Tony Wagner's Blog, page 5

Tony’s Inter-American Development Bank Keynote Now Available

Tony was recently invited to present at the Inter-American Development Bank’s Annual Meeting on Youth and Social Innovation in Panama.  You can view his keynote here.

Tony’s Blog, “What Does It Mean To Be a Change Leader in Education,” posted

You can read it at the getideas.org website here. It is also posted in the articles section of this website.

What Does It Mean To Be A Change Leader in Education?

This is a blog I wrote for the website, www.getideas.org
What Does It Mean to Be a “Change Leader” in Education?
January 12, 2013
by: Tony Wagner

Over the past 20 years, I have studied and worked with educators who have aspired to be change leaders in a wide variety of schools in the US and elsewhere. The most effective of these change leaders – whether they are classroom teachers, principals, or systems leaders – share a number of common practices.

First, successful change leaders clearly articulate the need for change to a variety of audiences in ways that are intellectually coherent and emotionally compelling. The ability to do this requires that change leaders immerse themselves into radically different worlds.

The first world that change leaders must understand deeply is the world for which they are preparing their students. Effective change leaders clearly understand and communicate what will be demanded of their graduates – what skills, what habits of mind, and what dispositions. They recognize the rapidly changing world of work, and the accelerating pace of the commoditization of knowledge. They realize that the world no longer cares how much students know, but rather what they can do with what they know.

The second world effective change leaders understand is the world of students. They have studied how students learn and what makes the particular students with whom they work unique – their culture and their community. They also appreciate the importance of students’ intrinsic motivation for learning and achievement. Finally, they seek out and listen carefully to students to better understand their classroom and school experiences.

Highly effective change leaders don’t merely preach these things to their teachers and parents, however. They engage them in adult learning about a changing world and how students learn best. They realize that the only way that change can be sustained is if the adults in the community also deeply understand the need for change, and so these leaders sponsor readings, talks by local experts, and discussions.

I recently worked with Jim Merrill, who was the 2012 superintendent of the year in Virginia, and whose campaign for adult learning culminated in a community wide discussion with more than 1000 participants. At the end of the evening, after hearing presentations and then discussion at small tables, individuals voted for their top priorities in the school district. Having come to better understand the changing world and how students are best motivated, the community voted overwhelmingly for critical thinking and independent learning to be the school district’s most urgent priorities. (For a more complete description of this project, see my September, 2012 article in School Administratorhttp://www.aasa.org/content.aspx?id=24588).

The best change leaders I know bring their understanding of these two worlds into the classroom every single day. They use these two criteria to continuously assess and improve instruction. They know what good teaching looks like, and they are relentless in their expectations. They understand that their job is, first and foremost, to be an instructional leader and coach.

However, they also know that “isolation is the enemy of improvement,” as a brilliant systems leader Anthony Alvarado often said. While accountability for continuous improvement is critical, Alvarado and his colleagues in New York City understood that teachers needed to work in teams and to have an effective coach in order to transform their lessons. Teachers must be given the working conditions that will enable them to improve and to be successful. They need time to learn and to collaborate. In Finland, which has the highest-performing education system in the world, teachers spend an average of only 600 hours a year in the classroom teaching lessons; in the US, the number is closer to eleven hundred hours.

Finally, the most effective change leaders I know take calculated risks. Historically, education has been a highly risk-averse profession – which is one reason why we have seen so little change through the years. Managers do not take risks. Leaders do. They model the behaviors of learning, collaboration, effective teaching, and risk-taking that they expect of their teachers.

Accountability for What Matters Most

© Copyright 2012 Tony Wagner.  First published September 2012 in School Administrator

During my travels all over the United States speaking to a wide variety of audiences and my visits with leadership groups in the Middle East and Far East, I have encountered diverse audiences who share my concern that the majority of students are leaving high school without the skills that matter most — even in those school districts that score well on Advanced Placement exams and state tests. The most common question I’m asked is: “What can we do about the problem?”

Fortunately, because of some important work that has been done over the last several years, exciting new answers are emerging. As I consider the essential steps to overcome the global achievement gap, I begin by examining what communities can do to create a higher level of accountability for schools and districts — beyond standardized test scores. The story of how the 70,000-student Virginia Beach City, Va., Public Schools set about transforming teaching and learning offers a powerful example of a school system ensuring all students graduate from high school with the skills they need to succeed

Laudable Engagement The first critical step in creating a communitywide focus on the skills that matter most for students’ success is to engage in a very different kind of strategic planning. Typically, districts create new strategic plans every few years in a process led by school boards with little community involvement. All too often, these efforts result in lengthy documents with lists of fiveyear goals (such as improving test scores by a certain percentage), which rarely result in any real change in classrooms.

Once in a great while, though, a superintendent sees a strategic planning effort as an opportunity for community engagement and adult learning and as a way to create a road map for significant improvements. One such leader with whom I have worked is Jim Merrill, who has just started his seventh year as superintendent in Virginia Beach.

The third-largest school district in the state, Virginia Beach has a diverse minority population making up 45 percent of total enrollment. When Merrill was selected for the top post, the district enjoyed a reputation as highly successful, with all of its schools having made adequate yearly progress on state tests.

However, he was concerned that Virginia’s tests (like those of most other states) assessed only basic skills with a minimum level of proficiency required to pass and, hence, success on these tests was not a reliable measure of students’ career and college readiness. In his second year, Merrill and his senior administrators met with me for a daylong retreat and decided to work on a different kind of strategic planning process, one that would involve the entire community in a conversation about how the world has changed and what were the most important student outcomes for which the school district should now be accountable.

Identifying Outcomes With strong school board leadership and support, the school district staff set out to collect the data they thought should inform a more meaningful strategic planning process. First, they conducted focus groups with local employers and college teachers about the skills students needed to succeed. Second, they administered the College and Work Readiness Assessment, a 90-minute online assessment of critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving and writing skills developed and administered by the Council for Aid to Education to a sample population of their 12th graders. They learned that, despite having scored well on state tests, the top 50 percent of these seniors who took the test were in the lowest quartile of college freshmen taking the same test.

Third, they took a hard look at the state-mandated formula for computing the district’s high school graduation rate and concluded it resulted in inaccurate and overly optimistic reporting of the percentage of students who successfully completed high school in the district. Although it turned out that the district’s 82 percent graduation rate was more than 10 percent higher than the national average, Merrill declared that this was unacceptable.

Finally, the school district subscribed to the National Student Clearinghouse, which provided data on district students’ enrollment and persistence in postsecondary-degree programs. To better understand these quantitative data, district staff conducted subsequent focus groups with recent Virginia Beach graduates about some of the ways they felt most and least well prepared by the schools for their futures.

The culmination of this effort was a communitywide meeting to talk about these and other district data and to consider what were the most important outcomes for Virginia Beach graduates in a changing world. Nearly 1,000 people — educators, parents, community members — gathered in the Virginia Beach Convention Center on a warm summer evening in 2008 for discussion at tables seating 10.

After an hour of presentations, which included looking at data as well as videos of the focus groups that had been conducted, participants were asked to consider a long list of possible learning priorities for the school district and to select the ones they considered most important. These “votes” then were quickly tabulated electronically. To the surprise of many, there was a virtual consensus on the outcomes that should be the highest priority for the district: The skills of critical thinking and problem solving were at the top of nearly everyone’s list.

Attributes Shared Merrill, his staff and the school  board then took this information and created a different type of strategic plan. Instead of the lengthy laundry list of mashed-together goals, priorities and initiatives that often turn up in districts’ strategic plans, the Virginia Beach strategic plan, called “Compass to 2015: A Strategic Plan for Student Success,” has been streamlined to one strategic goal, four outcomes for students and five strategic objectives with a few key strategies and measures identified for each. Notably, it fits on the front and back of one page. (See related story at right.)

The school district leadership’s next step was to begin working on creating accountability for teaching and assessing the four essential student outcomes that had been identified. They started by defining what critical thinking means and, more importantly, what it looks like in the classroom. Central-office and building administrators conducted learning walks to help everyone be clearer about what critical thinking looks like when it’s happening.

The results of their efforts are summarized on the district’s website, but, in part, this is what the leaders shared: “This school year, the leadership learning walks will still be looking for the hallmarks of critical thinking, but we will ask principals to specifically point out their areas of focus as the result of the ‘Compass to 2015’ strategic plan. The goal is to support schools as they work on the needs inherent in their schools. All learning walks are followed by a conversation with the school leadership.”

Anticipating that stakeholders would want to know what critical thinking looks like in the classrooms, the district developed a list of attributes that were identified collectively by the principals in Virginia Beach. Their list comprises a dozen attributes, including these: ll Students articulate a meaningful response to “so what” (what if, why); ll Students defend positions with justification based on factual evidence and data; ll Students adapt learned knowledge to more complex/ambiguous situations; ll Students evaluate and communicate their own thinking; and ll Students select, create, use and communicate effectiveness of a variety of tools, such as graphic organizers or grid paper.

Scaling Up Changes Education no longer deals only with teaching Johnny and Juanita to read. It’s about teaching them to think critically about what they read, interpret what they read and relate what they read to their own circumstances. If we are asking students for critical examination and reflection, we must be willing to do the same. The school district’s learning walks represented a journey to better understand the needs of children, to improve teaching and to clarify what is expected of students and educators.

“It’s the hardest work I’ve ever undertaken in my career,” Merrill said. “We’re trying to effect change at scale, and we have to play on two playing fields at once. We’re still being judged by the criteria for adequate yearly progress and state accountability standards, while we are holding ourselves to a much higher standard. We have to succeed at both. It’s hard, but it’s the right work to be doing.”

 

Tony interviewed on Huff Post about technology and education in advance of his iPad Conference keynote

You can read the interview with C.M. Rubin here.

Tony’s keynote for a VT School Transformation conference Includes Q&A with high school students now available

This recent keynote video shot at a state-wide conference sponsored by the Rowland Foundation has nearly 30 minutes of Q&A, including questions from a number of high school students. It can be viewed here. It is one of Tony’s best recent talks and reflects some of his latest thinking.

Tony’s latest keynote for a School Transformation state-wide conference in VT Includes questions from high school students and is now available for viewing

This recent keynote video shot at a state-wide conference sponsored by the Rowland Foundation has nearly 30 minutes of Q&A, including questions from a number of high school students. It can be viewed here. It is one of Tony’s best recent talks and reflects some of his latest thinking.

Tony’s Advanced Placement teachers’ conference keynote is now available for viewing

Here

Tony’s latest Ed Week Commentary, “Graduating All Students Innovation-Ready,” just published

You can read the article online here.  It is also available in the “Articles” section of the website.

“Graduating All Students Innovation Ready”

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C OMM ENTAR Y

Published Online: August 14, 2012

Graduatin g Al l Student s Innovation - Read y

B y Ton y W agne r

 

Improving student achievement through innovation is the latest buzz in education. New test-prep programs, online learning platforms, e-texts, charter school hybrids, and so on are proliferating, but they are only changing the nature of how we deliver the same old content. No one seems to question exactly what students should be achieving beyond better test scores. What matters today, however, is not how much our students know, but what they can do with what they know. None of these innovations addresses this fundamental shift in what our students—and our nation—will need to succeed in the 21st century.

Knowledge today is a free commodity and growing exponentially. Khan Academy currently offers more than 3,300 K-12 video lessons for free, and more than 6 million students are logging on every month. And now, growing numbers of our elite private and state universities are offering no-cost online courses for anyone who is interested. Because opportunities for learning are ubiquitous and accessible on every Internet-connected device, students who know more than others no longer have a competitive advantage.

Our students now compete for jobs with talented students around the world who will work for far less. As a result, the high school and college graduates who will get and keep good jobs in the new global economy and contribute solutions to the world’s most pressing problems are those who can bring what the author and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman calls “a spark of imagination” to whatever they do. They will be creative problem-solvers who will generate improvements in existing products, processes, and services, as well as invent new ones. Rather than worry so much about graduating all students college-ready, I have come to understand that the most essential education challenge today is to graduate all students innovation- ready.

What does it take to create an innovator? Research for my new book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World, has turned up some surprising answers to this question. The assumption of many business leaders is that we need more science, technology, engineering, and math education. But the scores of young STEM innovators and social entrepreneurs whom I interviewed learned to innovate most often in spite of their “good” schooling—not because of it.

“ It is [ t he ] c o mb i na tion of p l ay , pass io n , an d pu r p o s e t hat bes t de v e lo p s t h e d i sc i p li n e an d pe r severanc e requ i re d to b e a success f u l i nn ov a tor.”

Some argue that innovators like Steve Jobs are born and not made, and so the schooling they get doesn’t matter. However, I have come to understand that most young people can be taught to innovate in whatever they do. We are all born curious, creative, and imaginative. And the best schools—from pre-K to graduate school—continue to develop these capabilities in students. They do so not by delivering more-of-the-same education, but rather a very different education. Schools like High Tech High or the New Technology High Schools have established reputations for producing highly innovative graduates. But what and how these schools teach are radically at odds with conventional education.

These schools focus primarily on teaching students skills and not merely academic content, including critical thinking and problem-solving, effective oral and written communication, and many of the other survival skills, such as collaboration and initiative, which I described in my last book, The Global Achievement Gap. They do so by engaging students in rich and challenging academic content—and yet, content mastery is not the primary objective of their courses. In all of the classes, students must use academic content to pose and solve problems and generate or answer complex questions. Students are required to apply what they have learned and show what they know. Frequently, they do this work in teams.

For example, 9th graders at High Tech High work in teams to imagine a new business, and then develop a detailed business plan that they present to local venture capitalists in San Diego. Some of their ideas, in fact, get funded. And all HTH seniors must complete a semester-long team-based service-learning project in which a group works to solve a real problem in the community. One team I interviewed discovered that the local food pantry was not able to store the food it was collecting for needy families. So the students used a computer-aided-design program at their school to create a storage system. They then installed it at the pantry.

What is unique about these schools is the learning culture they have created.

All of them require collaboration in the classroom because they understand that innovation is a team sport. Most courses are interdisciplinary because, as Google’s former director of talent, Judy Gilbert, explained when I interviewed her in 2011: “A more interdisciplinary approach to learning will better prepare people for the kind of problems they’ll be confronting.” Understanding that innovation and self-confidence come from taking risks and learning from mistakes, teachers at the schools I’ve named encourage trial and error. Rather than talk about failure, they emphasize the importance of “iteration” in student work.

Perhaps my most surprising research finding is the extent to which young innovators—from both advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds—are much more motivated by intrinsic rather than extrinsic incentives. Their parents, teachers, and mentors encourage exploratory play, the finding and pursuit of a passion, and the idea of giving back. All of the innovators that I interviewed want to make a difference in the world. It is this combination of play, passion, and purpose—rather than the carrot-and-stick motivation of most classrooms—that best develops the discipline and perseverance required to be a successful innovator.

To graduate all students innovation-ready will require very different thinking from what’s currently being touted in education. First, I believe the U.S. Department of Education and state education departments need to develop ways to assess essential skills with digital portfolios that follow students through school, and encourage the use of better tests like the College and Work ReadinesAssessment. Administered by the Council for Aid to Education, the CWRA is an online test of problem-solving, complex thinking, and writing skills used by a growing number of independent schools, public school districts, and colleges around the country. Second, we need to learn how to assess teachers’ effectiveness by analysis of their students’ work, rather than on the basis of a test score. Teachers and administrators should also build digital portfolios, which their principals and superintendents should assess periodically. Third, to push educational innovation, districts need to partner with one another, businesses, and nonprofits to establish true R&D labs—schools of choice that are developing 21st-century approaches to learning.

Finally, we need to incorporate a better understanding of how students are motivated to do their best work into our course and school designs. Google has a 20 percent rule, whereby all employees have the equivalent of one day a week to work on any project they choose. These projects have produced many of Google’s most important innovations. I would like to see this same rule applied to every classroom in America, as a way to create time for students to pursue their own interests and continue to develop their sense of play, passion, and purpose.

Our students want to become innovators. Our economy needs them to become innovators. The question is: As educators, do we have the courage to disrupt conventional wisdom and pursue the innovations that matter most?

Tony Wagner is currently the innovation education fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard University. Previously, he was the founder and co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This Commentary was adapted by Mr. Wagner for Education Week from his recently published book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World (Scribner, 2012). His website is www.tonywagner.com.

Vol. 32, Issue 1