Collaboration & Group Learning

Good Work: Theory and Practice

A summary of the research around Good Work.

Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum

Common Sense Media's Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum was originally developed in collaboration with Project Zero's Good Play Project. Informed by the Good Play research findings, this curriculum emphasizes the ways in which youth can leverage the positive affordances of digital media while protecting themselves and making socially responsible, ethical decisions. The curriculum covers issues from online privacy to building positive community online to copyright and creation.

Zooms: Promoting Schoolwide Inquiry and Improving Practice

Abstract: A group of teachers and the program director describe a powerful collaborative and interactive teacher research process they developed at their school. The process engages teachers in generating new insights about teaching and learning. This article provides a road map for creating Zooms—documentation panels that are snapshots of classroom life—as unique, concrete models of teacher research. The authors illustrate how constructing Zooms helps teachers focus on children’s learning when so much is going on in a lively classroom. Ben and his colleagues show how they created a professional learning community—a culture of inquiry in their early childhood school that also enhanced staff collegiality. The teachers evolved from individual, reflective practitioners to collaborative, schoolwide teacher researchers. A real strength of the project is its emphasis on the teachers as knowledge creators. The Zooms process builds collaboration in concrete and structured ways and makes schoolwide inquiry key in teachers’ professional development. —Barbara Henderson

Responsibility at Work: How Leading Professionals Act (or Don't Act) Responsibly

Filled with original essays by Howard Gardner, William Damon, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Jeanne Nakamura and based on a large-scale research project, the GoodWork Project, Responsibility at Work reflects the information gleaned from in-depth interviews with more than 1,200 people from nine different professions: journalism, genetics, theatre, higher education, philanthropy, law, medicine, business, and pre-collegiate education. The book reveals how motivation, culture, and professional norms can intersect to produce work that is personally, socially, and economically beneficial. At the heart of the study is the revelation that the key to good work is responsibility—taking ownership for ones work and its wider impact. ISBN: 978-0787994754

Documentation and Display: What's the Difference?