For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about a unique approach to helping middle schoolers cultivate a sense of purpose.
How can students take control of their education and their future? In recent decades a great deal of educational policy has focused on student test results as the key measure of whether schools are succeeding. For struggling schools, though, the push to improve lagging test scores can sideline certain interventions that have the potential to help their neediest students. Maurice Elias, a professor of psychology and the director of the Social-Emotional Learning Lab at Rutgers University, thinks that there’s a better way to prepare at-risk students for success.
The insight derives from a past project (also funded by the John Templeton Foundation) where Elias worked with students on developing “Laws of Life” — a set of rules, ideals, and principles by which they aim to live. “We found that giving students the opportunity to explore and express their Laws of Life had a truly transformative effect on them — and as a result it had a transformative effect on the adults around them,” Elias says. “The essence of this transformation had to do with the students expressing their sense of purpose and in fact identifying that they have what Stanford psychologist William Damon calls a ‘noble purpose,’” defined as a generalized intention to accomplish personally meaningful goals in service of a greater good.