Overview
The design of these lesson plans is grounded in our own experience using previous versions of these materials with educators and students and in research about human learning and development. We know that just teaching about good work is not sufficient if we hope students will actually do good work; instead, students also need to be encouraged to reflect and act upon the principles of good work in their own lives.
The following lesson plans have been designed to help students develop their abilities to do “good work” that is excellent, ethical, and engaging. The curriculum guides participants through a series of questions central to understanding the importance of good work in our society, including:
How do I define “good work”? How do others define it?
What does it take to carry out good work?
What are my own personal standards of good work?
What are professional standards for good work, and how does that relate to my life as a student and as a worker?
What are some of the factors that make it difficult to carry out good work? How can I prepare myself for these challenges?
How can my community and/or my workplace support good work?
Why is good work important to society?
In order to help encourage and support students in their efforts to carry out good work, we have designed a four-year developmental curriculum that moves students through four stages: good person, good worker, good citizen, and a capstone that asks students to put these ideas together.
Good Person
In the first year of the program, students learn about what it means for them to do good work. Students learn the core concepts of good work, identify their own values when it comes to how they conduct their work, develop habits of reflection, and begin to develop strategies for how to handle dilemmas that inevitably arise in school, work, and life.
Good Worker
In the second year, students explore what it means to do good work within a profession. Students engage in discussions with peers to unpack case studies of real-life dilemmas. Students will apply the various lenses and strategies they uncovered in the first year of the program in their discussions and reflections.
Good Citizen
The third year of the program will focus on what it means to be a good citizen. Students will continue to use the case study approach applied in Year 2, along with the core concepts and practices developed in Year 1. There will be an emphasis on how students and others are responsible for the various communities to which they belong (e.g., friends and family, their classroom, their school, their city or town, country, and the world at large).
Capstone
Finally, in the fourth and final year of this program, students will complete a capstone project that they will design and execute along with guidance from their teacher. The capstone will incorporate the many skills and approaches practiced in the first three years of the program. Students might choose to take on a project that will encourage more good work in their community, research a new strand of good work, explore opportunities and challenges to doing good work in a field that they are interested in pursuing, or something completely different.
The above principles, questions, and learning goals inform the design and structure of the following developmental lesson plans.
All lesson plans have been designed to fit into a 45-minute classroom period (see time suggestions throughout). However, the lesson plans are flexible, and we leave it to each individual educator to tailor the timing of the lessons to their individual needs.