Part 1 of 3: Collaboration in Elementary Schools: The Power of Many

by Jan Duffy

Jan Duffy is a lifelong educator and has been a teacher at Woodward Academy since 1991.  A frequent poster on our GoodWork Toolkit Facebook page, one day Jan wrote about a recent dance performance:

“My Primary School Dance students, (Grades 1-3), recently presented their annual Spring Dance Concerts and of the 10 pieces of original choreography performed, no less than 7 pieces were co-choreographed by the students and me. Although those 7 pieces took a month longer to finish than the other dances, I think the empowerment the children felt when they performed those pieces was worth every extra minute! I don’t know a way to prove how much more they understand about what they learned as compared with other young dancers, much less as compared with other students, but I believe there’s a difference. One that every teacher who appreciates Whole Child, authentic instruction can find a way to relate to, and build upon.”

(Complete posting at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/GoodWork-Toolkit/215661020497)
We asked her to tell us a bit more about it.   Her response was so enthusiastic and thoughtful that it was far too long for just one blog.  We’ve divided it into three installments:  1) an introduction (below); 2) a discussion about the importance of engagement and 3) some thoughts about the collaborative process of GoodWork.

On May 1, 2011, 157 very excited young boys and girls in grades 1 to 3 took turns performing on stage in our school’s theater to the delight of their family and friends.  While this recital has taken place for the past 18 years, this year was different. What was remarkable about their program this year was that 6 of the 10 original children’s ballet and modern dances presented, were collaboratively choreographed!  The students in the 2nd Grade Ballet classes made up 2 of their 4 dances with me , and all of my 3rd Grade Modern Dance classes made up their dances with me.

Since 2007, when I began teaching full time at this private, independent day school, I’ve collaboratively choreographed at least one 3rd grade modern or modern/jazz dances each year, but never this many dances – and never with such young students!  It may not sound like such a big deal to those of you who teach authentically – who routinely present the collaborative work of your students – but I’m talking about some very young dance students.

That these 7-9 year old dance students all co-choreographed with me such lengthy pieces for their ages is somewhat of a feat when you consider that the formula I use myself as a “fast” professional choreographer is this one:  1 hour of choreography equals 1 hour of music-just to make up all the movement!   These children’s dances were completely co-choreographed, memorized, cleaned, added to, rehearsed, cleaned again, and rehearsed in costume two or three times in our classroom before we ever went to the theater-and almost all of the work was accomplished in two 20-30 minutes sessions of their 40 minute bi-weekly classes, over a period of 14 weeks.

To me, looking back on it, the fact that I even attempted it is pretty amazing!  After all, when you boil all that math down, and we’re talking about young children making up those dances with me, and getting them ready for performance in just 14 hours!  The piece’ de resistance’ was a suite of modern dances collaboratively choreographed by one of my 3rd grade classes to four of their favorite Beatles tunes. Before, During, and Between the dances, the kids arranged and rearranged 13 small folding chairs in various formations, and through their movements-with the judicious addition or subtraction of several small props- managed to successfully create in turn a “a book-seller’s convention”, “three limos and a sportscar”, “the sun”, and a “stadium style rock concert”. They brought down the house!

Even though their levels of ability, experience and actual technical prowess were no greater than any other class, as individuals, and as a group, this group seemed to intuitively understand how to seamlessly fit their contributions into the work as a whole.  Whether with a partner or a small group,  or as a class, the children worked with “the big picture” in mind to create and extend our movement phrases together, and did so much more cooperatively and professionally-and with more artistic integrity-than I’d ever experienced with a group of young 8 and 9 year olds in over 20 years.  Why was that?  As I began typing this, that’s what I wanted to know, and that’s how this blog post grew so long!  It’s not easy for me not to speak volumes about what’s been my greatest passion in life now for almost my entire career-empowering kids by helping them become leaders and learners just by helping them choreograph.  More on this in the next installment…

GoodWork Pilot in Radboud Academic Hospital, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

by Alexandrien Van Der Burgt-Franken

The GoodWork Project has been working with Stichting Beroepseer (The Professional Pride Foundation) in the Netherlands  for many months, and we are very excited about the  work they are doing. They started a GoodWork Hub this year, and now are piloting GoodWork sessions using the Toolkit in various professional settings. Below, read an account of the first of these sessions at the Radboud Hospital in Nijmegen and the plans for future sessions.

The Professional Pride Foundation in the Netherlands is starting to use  the GoodWork Toolkit  to lead sessions on GoodWork in an academic hospital. The translated GoodWork Toolkit will be used during four sessions.  For these sessions, three groups of hospital employees will be selected: the junior staff, the nurses, and the heads of the different departments of the hospital, including senior doctors and educators. The first session took place in April, and the second session will start this week.

Yolande Witman, doctor and researcher, and Alexandrien van der Burgt, trainer, coach and chairman of the Stichting Beroepseer (Professional Pride Foundation) are the process leaders of these sessions.

The central theme of the first session was, “GoodWork in general”. The main questions here included: what is GoodWork? Why is it important? What do we need to achieve GoodWork? What questions do we have about GoodWork?

The session started with interviews. The participants were asked to interview one another. They discussed the question “What makes you a good professional?”.

After the interviews, the facilitators led a discussion about GoodWork and the inherent challenges in achieving GoodWork.  This discussion enabled the participants to think about their own criteria for GoodWork in their professions.  At the end of this first session the participants were asked to sort the value-sort cards to determine which values they prioritize in their careers.

In the second session, participants will talk about excellence. Two narratives from the Toolkit will be used:  one about Alfred Bloom (“Chasing Excellence”) and Lauren (“The Price of Principles). The target of this session is to formulate a useful definition for excellence and to explore the criteria included in excellence.  Participants will also investigate the difference between professional and personal standards for excellent work.

In the third session, the focus will turn to ethics and GoodWork.  The fourth session will involve a discussion about engagement, or the meaning professionals find in their work.

At the end of these sessions facilitators plan to organize a central meeting where the three different groups will be brought together. During this final meeting, they will share their experiences from previous sessions and exchange ideas. The hope is that these disparate groups will learn from one another.

In September the results of the GoodWork pilot in the Radboud Hospital in Nijmegen will be presented and discussed.

Stay tuned for updates on the next few sessions and on the final session in September.

Coaching at the Frontiers

by Christina Congleton

Compare and contrast:  Marshall Goldsmith, Jayson Blair, and me. First, I’ll tell you how we are different.  Dr. Goldsmith has a reputation for doing “good work”.  He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author, and according to Forbes one of the most influential business thinkers in the world.  Mr. Blair is a former reporter for the New York Times.  He notoriously engaged in “compromised work” by plagiarizing and fabricating news stories and was forced to resign, along with two editors, in 2003.  As for me, I am a master’s student in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, currently reflecting on my professional aspirations.

Aside from a connection to the Times (yes, I am a reader, building a stomach for the digital subscription transition), what all three of us have in common is that we call ourselves “coaches”.  Dr. Goldsmith is an authority on executive coaching.  Mr. Blair, having left the journalism profession, now works as a life and career coach. After completing a year-long training and certification program, I’ve been building my own coaching business focused on human development.  This year I’ll be mentoring a group of students through the same coach training process.

Beyond our shared professional titles, what are the similarities in our work?  The troubling answer is that, even as one of the three coaches mentioned above, I don’t know.  Coaching is an emerging field of practice, still in the process of finding its identity.  It began attracting attention in the 1980’s, and has steadily gained in popularity.  The number of coaching-related articles in peer-reviewed journals has climbed steadily and coaching has been estimated to be a billion dollar industry.  It has also been called a “Wild West”, devoid of barriers to entry or clear selection criteria for consumers.

This wild western terrain is populated by practitioners offering a wide range of services: from Six Sigma business coaching to aura coaching; from Tony Robbins-style motivational work to ADD coaching.  People call themselves “coach” after having read a book, taken a day-long seminar, or dedicated months or even years of their lives to training.

The coaching community did its best to bring a sheriff to town in 1995 by establishing the International Coach Federation (ICF).  The ICF has delineated standards of practice for coaching called Core Competencies, and it has established a Code of Ethics.  These two sets of symbolic codes—one for knowledge and practice, the other for ethics—are what the industry presumptively needs in order to be considered a bona fide profession.  Yet debate continues: whether coaching should be a profession, how it should be monitored,whether its focus should be delineated.

For a study conducted last fall, I interviewed thirteen full-time coaches. A few endorsed the ethics and standards proposed by the ICF, while others said, “I don’t know if the ICF is the answer”, and “I don’t agree with all the ICF has to say”.  Interviewees indicated concerns about the continued lack of barriers to entry, since anyone can “hang a shingle” and call him or herself a coach.  One coach said she was keeping up her ICF certification, but that it held little meaning for her clients. Interestingly, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith does not claim to be certified, yet of the three coaches mentioned in my original comparison he has had the greatest impact on the field.

I’m left with the puzzle of  how best to establish coaching as a profession characterized by good work—work that is excellent, ethical, and engaging.  The good news is that if coaches are “cowboys” exploring the frontiers of a new profession, we certainly represent the warmest hearted of mavericks.  The coaches I interviewed in the fall expressed deep dedication to their work and an impressive sense of responsibility to their clients, their own integrity, and the wider world.  Indeed, such a sense of responsibility is integral to good coaching.  To cultivate a culture of good work, the coaching community will need to do more than tip its hat and ride off into the sunset.  We must reflect on how we can keep ourselves and each other on a well-traveled path,and how we will invite others to advance toward horizons that are still hazy in the distance, but worth pursuing.

Needed: A Reversal of Figure/Ground

by Howard Gardner

Those who remember their introductory psychology will recall the concept of ‘figure /ground.’ Most graphic displays, like photographs or paintings, feature a dominant object (or ‘figure’) in the foreground; to the extent that background is noticeable, its function is to support perception of the central figure.

In considering education in the United States today, what’s wrong with the picture? In a word, we’ve focused so exclusively on one figure–performance on a certain kind of standardized test instrument–that all other considerations are obscure or absent. I recommend a dramatic reversal of figure and ground. At the center of the image called American Education, I propose three dominant figures: the kinds of Persons we value; the kinds of Workers we cherish; the kinds of local, national, and global Citizens that we need.

A tall order, you are thinking. But in fact, over the course of history, these considerations have loomed large. The greatest educational thinkers–from Plato to John Dewey–have thought much about the human beings we would like to have, in the neighborhood, the individuals we’d like to encounter at the workplace, and the citizens needed for a well-functioning society.

Why, as a a nation, have we embarked on a well-meaning but misguided pathway? Principally, I propose, because a model of human existence, based heavily on market considerations, has come to dominate educational discourse worldwide, and the United States has absorbed this model totally and uncritically. I have much more to say on this topic, and I hope that those who are interested will inform themselves about The GoodWork Project and our Toolkit, our effort to move such considerations to the fore.

To forestall the most obvious rejoinder (and with a nod to my colleagues in this series of Harvard-emanating blogs): I am not for a moment saying that literacy, or numeracy, or the scholarly disciplines are unimportant. Nor am I saying that learning in these areas should remain unassessed. Nor am I doubting the importance of the biological, digital, or global revolutions. What I am saying is that unless we place in the foreground the individuals and society that we long for, all the rest will be in vain.

It has become commonplace, in this “Waiting for Superman” era, to blame the problems of U.S. society on our schools and our teachers. But that is nonsense. As David Halberstam pointed out decades ago, our misadventure in Vietnam was brought about by ‘the best and the brightest.’ Whether it is the massive deceptions at Enron, the greed of the financial world, or the prostitution of the academy, those with high SAT scores have lots to answer for. (The movie “Inside Job” provides far more insight into our troubles than does “Waiting for Superman“). These facts about American society today constitute the principal reason why we need a new guiding figure at the center of the educational landscape.

Check out more blogs on school reform topics.

It’s Time for Universities to Apply the Mirror Test

by Margot Locker

On April 13, Professors David Korn and Max Bazerman facilitated a several hour symposium at HLS on conflict of interest (COI, as it is called) in professions, particularly medicine. The papers were of high quality but they did not discuss the issue as it pertains to universities, and Harvard was not mentioned, except incidentally in opening remarks.

I raised the question of what universities in general, and Harvard in particular, should do, with respect to high profile and less dramatic cases of COI and other ethical lapses, such as plagiarism or data manipulation or creation by faculty. I mentioned that at Harvard, in the absence of ‘official’ statements by the President, Deans , and/or the Corporation, or posting on Richard Bradley’s (or Harry Lewis’) blog, there was no ‘commons’ at which these issues could be discussed, both by individuals themselves (I have cases in which I’ve been involved) and by thoughtful observers (like many readers of this blog). (The question was raised as to whether such a site should be curated).

Anyway I’d be quite interested in participating in such a Harvard- or University- endeavor, and I think that our recommendations about other professions and other ’sectors’ would be taken far more seriously if we also held up a mirror toward our own actions and activities.