For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about an innovative educational toolkit.
Like many educators, Vicki Zakrzewski entered her profession with passion, but found that her initial excitement was drained by the difficulties she faced during the years she spent as a schoolteacher and administrator. In 2012, having recently completed a Ph.D. in education, Zakrzewski helped to establish the education program at U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, tasked with the mission of helping educators understand and apply research-backed insights into the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being — not only for their students, but also for themselves. “In my experience in the trenches, I came very close to burnout — it’s just an enormously difficult and stressful job. So when I started the education program at Greater Good, I came in knowing that we had to address the adults,” Zakrzewski says. Her Ph.D. research had underscored the ways that organizational psychology — the study of how to create viable, thriving school cultures — was essential to helping students flourish as individuals. “I knew that teachers and school leaders were not getting this training,” she says.
This month Zakrzewski and her colleagues are launching Greater Good in Education (GGIE), an encyclopedic website offering free research-based strategies and practices to aid students’ social, emotional, and ethical development and to create flourishing school-wide cultures. The site pulls together insights from the fields of social emotional learning, character education, and mindfulness, arranging findings and activities by topic and grade level to allow educators to review the basics of a given subject, find specific suggestions for ways to integrate practices into their work, and easily see the research that backs up the suggested approach.