Top 5 Articles - Back To School

For many of us—including those in the US—a new school year has officially launched. While we hope that this is really the year that we “return to normal,” there are still some lingering effects from the last two years of pandemic that must be recognized and addressed. That said, the promise of a new start lends the opportunity for new tactics and strategies in the classroom. 

Take a look below to find some of the latest articles that our team has been reading and sharing as we kick off the new academic year. 

1. In this article, John Spencer argues that teachers need to be given the space to take creative risks with their teaching. Freedom gives teachers professional agency, which helps to bolster engagement in their craft. It also allows teachers to serve as role models for their students who are asked on a daily basis to take risks in their own learning. Spencer goes on to suggest 10 creative risks for teachers to try out this year. We hope this inspires some educators to test drive something new.

2. While schools are back in person, the effects of the pandemic and remote learning are still being felt. For some students, this can show itself through burn out. We’ve talked a lot over the last year about worker burnout, but how can teachers and schools turn their attention to this issue within their students? Miriam Plotinsky of Edutopia describes the problem space and offers some strategies for mitigating the effects of student burnout in her article here. 

3. In response to the rising number of students experiencing mental health issues, many teachers have added a mental health check-in with students to their daily routine. This article from NPR describes this new strategy and how school systems and professional care are working with educators to get resources to those students who need additional support. 

4. What do you know about Mastery Based Learning (MBL)? The Hechinger Report’s article gets into the nitty gritty of MBL and offers a rebuttal to some of the most common arguments from skeptics. Take a look and see if this might be the approach your students need to improve performance and deepen understanding.

5. Larry Cuban recently revisited his popular article on “classroom expectations” here. Cuban discusses not only how a teacher’s expectations of their students ultimately influence classroom outcomes, but also how students’ expectations of their teachers also play into the behaviors and academic achievements of the group.

Good Work for Brazilian Educators Featured on CNN

Professors Valéria Arantes and Ulisses Araújo of the University of São Paulo have for the past several years been working on an investigation of “good work” with Brazilian educators, part of The Good Project Brasil (link) initiative. Our team has been excited to observe how ideas from The Good Project have been applied in the Brazilian context.

Recently, this work appeared on CNN Brasil in two video features that highlighted ongoing research and implications for teachers, which we share below for our readers. (Note that the videos are in the original Portuguese.)

The first video spotlight described the investigation that Arantes and Araújo have done of “good teaching,” including the 3 Es of good work (excellence, ethics, and engagement). In interviews with 2,000 Brazilian public school teachers, participants were asked about their values and sense of purpose within education. Questions included:

1. What are your goals and plans for the coming years and a brighter future?

2. Tell us about your life purpose, describing in detail your thoughts, feelings, and actions about them.

83% of teachers in the sample described education as central to their vision of life. 88% commented on excellence, while 56% described a commitment to ethics and responsibility. Arantes, Araújo, and their colleagues conclude that teacher trainings should support educators to develop purpose and foster socioemotional skills.

The second feature includes teachers’ responses to a question regarding their “dream school,” with 97% of respondents desiring change from current educational models. Themes discussed by teachers included more democratic and inclusive institutions; active learning pedagogies; and a focus on citizenship.

We congratulate Valéria, Ulisses, and their team for this recognition of their work and look forward to continuing to follow their progress! 

Announcement: Spanish and Chinese Translations

The Good Project is pleased to present Spanish and Chinese translations of our Lesson Plans. These have been designed to foster the ideas and practices of Good Work, based on many years of research, teaching, and informal experimentation. Please find the translations on our website here. 

The curriculum consists of 16 45-minute lessons, organized into 4 separate units. Each lesson is organized through timed activities and includes a specific lesson goal along with assessment recommendations. All necessary readings and worksheets are also included. Students will collect the work they generate in a portfolio; that collection can then be evaluated with respect to the central ideas and skills foregrounded in the curriculum.

Also included in the packet are introductory materials to familiarize teachers with The Good Project’s approach and theory of change. Additionally, there are two appendices–a guideline for a whole school initiative, as well as a long-term project that can be used as a capstone.  

The sequence of lessons in the full curriculum guide students in four ways: to think deeply about The Good Project’s framework of “good work;” to develop reflective habits that will allow them to navigate complexity, to understand and articulate their own beliefs and values; and to make well-informed decisions in the future.

Our hope is that the translated lesson plans will make our work accessible to the large number of educators who speak or work primarily with students in Spanish or Chinese, within the United States and across the world. 

We would like to thank The Argosy Foundation for providing the generous funding that made this work possible. The Good Project has also received significant support from The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation, The Endeavor Foundation, and additional anonymous funders. 

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want to connect as you implement these lessons with your students. We are available via our “contact us” page, which can be found here.

First Brazilian Conference on Active Learning for K-12 Education

We are pleased to announce that the first Brazilian Conference on Active Learning for K-12 education streamed live on October 11, 2021 . Director Lynn Barendsen gave a talk on Good Work and Good Teaching in 2021 as part of the conference.

You can find the conference in English and Portuguese below:

English version

https://youtu.be/Mlf2HSlEz3Q

Portuguese version

https://youtu.be/NjQ7yBA3i3Y

Doing Good Work at School in the Midst of the Pandemic

A guest post by Hiya Jain

Hiya Jain is a recent graduate of the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India. We invited Hiya to write a post about her experience at Riverside during the COVID-19 pandemic and the social good that was still possible during this year. Below, she describes how her understanding of “good work” evolved this year as a result of two programs:

1. The Inner Sanitation Experience (INSANE), in which graduating students engage in self-discovery and personal transformation during a two-day community. Held just two weeks before final exams, students share perspectives about how they are not meant to “compete” with each other but to “complete” each other.

2. Persistence, a community service program in which students partake in initiatives in the local community.

We thank Kiran Sethi, founder of The Riverside School and Design for Change, for connecting us with Hiya and for the opportunity to feature a student’s personal point of view.

---

I am Hiya Jain, a 17-year-old recent high-school graduate from India who wants to pursue Media, Politics, and Economics at an institution abroad later this year. After spending close to 15 years as a student at the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, where I was asked to take responsibility for my own education and allowed to make and learn from my mistakes, I am excited, not afraid, to see what the world has in store for me.  

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the single most difficult thing about lockdown was “perspective,” or rather the lack of it. Sitting in the comfort of my own home, I was almost completely cut off from social interaction, save for Zoom calls. This made my outlook on the world very one-dimensional. In essence, I was only speaking with people who had the privilege of owning an electronic device and had a steady Internet connection. This meant that while I heard of the disparities created by the pandemic, and I saw news reports of an extensive crisis so many people faced, it became so much easier to compartmentalize them away.

Add to the situation the perceived struggles of coping with online school and the many other comparatively insignificant problems of a senior year in lockdown, and doing “good work” became an afterthought. But at the end of the day, “good work” is a choice, as is making the “right decision,” and sometimes even the most well-intentioned people need a reminder of that. Thankfully, I experienced two particular processes at Riverside that served as a reminder for me to do “good work” in the world and that gave me much needed perspective.

First, there was INSANE (link here), an experience that truly lives up to its name. Two weeks before our final senior secondary leaving examinations, my entire class spent a day going through six carefully planned activities for the sole purpose of setting priorities before we graduated. The day started at about 6AM with a bunch of sleep deprived individuals, but by the end, we were more awake and aware than we had ever been. We spent time at a cemetery, picked up trash on the roads, rolled incense sticks, and reflected over our inability to convey the magnitude of our problems to others in the world.

Even with the challenges posed by the pandemic, even if we only got a modified version of the true “inner sanitation” experience, it was still worth it. Why? Because each one of us left asking so many questions, including, “What is stopping us from doing good work?”

The second process, one we undertook for the duration of the year, is called “Persistence.” The name is again fitting because it is something every student participates in during the entirety of high school at Riverside. In the simplest of terms, Persistence is student-driven community service. It can take lots of different forms, but the one that I lead was called “Inclusion,” an attempt to help students under the Right to Education Act reach their target class level academically.  

This was the first time I saw opportunity inequality during the pandemic. Each week, as my student buddy and I struggled through another session with poor technology connection, I realized the importance of the Internet in learning. Despite the challenges, she showed up every class ready to make it work, and I knew I had to at least attempt to match her efforts in doing my best “good work.” 

So, what does “good work” mean? Personally, I find it very difficult to explain or define it because I think that “good work” is often just the result of being a “good person.” And as I reflect on the processes I just described, it is clearer to me that the objective of both Persistence and INSANE was to help us become better people. INSANE showed us the purpose of making morally sound choices, while Persistence illustrated how our actions affect others, thus demanding quality “good work” from us.

In a funny and clichéd way, while I set out to write about learning during the pandemic, I think it turned out to be more like learning from the pandemic. I understand that “good work” is a choice, which seems more obvious and achievable when the little bit of empathy and whole lot of perspective I learned at Riverside.