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

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.

The Good Project Presents at Project Zero Sparks 2022

by Lynn Barendsen and Danny Mucinskas

In late July 2022, we had the pleasure of leading a virtual workshop as part of Project Zero’s one-day online Sparks conference, an opportunity to learn about a variety of PZ ideas for a diverse group of educators. We were pleased that, for our session, we had an audience of almost 40 educators from around the world: participants from the US hailed from states as diverse as Georgia, Nebraska, Ohio, and Texas, while international participants joined from countries such as Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, and Trinidad and Tobago. 

Our session was titled “Good Work: What It Is and How to Teach It,” and we offered an introduction to Good Project ideas, a brief overview of our research, and an introduction to the Good Project Lesson Plans. Although we miss the collegiality of in-person meetings (and look forward to many more in the future!), we welcomed the variety of perspectives and responses that emerged from such a far-reaching, diverse group. 

We began with an activity from the Good Project Lesson Plans, asking participants to think of someone they believed exemplifies “good work.” In small breakout groups, participants described individuals they admired: sometimes they chose family members, friends, and colleagues; sometimes they described individuals they’d never met but nonetheless admired. They then pulled out terms they would use to describe these exemplary workers, including qualities such as “visionary,” “driven,” “optimistic,” “honest,” “trustworthy,” “caring,” and more.

When we returned as a full group, participants shared themes from the descriptions of the individuals they admired and what they learned from these individuals on a shared collaboration board, and we had a brief discussion. For example, one participant commented upon three qualities that their partner exemplified in their work, including approaching collaborators with kindness. Another participant spoke of a celebrity’s work ethic and commitment to excellence. Interestingly, a number of participants described the importance of positivity and bringing “joy” and compassion to work in various ways, using words and phrases such as “sense of humor” and “cultivate calm.” Our team has led this discussion on a number of occasions, and this focus on positivity is not something that has come up frequently in past sessions. We wonder now if perhaps attention to joy feels especially necessary for educators who are experiencing more challenges than ever. 

After a brief introduction to Good Work and the three “Es” that comprise our definition (excellence, ethics and engagement), we asked participants to revisit the qualities that defined their chosen “good workers” and consider whether their descriptions fit neatly under the heading of one or more of these “Es.” Some terms (such as “honesty”) seem to fall squarely into the “ethics” column. Other terms (such as “supportive” or “inclusive” or “kind”) could arguably fit into multiple categories. We explained that these conversations can make for great jumping-off points with students as they consider what’s important to them in their work, and how they might best find mentors to help them further establish their own standards for work. 

We then offered a brief introduction to the Good Project Lesson Plans. Incorporating real-world dilemmas, reflective activities, and guided conversations about ethical challenges, responsibilities, and values, these materials are designed to support students to develop the skills, understandings, and dispositions to effectively navigate their working lives. We are excited to explore the outcomes of our materials more systematically in our recently launched research project of the lesson plans, for which we are recruiting a passionate group of educators around the world. 

Despite calls for the development of “21st century skills” necessary for success in a changing working world—one that includes technological advancements, political turmoil, and evolving work habits—few educational outlets allow students to grapple with this complexity and address their own opinions and beliefs as they relate to present and future work. Inviting this diverse group of educators to reflect on their own beliefs about work gave us the briefest insight into how they approach some of these challenges.