical decisions. 

When we first began our study of “good work” in the mid 1990s, we often had to explain why we were studying what was then referred to as “Humane Creativity.” Why was it necessary to understand why some creative leaders were more “humane” than others? At that time, ethical lapses were not a daily newsworthy occurrence. Through the decades, and through large breaking stories such as Enron (depicted in the film “The Smartest Guys in the Room”) and Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, gradually the need for ethical workers became more and more clear. Over time, discussions of “good work,” have come to elicit quick nods from the audience and questions about how to make it happen, rather than questions about why it’s necessary. Ethics violations at Facebook (as identified by whistleblower Frances Haugen), Theranos, the admissions scandal “Varsity Blues,” doping in sports and luxuries provided to Supreme Court justices provide just a handful of many, wide-ranging examples.

We need ethical workers. We also need ethical leaders. For better or for worse, leaders are role models for our youth and are constantly in the public eye. As we have seen over and over again, if unethical leaders are successful, they will be imitated. Although “ethics” may be the most complex of the three “Es” in many ways it feels the most urgent and threatened component. Below are some additional resources to draw upon to continue to encourage and support ethical good work.

Resources:

A professional development video on ethics 

An activity about making a difficult choice

A blog on discussing ethical dilemmas 

Advice on leading difficult discussions 

Dilemmas database

The Good Project Core Concepts: Models and Mentors

by Danny Mucinskas

Throughout our lives, we will meet countless individuals and be exposed to the stories of thousands of other people through mass media. The relationships that we develop, whether direct interpersonal relationships (such as a deep friendship or family bond) or parasocial relationships (such as being a fan of a celebrity) can have profound effects on our values, identity development, decisions, and actions. Consider:

• What types of relationships in your life have influenced you in positive and negative ways? 

• Is there a particular person or persons who shaped who you are today? 

• Have you held this role for someone else in your life? Do you think you’ve helped shape who they are in positive ways? 

In various lines of qualitative work carried out by The Good Project, related to both the way that adolescents navigate the world and how adults conduct their professional lives, we have often focused on two specific types of influential relationships. Research participants have spoken about:

1. Role models. These are people who others often seek to imitate or emulate based on some characteristic, behavior, or set of achievements in a particular field. People often find them to be inspiring and to represent something that they seek to accomplish themselves and are described as “looked up to.” While people often have a direct relationship with their role models (e.g., an older sibling), it is also frequently the case that role models are widely recognized individuals who may not know the people who are emulating them (e.g., a widely known author).

2. Mentors. These are people who others look to for guidance. Unlike role models, mentors (e.g., a teacher or a close colleague in a leadership position) are by necessity always known well to those they are advising, who are often seeking to follow in their footsteps. Mentors are often people who have experience or knowledge of a particular domain and can provide their mentees with support or feedback that can be actively used towards achieving the goals or ambitions of the mentee.

From research, we know that having role models is important for a variety of reasons. For example, role models are often responsible for increasing motivation towards goal achievement (Morgenroth et al., 2015), for setting examples of how one wants to work (particularly in parental role modeling; Wiese & Freunde, 2011), and can even inspire others to make bold decisions like starting a company (Bosma et al., 2012). Role modeling is also potentially associated with the development of character strengths (Johnson et al., 2016), with advancement of values like multicultural harmony (Onyekwuluje, 2000) and has been found to influence certain health outcomes (Yancey et al., 2011). 

Similarly, mentorship is also tied to a variety of positive outcomes and is often important in directly transmitting interpersonal support. In the health professions, mentorship models are relied upon for the sharing of knowledge, values, and emotional encouragement between older and younger members of the workforce (Henry-Noel et al., 2018), while mentors who embodied a “Close Connector” relationship model were found in one study to be most beneficial for youth outcomes (Austin et al., 2020). In the business world, 75% of executives say that having a mentor has been important to their careers, and 90% of workers with professional mentors are happy at work. It is clear, then, that across the lifespan, a relationship with a mentor can assist people in growing their skills and reaching their potential.

The demonstrated benefits of finding role models and mentors prompts all of us working in education to help young people to cultivate and maintain these types of relationships. From The Good Project’s years of investigating and speaking to individuals about these relationships, we have developed several insights which may not only be helpful for educators but also for adults as they do their work across the lifespan.

• We are all members of a multitude of communities, whether the city or town where we live, schools, families, workplaces, hobby groups, and more. We can each find and connect with mentors or role models in any one of these environments or circumstances. In an educational context, by allowing students to choose personally meaningful role models or mentors from any arena of life, the likelihood increases that students will make choices that represent a diversity of voices and identities. Thinking expansively about who might be a role model or mentor reduces the reliance on easy answers or moral paragons who might often be held up as exemplars but who may seem one-dimensional or out of reach (e.g., Mother Teresa, George Washington).

• No mentor or role model is perfect, and there may be a temptation for all of us to find one singular individual who possesses a multitude of admirable qualities or who is in exactly the right position to provide future career advice. Instead of looking for one individual, we have learned that it is possible for people to engage in “frag-mentoring.” Frag-mentoring is the concept that we can have several mentors at once, dependent on their qualities and their areas of expertise. For example, one might choose a senior colleague at work as a mentor for their tenacity and wisdom, even if they aren’t always someone who displays warmth as a friend, and also have a religious leader as a mentor for their spiritual devotion and community leadership, even if they aren’t always organized. The counsel or example of each one of these individuals might serve different purposes in particular circumstances, dependent upon one’s needs.

• Negative examples can be equally as powerful as positive ones. While the definitions of role models and mentors we offered above presuppose positive interactions or a desire to mirror, the opposite may also be true. People who don’t embody the expectations or qualities we value in others, such as a micromanaging boss or a noncommittal family member, can still be instructive from an opposite vantage point. What is it about these individuals that encapsulates what we don’t want to be like, and could their example serve as an “anti-mentor”?

• Concrete and direct action can come from mentorship or role model imitation with planning. Identifying individuals worth emulating as role models or interacting with as mentors is a first step, but the qualities or goals that make these people inspiring and worthwhile exemplars should be specifically named. Naming the qualities of a role model specifically or the goals that a mentor can support can be a tool for intention-setting and getting down to the particulars of what might be productive and life-changing about these relationships. For institutions like schools and workplaces, defined programs can also make mentoring concrete, such as a guest speaker series or a peer mentoring program.

While these insights may help a general audience think about mentors and role models, it can simultaneously be difficult to identify boundaries on who is a suitable individual to fulfill those roles. Notably, in forthcoming data collected by The Good Project, students (primarily secondary schoolers) were asked in an at-home reflection activity to identify multiple exemplars of “good work.” Analysis of their responses revealed that youth are already drawing on both close (e.g., family) and distant (e.g., celebrity) role models and that the qualities they admire in these individuals also cross a variety of complex dimensions of character strengths, including intellectual, moral, and performance character. Yet while these findings are encouraging, students often spoke of business leaders who have questionable scruples (e.g., Elon Musk) as people worthy of imitation as role models. 

While we believe in the idea identified above (that no mentor or role model candidate is perfect), every individual represents a complicated totality of decisions, experiences, and interactions with others and the world. As a project that believes in excellence, engagement, and ethics in human pursuits, The Good Project’s stance is to encourage the choice of mentors and role models who embody convictions and virtues with universal appeal, including common good, equity, empathy, perspective-taking, and sustainability. To complete the three-dimension framework of “good work” that is at the center of our project, leaders who are excellent and engaged in their pursuits must also be ethical.

Some further resources related to role models and mentors that you could explore are:

• Our sets of activities related to mentors and role models.

• Nobel Prize in Mentorship?, a blog post by Lynn Barendsen about the power of mentoring relationships.

• The Making of a Professional, a blog post by Howard Gardner that touches upon the way that models can assist professional development.

• Good Work and How It Happens, a blog post by Arlene Pang about becoming a teacher and how mentorship played a role in her experience.

• This list of role model resources compiled after conversation with teachers. 

• Two dilemmas touching on mentorship: Mentorship at a Distance and What’s a Mentor?. 

Tidbits from Tuscaloosa: Creating a Culture of Character in Schools

By Shelby Clark

A few weeks ago, I attended the “Character through Communities” conference at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—“Roll Tide!” (as I learned to say while I was there). This was my first time in Alabama and really my first time anywhere in the “Deep South” barring southern Florida (which, I think, many would argue doesn’t count). This conference, facilitated by the University of Alabama, the Hope Institute, and Samson University, was held in order to help educators, academics, administrators and others think more about how we can facilitate character education in schools, with a particular focus on the role of relationships and communities in fostering student character. What were some take-aways for all who care about fostering character or social emotional learning in students?

1. We are cultivating character in children, not assuming that character is something children innately have or do not have. Educators, administrators, researchers, parents, and more are planting the seeds and creating the right conditions in the gardens for students to grow into people of character. Clifton Taulbert, the opening keynote speaker, civil rights activist, and author of Eight Habits of the Heart, stated that “we can all be cultivators, we can all do something to make a difference [in the lives of children.].. Don’t remove yourself from the system.” 

Keynote speaker and character scholar Marvin Berkowitz called upon the Hebrew saying “tikkun olam” or “to heal the world,” explaining that educators have an “ethical obligation to improve the world, to make it a better place.” He said, “We are in the world changing business.” Rather than a garden, Berkowitz compared schools to a petri dish. If we want schools to be places where children’s character can flourish, then we need to be providing the right nutrients for character to grow. 

2. Administrators should create a school culture focused on character. One presenter insisted that administrators have a responsibility to create the school culture, and in particular a school culture focused on character. They asserted, “Principals have to carry the flag.” In particular, the conference emphasized that principals have to be role models of character, in essence “walking the walk” rather than “talking the talk.” In a later panel of school leaders, one leader mentioned that a school’s culture should feel like the building “is giving you a big hug.” 

The administrators furthermore emphasized that creating a culture of character in schools is not about making quick changes, but rather about small changes over time. One speaker referred to the book Atomic Habits, which talks about how small, 1% changes can add up over time to give you extraordinary results; it is the same with school cultures. Administrators need to celebrate their small wins and look at failures as opportunities for growth. Marvin Berkowitz similarly commented that administrators and educators need to “Dream big, think small, and act now.” 

Ideas suggested for how to focus your school culture on character included:

• Make sure you have a structure and a plan regarding how to implement character in your school - “Just talking about it is not enough.”

• Keep in mind that one size doesn’t fit all.

• Provide protected time for character education (e.g., a character education class, advisory, etc.).

• Secure resources for character education.

• Discuss character education with staff and other stakeholders (e.g., in meetings).

• Be intentional in your hiring and team selection (e.g., do they model character?).

3. Define your character education core values. Several of the presentations throughout the conference pointed out that there needs to be greater focus on defining and understanding core values. One presenter mentioned that, if a school team tells him that they want to help form productive citizens, his follow up questions include, “1) Do you have an operational definition of what a productive citizen is?; 2) Do you have initiatives to get to that?; and 3) How are you measuring that your students are getting there?” Drs. Ted Savage and Hank Staggs, keynote speakers, noted that having a common language regarding core values across a school system allows students to know that the expectations will look exactly the same in each of their classrooms. Ultimately, such uniformity helps erase confusion and makes more time for learning. Drs. Brendan White and Tanya Crockett likewise found that shared, common language around character is a staple of Character.org National Schools of Character.

Ideas suggested for how to define core values included: 

• Everyone makes a list regarding which values are most important to them. Once those lists are narrowed down to the top values of the group, everyone is asked to describe each value, and these definitions are compared in terms of overlap.

• Begin with an existing framework of values (such as that of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues). Have your staff and faculty narrow these down to their most important values, then have the parent community narrow these values down, then have your students narrow these values down again in order to find your final core values. 

• For younger children, ask them to vote for the behaviors they might prefer, rather than which values they prefer (see picture). 

Assessment of elementary age students’ core values, presented by Ted Savage and Hank Staggs,

4. In the words of Marvin Berkowitz: “Relationships, relationships, relationships.” Clifton Taulbert noted that during his childhood growing up poor in the South, he had a variety of “porch people” in his community who felt responsible for him and helped him achieve success. He described one aunt who stood on her front porch every morning in order to hail down the school bus so he could go to school— otherwise it might have passed by. Taulbert quoted Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who said, “No one accomplishes anything alone.” State superintendent Eric Mackety further remarked that “children are children,” pointing out that they all want hugs, they all want adults to ask them how they’re doing, and they want to be able to ask adults how they’re doing. 

Ideas suggested for developing relationships included:

• Creating teacher-run interest-based clubs that students can join. Teachers are then passionate about running these clubs and can share their passions with students and develop relationships with them.

• Engage in icebreakers, such as showing each other something you care about on your phone.

• As in this video, print out school rosters and have the entire staff write down how much they know about each student in the school.

• Create a “house” system to build relationships amongst students. 

• Have every classroom or homeroom adopt an adult in the building. 

5. Involve ALL of your stakeholders. Without the involvement of staff, faculty (or “staffulty,” as one presenter called them), parents, and students, several presenters pointed out that it is hard to fully implement character education in schools. One administrator emphasized, “if you haven’t made relationships with your bus drivers, you need to do that!” Marvin Berkowitz noted that administrators should approach their role as one of servant leadership towards their staff and faculty, adopting an attitude of humility, forgiveness, gratitude, empowerment, foresight, stewardship, bravery, and noble purpose. He joked, “If you are a servant leader and help every teacher in your school become the best teacher they can be, then you [administrators] can sit in your office and play Angry Birds all day.” 

Ideas suggested for involving stakeholders included: 

• Conduct individual check-ins with staff.

• Visit local stakeholders (e.g. with parents at the local playground). 

• Involve parents and community members in defining a school’s core values.  

• Establish a parent advisory for the principal, allow everyone to add agenda items, and, in particular, make sure that at least one of the agenda items is about character education.

• Add staff members to the school leadership team.

• Create student ambassadors.

• Offer character oriented professional development for stakeholders.

• Empower your stakeholders and honor their voice.

• Allow character education at your school to become a collaborative project. 

Of course, these are not the only ways to ensure children grow in their character, but they certainly offer some ways to get started when thinking about adopting a whole school character model. 

For more information about adopting a whole-school model of character education based on The Good Project’s core ideas and concepts, visit the link here. Let us know what your school is doing to implement character education efforts in the comments below! 

The Good Project Core Concepts: Excellence

by Lynn Barendsen

At work, when and how do you consider questions about excellence? Some further questions that might come to mind about excellence at work are:

• Do you have time to reflect and consider the quality of your work?

• Do you answer to an immediate supervisor, and does their opinion impact your understanding of excellence at work?  

• Do you supervise others, and do you regularly discuss what is and isn’t quality work with them?

• How do you do your “best” work?

• Does your current work allow you to make the most of your skills?

• What is the relationship between high quality work and “good work”?

At The Good Project, “good work” is about three “Es”: ethics (contributing to the world in a positive way and doing no harm), engagement (meaningful, fulfilling), and excellence (high quality). This blog focuses on excellence: what we mean by this term, how it has evolved since our research began, and particular contexts to take into account when reflecting upon and discussing excellence in today’s climate.

During our original research of the nature of “good work” in the mid 1990s, we identified practitioners to interview via a process of recommendations, based predominantly on excellence. Each time we began to study a new profession (genetics, journalism, medicine or law, for example), we would conduct a series of informant interviews, talking with experts in that field. These “gatekeepers” would help us to identify emerging issues in that particular profession; they also helped us to identify established or emerging leaders. When we asked about leaders in the field, we asked only about excellent, or high quality, work; we didn’t ask for the most ethical leaders, nor did we ask about those who found meaning in their work. In other words, when we first began our research, “excellence” meant expertise: high-achieving, well-known, respected work. We wanted to talk with those who were leaders in their various professions in terms of high quality work (the other two “Es” were identified as a result of the data gathered through conversations with “excellent” workers).

In the decades since this research, our understandings of excellence in work have evolved in multiple ways. Today, we believe that it’s critical to take into account how personal standards for excellence may differ from one another. For example, someone who has been working in a particular field for decades will have developed a level of expertise not possible for a novice; someone raised with wealth and privilege will have a different approach to work than someone struggling with food insecurity and lack of housing. There are many other examples of difference with respect to the factors that impact how individuals approach their work. If we truly want to encourage excellence in work (not to mention ethics, engagement and other elements of good work we have yet to identify), everyone must feel motivated and supported, and we must recognize that what works for some doesn’t work for others. Often, excellence is our individual “best” effort, determined by any number of factors, at a particular moment in time.

Although an individual “best” on any given day can shift, what’s important are the standards to which we hold ourselves. We bring varied notions of excellence to the table based on a number of factors, including cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, neurological and other differences. That said, there are of course standards of “excellence” that are important to keep in mind. For example, a surgeon’s “personal best” on a given day is not enough if it puts a patient’s life at risk. If she is tired and not able to meet her profession’s standards, perhaps her personal best on that day involves rest and recuperation rather than work in the operating room. Importantly, this is why we also have professional standards that must be met, so that is not just up to individual, personal judgment.

On The Good Project, we have come to believe that the concept of excellence - like the full good work framework - is:

• attentive to the particular qualities and behaviors we want to cultivate in ourselves and others; 

• more than meeting a particular benchmark (like a grade) and is attentive to complexity;

• regularly reflected upon for insight and growth; 

• guided by personal values and is context specific but open to flexibility (e.g., excellence as a nurse looks different than it does for a journalist, a restaurant worker, or a teacher)

An additional important question, especially considering the current mental health crisis: is striving for the “best” necessarily a good thing? As Jennifer Breheny Wallace has highlighted in her bestselling book, Never Enough, optimizing performance has become toxic and dangerous in an achievement culture within a particular subset of the population. (Some solutions to this toxicity are suggested in this interview with the author.) Also crucial to any conversation about excellence is an understanding about difficulty and even, at times, failure: how do individuals respond to obstacles in their work? As a recent article on Failing Well explains, “intelligent” failure is common with innovation, and if learning happens as a result of a failed experience, the net result may in fact be positive.

When we work with high school students, we have had to make clear that we are not insisting that every student be “excellent” every day and in every way. But where and how these lines are drawn are important topics of conversation, for educators, for students, for school communities as a whole and of course, for families.

Some questions we continue to ponder:

• Does all work have to be “excellent,” or can it be really good or great? Does this vary by the work carried out? What is the relationship between “perfection” and high quality work? Do you need to be an expert to do excellent work? What is the relationship between competence and high quality work?

• How are our expectations of “excellence” connected to the number of people impacted by the work carried out? Is there a difference, for example, in what we expect of a rocket scientist or an architect because the work they do can potentially help or harm a large number of people?

• Do we consider the years of training required to do a particular type of work, or the number of years someone has been in a particular position, in our expectations about excellence? In other words, do we expect more in some ways of a lawyer than a school bus driver, or more of a chef who has been in the kitchen for 15 years than one who has been working for 5?

• How are our understandings of excellence connected to the responsibilities of a particular type of work?

• What are the differences between the process of excellence and the product of the work? Consider, for example, the “journey” towards excellence versus the actual product of “being” excellent. Sometimes failing along the way is a positive process, as it allows for innovation. What are the important distinctions between the process of work and the end result of those efforts?

Below are some resources from The Good Project that you might use to explore excellence:

• A video describing the three Es of excellence, ethics and engagement

• “The Meaning of Grades” Dilemma

• “When In Doubt, Make it Excellent” Dilemma

• Famous Failures Activity

• What is Excellent Work Activity