The Latest Reads: Our Summer Top 5

It’s mid-summer here in the United States, and our team members have each been enjoying a little summer reading and a few holidays away from work. Of course, while summer is often a time to slow down and recharge, world events these past few weeks have not slowed. The COVID pandemic continues to be with us and is entering a new phase of danger due to the delta variant; dangerous weather fueled by climate change has affected many countries; and the Olympic Games in Tokyo are well underway.

Below are a few articles that got us thinking recently. We invite you to read them and share your own thoughts.

• Vishal Kheptal, a physician working in Rhode Island, describes for Slate how the disparity in COVID vaccination rates in the United States is resulting in starkly different conditions on the ground for communities across the country. Most people expect physicians to do “good work” in their practice of medicine, and the difficult conditions that doctors respond to influence their understandings of excellence, ethics, and engagement on the job. These understandings will continue to change and adapt for many people depending on the pandemic’s local course (link here).

• The Good Project supports the free exchange of ideas and believes in the power of “better arguments” (link here). A major goal of our work has been to support the open discussion of values and views across groups. We have been troubled by the attempts of some lawmakers in the United States to pass laws that would prohibit educators from freely discussing ideas with their students, which have been targeted in particular at critical race theory. Four writers from across the political spectrum explain in the New York Times why these types of laws are in opposition to free speech and liberal education (link here).

• Gymnastics is a sport that often demands strong commitment from athletes from a young age. A popular dilemma from our database concerned a young gymnast who felt pressured to attend practices by her parents (link here). Echoing this situation, when champion gymnast Simone Biles stepped away from competition at the Tokyo Olympics, commentators like Jemele Hill in The Atlantic pointed out Biles’ bravery in countering the narrative of athletic invincibility and in potentially setting a precedent for others to take care of their mental health, rather than face the pressures of competition (link here).

• We have mentioned moral paragons like Mother Teresa (and others) as exemplars of “good work.” A new podcast series titled “The Turning,” summarized by Salon, reevaluates Mother Teresa’s legacy through the eyes of former nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, the order that she founded. The interviewees allege a culture within the order of total repression and silence that made it difficult to actually do good for the poor. The criticism from those close to Mother Teresa raises questions about aspects of her life and legacy, and subsequently those of other moral exemplars, that must now be looked at through a different lens (link here).

• Addressing climate change is taking on ever-increasing urgency, as recent heat waves and flooding events have demonstrated. The solution may seem like simply transitioning away from fossil fuels, but as Dr. Beverly Wright explains for The Hill, environmental justice is also about making sure that people can thrive in “good jobs” in the aftermath of economic transition. As her argument shows, doing “good work” most often involves multiple factors and considerations, and is rarely easy (link here).

Announcing The Good Project Fundamental Lessons

We are excited to announce The Good Project Fundamental Lessons, which can be found on our website here. 

This set of 16 lessons organized into 4 units serves as an introduction to the core concepts of The Good Project. Adapted from our longer 45-minute lessons (here), each fundamental lesson is approximately 15-minutes long. They are designed for secondary school students but are adaptable to middle school, and some lessons may well work with younger audiences.

Similar to our longer curriculum, the Fundamental Lessons include introductory material to familiarize teachers with The Good Project’s approach and theory of change. Each individual lesson includes an overarching goal, lists the core concepts covered in the lesson, and indicates any prerequisite lessons. The lesson instructions are detailed and broken down into separate steps with recommended timing in order to help adhere to the 15-minute window. All necessary worksheets and reading materials are also included. 

While we wish all students had the opportunity to delve deeply into the ideas and frameworks related to “good work”, we realize classroom time is at a premium. Our hope is that this abbreviated curriculum sparks interest in both students and educators, and that it provides enough of an overview for students to begin to think about how they might view themselves as “good workers.”

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 Endeavour 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.

New Dilemmas Explore Life During the Pandemic, Misrepresenting the Truth, and Whistleblowing

by Danny Mucinskas

Every day, people face situations in which the “right” course of action is unclear. These dilemmas may involve competing priorities, conflicts between the personal and professional, and clashes between excellence, ethics, and engagement at work.

Our dilemmas database (link here) includes dozens of narratives, inspired by real-life events, that have been used in classrooms and other learning environments to illustrate the principles of “good work” and to help prepare students to make sometimes difficult decisions.

We have added a new set of seven dilemmas to our expanding collection. Responding to current social issues and events, the stories represented in this batch are focused on life during the COVID-19 pandemic, questioning the boundaries of truth and lies, and whistleblowing in a case of racial inequity.

Click on the titles below to read the new additions. We encourage you to consider these dilemmas with students or colleagues and to use the reflection questions at the end to guide your discussions.

• Speaking Up, or Staying Silent? - A college student observes a roommate who is a close friend cheating during an online test.

• Confronting Coworkers - A marketing professional accidentally finds out that her coworkers have been disparaging her appearance during a virtual team meeting.

• To Tell, or Not to Tell? When Friends Break Rules - A college student feels increasingly uncomfortable with the way his friends are disregarding their school’s COVID-19 precautions.

• Test Inequity: When to Blow the Whistle? - A nonprofit employee, fed up with the way her colleagues have ignored racial bias in one of the organization’s products, weighs whether to go public.

• Marketing Misrepresentation - A woman overhears her boyfriend lying about his credentials in order to persuade clients to subscribe to a service.

• An Appropriation of Identity - A transplant to a new city finds out that her new friend has been lying about her race in representing her online business.

• Travel During COVID: Personal vs. Professional Safety - An inspector must decide whether to comply with her company’s request that she travel during the height of the pandemic. 

As always, the stories represented in these new dilemmas are based on real-life experiences and difficult decisions. We are still actively seeking new stories. If you have faced an ethical dilemma in school or work please consider sharing your story anonymously (link here).

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.

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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.

June Wrap Up: 5 Articles Worth Sharing

It’s hard to believe that summer is already well underway and that we are about to celebrate the July 4th holiday in the United States. We hope that many of you are gearing up for a relaxing holiday weekend. 

We would like to share some of the articles that we’ve been circulating amongst our team over the past few weeks. We hope that you are able to check out some of these links as time permits and that you find them as interesting and thought provoking as we have. 

1. Cintia Hinojosa and Evan Nesterak explore “The Intersection of Behavioral Science and Advocacy” in their recent series in The Behavioral Scientist. Hinojosa and Nesterak reflect on the events of the past year and explore how to integrate personal values, responsibilities, and biases with professional roles as social scientists. How do the personal and the professional come together, and how does the interaction dictate advocacy actions? The pair put out a call to their fellow colleagues to gather data on these ideas. Read what they learned in the series on The Behavioral Scientist website (link here).  

2. It seems like everyone is talking about burnout at work, but is this a new phenomenon or just a natural part of being human? Read (or listen!) to Jill Lepore as she explores “modern burnout” in her piece from The New Yorker (link here). 

3. We know that social media creates “bubbles” and that we can get caught in these echo chambers of perspectives and opinions that mirror only our own thinking. George Packer takes a step back and explains what he sees at “the Four Americas,” and how the fault lines between these visions originated, in his latest article in The Atlantic (link here). 

4. Fields like education are more and more being “run like businesses,” but what about when business is being run like science? Learn how science and experimentation is making its way into the operation of businesses today in a recent piece by Elizabeth Tenney, Elaine Costa, and Ruchi Watson of The Harvard Business Review (link here). 

5. Are you on summer vacation right now and just want a good laugh? Check out this cartoon from The New Yorker on how to “expand your imagination” (link here).