久强丝网球场围网:Seven skills students desperately need

Thu, Nov 20, 2008 Send  Print  Reprints  RSS
Seven skills students desperately need
Today's students could fail at life, says Harvard's Tony Wagner, because their schools are too busy teaching to the test
By Meris Stansbury, Assistant Editor
Primary Topic Channel:  21st Century skills

SETDA Keynoter Tony Wagner says teaching to the test discourages learning.
Teaching to the test is a mistake, Harvard's Tony Wagner reminded the audience of his Nov. 18 keynote address to the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), because it interferes with transmitting the seven "survival skills" every student should acquire before graduating.
Wagner's remarks came during a forum organized in Washington, D.C., as one way to advance the 10-point "Action Plan" SETDA had issued the day before.
As the Obama administration prepares to take over in the nation's capital, SETDA and similar groups are offering advice on how federal policy makers and state and local education leaders can transform education and help students obtain 21st-century skills with the help of technology.
"With this summit and with the release of our Action Plan, we hope to figure out how to make the steps of crucial change more scalable," said SETDA Executive Director Mary Ann Wolf.
Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, said economic change will come as soon as classroom and national practices involving instruction change as well.
"A lot of people think the skills that students need to learn for the workforce and the skills they need to learn to be a good citizen are two separate sets. But they're not. What makes a student successful in the global workforce will make a person successful at life," he said.
Wagner said he hears two things repeated constantly by today's employers: "We need people who can ask good questions, and we need people who can engage others in thoughtful conversations."
"When I asked them whether or not they needed students to know the latest version of software, they said no," he added. "They told me that technology moves so fast that it's hard to keep up with. [From] the time students graduate to when they get the job, it's usually changed anyway. . . . [Employers] . . .don't mind training employees in technology--but you can't teach someone how to think."
Wagner, who consults for public and independent schools, districts, and foundations across the country and internationally, said his visits to some school districts have highlighted why state standards need to change--and why teaching to the test is not the way to achieve success.
"I went to visit many science labs in these districts," said Wagner. "Some of them were great, achieved great test scores, and most of their students went on to postsecondary education. But some weren't so great, and here's why: I was watching a group of high school students in a science lab. One group had a problem, and the Bunsen burner was smoking. But they weren't doing anything about it--just waiting for the teacher to come by and fix it. But the teacher wasn't looking, so I went over, and I asked: 'What's going on?' One of the kids said, 'Don't know, not working.' So I looked at them and I said, 'Well, what's your hypothesis?' They all stared blankly. Finally one said, 'Oh yeah, a hypothesis, that was one of our vocabulary words the other day, but I don't know what it means.'"
Wagner said the problem is that you can have all the equipment and technology you want, but "if you don't teach kids how to think, how to think beyond multiple choice, you've got a problem."
He told another story illustrating this same problem:
"I went to a school once that had a lot of AP courses. I went into one AP course on government. Here was this teacher asking kids questions, and of course, there's the one kid who keeps raising his hand, but the rest of the class was dead. The teacher asks the questions, the one kid raises his hand to answer, the teacher calls on him, the teacher moves on to the next question. This gets repeated over and over again. Finally the teacher asks a question the one kid doesn't know: 'What's the Iron Triangle?' No one raises [a] hand. The poor teacher, flustered that he has to cover so much in so little time, says hurriedly, 'OK, here's how you answer this one' and writes the answer on the board."
Wagner continued: "The problem is that teachers are teaching to tests--telling kids answers that they don't think [of] for themselves--and that's why students may pass high school but can't cut it in college or in the workforce."
Wagner suggested that states and schools move from content standards to performance standards, and he urged education stakeholders to think of ways to start assessing 21st-century skills.
"I realize education is a very risk-averse sector," said Wagner, "but assessments either drive instruction for the better or for the worse, and right now in the U.S., it's for the worse. If our assessments measured performance and 21st-century skills, like the European PISA assessment, that would be another story."
Wagner said teaching to the test not only limits students' ability to think for themselves, but also discourages students from studying subjects they love.
"Once I was talking to this student from MIT," he said. "Very successful and had gone to an AP magnet school. 'I used to love science and STEM subjects,' he told me, 'but all the testing turned me off. Now I'm going to become a teacher to try and change that way of teaching.'"
According to Wagner, students of this generation are not unmotivated; they're just differently motivated.
"They're multi-taskers, they are drawn to graphics, they like instant gratification, they use Web 2.0 tools to create, and they love collaboration," he said. "If we can figure out how to grab their interest in learning, they'll become great thinkers and be eager to learn the basics."
Wagner presented a list of seven "survival skills" that students need to succeed in today's information-age world, taken from his book The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can do About It. It's a school's job to make sure students have these skills before graduating, he said:
1. Problem-solving and critical thinking;
2. Collaboration across networks and leading by influence;
3. Agility and adaptability;
4. Initiative and entrepreneurship;
5. Effective written and oral communication;
6. Accessing and analyzing information; and
7. Curiosity and imagination.
"We are making [Adequate Yearly Progress] at the expense of failing our kids at life. Something has to change," he concluded.
Links:
Tony Wagner's web site
SETDA
Note to readers:
Don’t forget to visit the “Creating the 21 stCentury Classroom”resource center. Preparing today’s youth to succeed in the digital economy requires a new kind of teaching and learning. Skills such as global literacy, computer literacy, problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, and innovation have become critical in today’s increasingly interconnected workforce and society--and technology is the catalyst for bringing these changes into the classroom. Go to Creating-the-21st-century-classroom
Comment now.
to Jim Ifer
Have you looked at the tests? I graduated with my teaching credential just 4 years ago. My university professors did not prepare me for the reality of what is going on in the classroom. Our children are not being taught how to be the citizens of the future. Our children are being taught how to fill in circles. I am disgusted with you out of touch educators. I have seen the annual tests for 2nd grade, 5th grade and 6th grade. They are horrendous! The verbiage is confusing; as are the mulitple choice answers. I have heard more than one teacher express that they seemed designed to make it difficult to pass and I agree. Yes, I agree that we need to test skills; but the tests are ridiculously designed. California's education will soon be state run and I believe that is the goal of the tests. I want to prepare my children to be caring, responsible citizens. I can't do that when I am being pressured to teach to the test.
Posted By: cynthiaegray, 2008-11-27 9:59 PM
SCANS redux?
We've produced a generation of teachers since the SCANS reports and we still have the best and brightest finding the challenge of going into teaching to "set it right" (glad the calling is still alive). It appears it will take more than a focus on the required skills and able bodied teachers. We are still stuck in issues at the "design" level - the appropriate level of decentralization (property tax base) and political mandates (no child left intact)...Obama will have an easier time with the economy....
Posted By: bshea, 2008-11-26 2:55 PM
An Evolutionary Perspective for Educational Change
The educational change that is behind today's search has an human evolutionary dimension that needs to be understood. The need is a result of the developments in science and technology that has taken place over the past two hundred years. The base for the existing education system has been evolving over the past six thousand years to serve the human survival needs of agrarian societies where human physical energy was the survival base. Science and technology is gradually changing the primary physical survival need to intellectual. The agrarian survival pedagogy evolved as an elimination process. Intellectual ability was seen as needed only from those individuals with the highest natural intellectual ability. It became an externally motivated elimination process with testing and subjective grading as the tools of elimination. Education is becoming aware of the fallacy of that mind set when children of wealthy or politically in power families were able to send their children to formal education and they succeeded or failed no matter what their intellectual may have been. There is no science of human intellectual development behind the the starting of formal education at age six. The age six was unscientifically believed to be the age of reason when children could be held accountable for sins. In the Middle Ages this is when boys became squires and trained for the military. In 1830 the U.S. unscientifically assimilated the educational elimination process and tryed to make it inclusive for the education of all children. Educators have been struggling with that decision ever since. Today science is gradually pointing to the importance of individualization in education. The most powerful and unavoidable learning process for all life in the universe is survival and it is totally internally motivated. What education needs to do is to get objective scientific understandings of the total birth to ageing process for internal and external motivated formal education. This is the only way humanity will be able to make the transition from physical survival pedagogy to intellectual survival pedagogy. Because this has an evolutionary dimension we don't have to do anything other than what we have been doing. It will then take the historic generations to make the transition. We have already been is the process for nine or ten generations as is today. Even if we could agree upon the transition process today it would still take at least two generations to become significant in evolutionary terms.
Posted By: 512lap, 2008-11-24 5:56 PM
Department of Obvious, No Duh Division
Look at that seven. This is what any teacher who deserves the title has always wanted. I should never read any post with a number in it. I am disappointed. Not a kernal of help here. And number 7? You can't teach an attitude. You can demonstrate, you can draw out what is already there, but calling it a skill is worse than wrong, it borders on Orwellian corruption.
Posted By: terry.elliott, 2008-11-22 2:18 PM
PISA and other follies
It's frightening when Harvard Education School is run by people as deluded as Wagner. The example of the student who didn't know what a hypothesis is shows what's wrong with education--not what's wrong with tests. Let's look at it another way: until very recently, testing was a routine part of schooling. Even in the 1960s, teachers normally set a test at least once a week. They assumed, rightly, that this was the only way that pupils could be induced to understand difficult concepts, such as the need to construct a hypothesis, and to devise replicable experiments to test it. The enlightenment is based upon quite a complex set of ideas, and tests such as PISA are virtually useless in determining whether students understand them. To wit: a science teacher in England recently passed me materials that Prof Wagner would no doubt approve of. It was designed to teach 12-year-olds 'critical thinking skills' and the scientific method. It was stripped of all references to numbers and equations--it was merely about conducting 'investigations'. It was boring beyond belief. If you look closely at PISA, the tests are largely verbal intelligence tests. Trivial problems are disguised in a wealth of verbiage, and woe betide the poor student whose reading ability was stunted by the enthusiasms of Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman. Prof Wagner really ought to read a bit more deeply into the cognitive sciences. An excellent article by Dan Willingham at http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/summer07/Crit_Thinking.pdf explains why attempts to teach 'critical thinking skills' have borne such meagre fruit. Despite educators' enthusiasm, teachers--the kind who actually face classes full of hormone-charged teenagers--are becoming increasingly cynical about this brave new world of amorphous 'skills'. The better ones, such as my friend in England, carry one teaching science pretty much the same way as it has been taught ever since the modern curriculum was devised in the dissenting academies of 18th century Britain. And oddly enough, my friend has no trouble 'motivating' his students: once they know some real science--not the PISA pretend science--they begin to understand what a powerful tool it is for unlocking the natural world.
Posted By: tom burkard, 2008-11-20 10:27 PM
Hopefully someone is listening
As a community college educator I see a very wide slice of high school graduates,from those who are university eligible and could do very well but are in community college due to cost, to those who are high school drop outs- I am finding that regardless of academic skill level, younger students are not creative, they do not attempt to solve problems, and they want me to spoon feed them directions for every assignment. Please let's begin to teach students more than the minimum requirements so that they can pass the test.
Posted By: dgreene, 2008-11-20 9:08 PM
Of course, it depends on the test to which we're teaching. . .
I have also been in education for many years, and while teaching to the test may be beneficial if we're sure the test measures what we really need students to learn, then I'm all for it. Far too often, however, the "test" that we're teaching to is generated by groups or individuals that may or may not have a good grasp of what we really need to measure.
Posted By: donna.welschmeyer770, 2008-11-20 3:00 PM
Creativity an "implied" skill?
Critical thinking skills are paramount, there are few who would disagree with this, but there may be more additions to Dr. Wagner's list. I have been teaching college freshman for two years now and I see a lack of systems thinking skills, just for starters. The kids can parrot back information just fine when asked to do so, but few can go beyond the information provided in class and develop connections between concepts, conjectures, hypotheses and analogies of their own. There are exceptions, to be sure, but the majority struggle with being able to think holistically, and draw connections between seemingly disparate parts of the whole. They also struggle with being able to access multiple streams of information from a variety of text and visual sources, and fuse it into a coherent whole. I would also add creativity and innovation to Dr. Wagner's list, two skills we seem to have forgotten as being important to the entrepreneurial spirit that once characterized the collective American workforce, and skills that seem to be implicit in the language of his list. In teaching to the test, we have prepared our students to be able to memorize and regurgitate pertinent information, but we have failed to develop in them their natural and innate abilities to experiment with ideas, and yes, even occasionally fail with their projected outcomes. We have been so bent on the mantra that "failure is not an option," that we forget that failure has been the driving force behind mankind's greatest discoveries and creative pursuits. We need to teach kids that its ok to fail, and that resiliency in the face of failure is the single most important factor in success.
Posted By: fitzerki, 2008-11-20 1:37 PM
Teach to the test is the minimum we should do
I have been training teachers for over a decade and I disagree with the concept of not teaching to the test. Whenever, I'm told this I ask - if you're not teaching to the test ...then just what are you teaching to? Teaching our students to be successful on their assessments is the minimum requirement we have as instructors. It does not limit what we do - it is the least we should do. It should also never be confused with "teach the test". Far too often teachers don't teach to the test and by doing so they set students up to fail. This failure leads to loss of self confidence and lowered academic performance. I want my students to have both of those skills for life.
Posted By: jim iler, 2008-11-20 12:34 PM