Encouraging ethical, excellent, and engaging work.

Founded by psychologists William Damon, Howard Gardner, and the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1996, The Good Project has two decades of experience carrying out qualitative research and developing practical materials with an emphasis on topics including the meaning of good work, effective collaboration, digital citizenship, and civic participation.

Presently, through research-based concepts, frameworks, and resources, The Good Project strives to equip individuals to reflect upon the ethical dilemmas that arise in everyday life by providing them with the tools to make thoughtful decisions.

We are a research initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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A Degree Opens the Door—but What Prepares Students to Walk Through It? Good Work in Information Technology
A Degree Opens the Door—but What Prepares Students to Walk Through It? Good Work in Information Technology

If there is any field where we might expect technical expertise to dominate conversations about career readiness, information technology would seem to be it. Coding languages, technical knowledge, systems, software, and networks all matter. And yet, when we spoke with IT students and employers as part of our Good Work Value Alignment Study, both groups repeatedly returned to the same point: technical knowledge isn't enough.

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Why Knowing How Isn’t Quite the Same as Being Ready: Good Work in Architecture and Construction
Why Knowing How Isn’t Quite the Same as Being Ready: Good Work in Architecture and Construction

Technical expertise certainly matters. Workers need to understand design, materials, codes, safety, software, and the physical realities of building. But when we spoke with students and professionals in architecture and construction as part of our Good Work Value Alignment Study, they consistently described good work as something broader.

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Same Person, Different Meanings: Good Work through young eyes in unequal contexts
Same Person, Different Meanings: Good Work through young eyes in unequal contexts
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The Good Project Receives Continued Support from the Henry Luce Foundation through their Women in STEM Program
The Good Project Receives Continued Support from the Henry Luce Foundation through their Women in STEM Program
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What does it mean to do "good work" today?
What does it mean to do "good work" today?

Investigating how higher education students and employers understand “good work” today.

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Building Up to High Stakes Discussions
Building Up to High Stakes Discussions

In our work with teachers implementing The Good Project lesson plans, we’ve seen that real-life dilemmas are among the most powerful springboards for intellectual risk-taking— the ability to engage with uncertainty (e.g. asking questions, sharing ideas, admitting confusion) despite the possibility of being wrong or judged. The Good Project’s dilemma-based secondary school ethics curriculum invites students to grapple with questions that have no easy answers (Should a doctor treat a patient whose actions have caused harm to others? Should a teenager join a protest even if it goes against their family’s views?) and to tolerate ambiguity while weighing competing values and perspectives.

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Updating our Social Impact Buckets: Mechanisms of Change
Updating our Social Impact Buckets: Mechanisms of Change
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Seeing the Whole: Aligning Good Work, Character, SEL, Practical Wisdom, and Flourishing
Seeing the Whole: Aligning Good Work, Character, SEL, Practical Wisdom, and Flourishing

How do character education, social-emotional learning, practical wisdom, and human flourishing actually fit together? In this post, we share a new integrative model that uses the Good Project’s 3Es—ethics, excellence, and engagement—as an interpretive lens to explore how these widely used frameworks overlap, reinforce one another, and support wise action and flourishing over time.

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Henry Luce Foundation Grant Announcement
Henry Luce Foundation Grant Announcement
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What is the Good Project?
“Doing things in a new way is easy; we call this novelty. What’s challenging is to do things in a new way that eventually gets accepted by others; we call this creativity. What’s even more challenging is to do something in a new way that is ethical and advances the human condition; we call this “good work.””
— Howard Gardner