Reforming Education

These two article summaries from the NYTimes—one from David Brooks and one from Thomas Friedman (with many quotes from Tony Wagner)--resonated for me as we begin planning for next year and beyond.

In many ways, the future direction of education can be reduced to the content of these two articles. 

•   The world has moved from the Knowledge Age (where content and memory were valued) to the Information Age (where communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creative thinking are now valued)

•   Schools, being conservative institutions by nature, are slow to react to new needs in society and the workplace.  But some leading schools are making dramatic changes to the what they teach (program) and the how they teach (pedagogy).

•   In terms of program changes, teachers are reducing the content and skills they cover to what's truly essential, creating more time in the classroom for students to develop Info Age skills. This is hard going for many of us because we're still viewing education, our classrooms, and content from a Knowledge Age paradigm. 

•   As we do move from this content coverage paradigm and allowing more student voice/choice, project/inquiry-based activities, however, we are helping make school more relevant, interesting, engaging, and personal for our students (I really like Wagner's quote below on "play, passion, purpose.")

Keep these summaries and refer/reflect on them as we continue to move Trinity to a school that strives to prepare kids for success in the Information Age, not Knowledge Age.

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

“What Machines Can’t Do” by David Brooks

As most of us know, several mental skills will be less valued as computers become increasingly powerful and prevalent in the workplace, including having a great memory; being an A student by gatheringlots of information and regurgitating it back on tests; doing any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.

But some human skills will be more important in the age of brilliant machines:

Having a voracious explanatory drive, an almost obsessive need to follow one’s curiosity… diving into and trying to make sense of these bottomless information oceans.

Being quick to recognize an interesting event and get the word out to others, perhaps on Twitter.

Being able to grasp the essence of one thing, then the essence of something quite different, and put them together to create something entirely new.

Being able to visualize data and present it in vivid graphic form.

Having an extended time horizon and strategic discipline – an overall sense of direction and a conceptual frame. In a world of online distractions, the person who can maintain a long obedience toward a single goal, and who can filter out what is irrelevant to that goal, will obviously have enormous worth.

Possessing a Goldilocks level of team leadership – not too controlling and not too loose. One of the oddities of collaboration is thattightly knit teams are not the most creative. Loosely bonded teams are teams without a few domineering presences that allow people to think alone beforethey share results with the group. So a manager who can organize a decentralized network around a clear question, without letting it dissipate or clump, will have enormous value.

The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized, or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract attention and linger in the mind. Unable to compete when it comes to calculation, the best workers will come with heart in hand.

“Need a Job? Invent It” by Thomas Friedman

When Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes” — the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs.

Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace.”

This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job.

Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job.

Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever.

Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.

I asked Wagner to elaborate. “Today,” he said, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.

As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”

“Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course. But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously.”

So what should be the focus of education reform today?

“We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over. Because of this, the longer kids are in school, the less motivated they become. Gallup’s recent survey showed student engagement going from 80 percent in fifth grade to 40 percent in high school.”

“More than a century ago, we ‘reinvented’ the one-room schoolhouse and created factory schools for the industrial economy. Reimagining schools for the 21st-century must be our highest priority. We need to focusmore on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.”

What does that mean for teachers?

“Teachers need to coach students to performance excellence. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need ‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary.

Teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May. We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship.”

Who is doing it right?

“Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world, and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’  They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing. In the U.S., 500 K-12 schools affiliated with Hewlett Foundation’s Deeper Learning Initiative and a consortium of 100 school districts called EdLeader21 are developing new approaches to teaching 21st-century skills.”