Humane Educator's Toolbox: MOGO Questionnaire

One of the activities we ask all our program, workshop and course students to do is take our MOGO Questionnaire. (MOGO is short for "most good, least harm.") The MOGO Questionnaire helps people to reflect on their choices and their vision for their lives, to put into words some of their concrete goals, and to map out some next steps for positive action.

In our Teaching for a Positive Future month-long distance learning course, we asked participants to take the questionnaire, and then to consider how they could use such a tool with their own students. There were some great responses, and we wanted to share some of them. Here's 5th grade teacher Alison Panik's summary of doing the questionnaire herself:

"The questionnaire helped me not only consider the role I'd like to play as an educator, but also just as a person. I enjoyed identifying the qualities that are most important to me and writing my epitaph (never did that before!). It gave me a big picture of what I want my life to mean. I learned that while there are many qualities I value, I am not as good at modeling them in all areas of my life as I would like to be. It was challenging to think about why I was not modeling some of the qualities in the different areas – exactly what was getting in the way and what I needed to do to change this. I am humbled and somewhat embarrassed by my ignorance about the producers and suppliers of the products and services I use everyday. And I realized through this questionnaire that this ignorance is actually intentional. I recognize that I resist knowing about suffering. I turn off television commercials about people suffering in other countries and animals suffering in shelters, not because I don’t care, but because it actually makes me feel despair and that hurts almost physically."

Here are a few of the ideas that participants had for using the MOGO Questionnaire with their students:

"I would like to lead my students through a process of identify ways to bring more good to the community around our school….I can see how this form of self-reflection can help kids (and adults) align what they believe is important to them with what they are doing on a daily basis in their lives."
~ Alison Panik

"I want to continue to discuss with them and instill the belief that they have the power to make a difference; ask them to seriously consider what are their skills, what do they like to do; what problems do they see in our world and what are their solutions; continue to stress the importance of Jane Goodall's message of 'The Power of One': 'The greatest danger to our world is apathy. You may be overcome by feelings of helplessness. How can your actions make a difference? Best you say to leave it to the decision makers. And so you do nothing. Can we overcome apathy? Yes, but only if we have hope. Each of us must work as hard as we can now to heal the hurts and save what is left.' Lastly, an idea to bring self-reflection is to discuss how students/adults can be 'bucket fillers or bucket dippers' - based on the book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today by Carol McCloud."
~ Teaching for a Positive Future participant

"I want them to reflect on how their actions affect their community and the steps needed to make the changes to be humane."
~ Kari Shutts

"I have been incorporating information about the fair trade movement, environmental issues and human rights issues into various courses and levels, but I need to find a better way of guiding students to think deeply about these issues and to engage in problem-solving. In many cases, challenging students to get around the 'either/or' thinking addressed in our text could lead to productive discussions about the interrelatedness of problems like poverty, economic inequality, exploitation of workers, human health crises and environmental degradation. I also want to be more intentional about hooking up students of Spanish with opportunities to be advocates and activists in areas that concern them."
~ Stacy Hoult-Saros

"Once students have learnt about a particular issue, ask them to write three things they will do within the next month to turn their intentions into practical changes. This is a great opportunity for students to realize that the situation is not hopeless but most importantly that they can at their level make a difference."
~ Elodie Guillon

"Besides sharing information on such issues I personally feel that stories related to people like Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus Christ, and Nelson Mandela can be of great help and best used to imbibe humane education amongst students - their sacrifice and contribution to the society which has impacted humankind with long lasting positive changes. Apart from this, students can also be asked to do or perform at least one moral act in their normal day-to-day life, they can note it down and share with other students in the class that how the particular act have impacted both."
~ Nishant Gupta

~ Marsha

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