Explore our programs — offering exceptional academic preparation, opportunities for growth, and the tools to make an impact.
Find everything you need to apply for and finance your graduate education.
Stories, strategies, and actionable knowledge — putting HGSE's powerful ideas into practice.
With deep expertise that connects research, practice, and policy, HGSE faculty are leaders in the field.
Get to know our community — and all the ways to learn, collaborate, connect, develop your career, and build your network.
Faculty-led programs to deepen your impact and build your effectiveness as an educator and leader.
Access the premiere education subject library for Harvard University.
Access the Office of Student Affairs, the Office of the Registrar, Career Services, and other key resources.
Explore opportunities to grow, build connections, and create change.
Visit my.Harvard
Richard Weissbourd is a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His work focuses on moral development, the nature of hope, vulnerability and resilience in childhood, parenting and effective schools and services for children. He directs the Making Caring Common Project, a national effort to make moral and social development priorities in child-raising and to provide strategies to schools and parents for promoting in children caring, a commitment to justice and other key moral and social capacities. He leads an initiative to reform college admissions, Turning the Tide, which has engaged over 300 college admissions offices. This initiative seeks to elevate ethical character, reduce excessive achievement pressure and increase equity and access in the college admissions process. He is also conducting research on how older adults can better mentor young adults and teenagers in developing caring, ethical, and mature romantic relationships.
He is a founder of several interventions for children facing risks, including ReadBoston and WriteBoston, city-wide literacy initiatives led by Mayor Menino. He is also a founder of a pilot school in Boston, the Lee Academy, that begins with children at 3 years old. He has advised on the city, state and federal levels on family policy, parenting and school reform and has written for numerous scholarly and popular publications and blogs, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today and NPR. He is the author of The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America’s Children and What We Can Do About It (Addison-Wesley, 1996), named by the American School Board Journal as one of the top 10 education books of all time. His most recent book, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development (Houghton Mifflin 2009), was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 24 books of 2009.
Imagine a world where kindness and empathy are the cornerstones of young peoples everyday lives. Making Caring Commons vision for The Choose Kindness Project and Alliance (TCKP) is to make powerful strides toward this reality through a four-pronged strategy: 1) Expanding the reach and impact of TCKP resources; 2) Engaging new audiences, particularly in underserved communities; 3) Creating a lab that enables Alliance members to strengthen their research and evaluation efforts, share findings, and continuously improve; and 4) Outlining a plan for lasting impact.
This grant to Making Caring Common (MCC) will sponsor a convening that explores how higher education institutions might more effectively cultivate moral and civic development with their students and broader campus constituents. The convening is predicated on the belief that students are not vessels to be filled by faculty wisdom, instead all members of these institutions are in various stages of moral growth, and that colleges should function to elevate all members' ability to grapple with moral questions and to be generous and humane in their daily interactions. o MCC hypothesizes that moral and civic development and the growth of pluralism skills mutually reinforce each other. A willingness to engage in complex moral questions, for instance, can lead to treating people from different backgrounds with decency and generosity. These dispositions are fundamental to preparing students to be ethical and engaged citizens, professionals, and community members who will mend societal fractures. o This grant will help us understand whether moral and civic development is critical to pluralism practices and how higher education institutions can instill moral and civic capacities and skillsets among their students
With the generous support of Capita, we aim to better understand adult Americans experiences and perceptions of loneliness and spirituality in America, including who or what they blame for the current state of loneliness in the country and the efforts needed - both at the individual and community/social levels - to reduce the problem and strengthen social connections. To accomplish this, our first phase of work will be a national survey with YouGov, a popular proprietary opt-in survey panel. For this first phase of work, we are responsible for developing the survey and study design and YouGov is responsible for programming and launching our survey with a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults as well as oversampling for Michigan and North Carolina residents. YouGov will also be responsible for cleaning and aggregating the data and providing us with a set of materials, including the resulting dataset, codebook with study documentation, access to their platform providing data visualizations and a set of crosstabs with various demographic breakdowns.
In grant year one, Making Caring Common (MCC), which is a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, will lead project-wide management and qualitative research design and analysis. MCC is led by Richard Weissbourd. Project-Wide Management: MCC will lead cross-team project management. MCC will hire, employ, and supervise the larger project teams project manager, who will collaborate closely with project PIs and collaborators at University of Wisconsin-Madison; University of California, Berkeley; Scholarship America; the Lumina Foundation; and state departments of higher education. The Project Manager will manage day-to-day cross-team project logistics and inter-team communication.This will include all aspects of grant management including creating, tracking, and communicating timelines and deliverables, reporting on progress, maintaining documentation, responding to funder requests, and monitoring the budget. The Project Manager will also support all data collection efforts (quantitative and qualitative). The Project Manager will be supervised by MCCs Director of College Admissions. Qualitative Research Design and Analysis: MCC will lead the projects qualitative research design and analysis. In grant year one, qualitative data will include approximately 50 student interviews/focus group participants, as well as student participation in short surveys (approximately 300) to better understand direct admission student participants experience and decision making. Our questions will seek to illuminate, for example, what students view as barriers to enrollment, the incentives that might change their enrollment decisions, and the impact of awarded scholarship dollars at the time of direct admissions notifications. We will also conduct interviews with approximately a dozen administrative staff at participating universities and state departments to capture the impact of this program on a wide array of stakeholders. MCC will work with our state and school partners to design interview and survey processes that minimize the administrative burden on those groups and work with existing protocols/systems and schedules. MCC team members will develop survey and interview content and will conduct all interviews in person or virtually. MCC will code and analyze qualitative data and prepare summaries of all year one survey and interview findings.
Making Caring Common (along with collaborators Welcoming America and StoryCorps, seeking separate grant funding) seeks to expand and deepen our efforts to cultivate middle and high school students capacity to care across difference and to pursue justice. Together, we will make our resources and strategies more culturally relevant and accessible to more families, students and educators from a diverse range of communities and support schools in deeper and more sustained work that is far more likely to cultivate these capacities in students. By drawing on each other's unique strengths and collaborating in innovative ways, we anticipate having far deeper impact and achieving goals we could not achieve alone
Making Caring Common (MCC), a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is embarking on a three-year project to understand the primary drivers of the mental health crisis among teens today and to develop, curate, and disseminate school, family, and community resources and strategies designed to curb this crisis. Mental health problems among children and young people are alarmingly high and rising. In 2019, prior to the pandemic, over a third of high school students reported chronic feelings of sadness and hopelessness, a 40% increase since 2008 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). A staggering 19% of high school students reported seriously considering attempting suicide in 2019, a 36% jump since 2008 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). The pandemic appears to have significantly exacerbated numerous mental health challenges, including depression and anxiety (Racine et al., 2021). These mental health challenges often undermine students academic progress. Mental health troubles have been linked to higher rates of absenteeism, suspensions, expulsions, and credit deficiencies as well as lower test scores, course grades, and graduation rates (Now is the Time, 2016; Kevmien, Leone, & Achilles, 2006). This crisis is so dire that national groups of pediatric professionals have declared it a state of emergency and the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory on protecting youth mental health (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2021; Office of the Surgeon General, 2021). We urgently need to understand more deeply what is driving this crisis; create supportive networks for students; and provide low burden, engaging strategies and resources for families, schools, and communities that both prevent and stem distress among youth. Our work on the Youth Mental Health Project will comprise: 1. Researching the root causes of teens mental health troubles 2. Hosting a series of convenings with mental health experts 3. Developing and curating resources/strategies for schools, families, and communities 4. Disseminating this work through a creative and strategic communications campaign,
Researchers share what Americans have to say about social disconnection and potential solutions
Three HGSE faculty members share actionable steps and words of wisdom for supporting young people amid uncertain times
Making Caring Common identifies several drivers of young adults’ emotional challenges, including a lack of meaning and purpose
Strategies to better support the mental well-being of parents and caregivers, with a view to preventing anxiety and depression in adolescents