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From Educational Leadership Magazine
October 2008 | Volume 66 | Number 2
Expecting Excellence
Pages 20-25
Rigor Redefined
by Tony Wagner
 Even our “best” schools are failing to prepare students for 21st-century careers and citizenship.
In
the new global economy, with many jobs being either automated or
“off-shored,” what skills will students need to build successful
careers? What skills will they need to be good citizens? Are these two
education goals in conflict?
To examine
these questions, I conducted research beginning with conversations with
several hundred business, nonprofit, philanthropic, and education
leaders. With a clearer picture of the skills young people need, I then
set out to learn whether U.S. schools are teaching and testing the
skills that matter most. I observed classrooms in some of the nation's
most highly regarded suburban schools to find out whether our “best”
was, in fact, good enough for our children's future. What I discovered
on this journey may surprise you.
The Schooling Students Need
One
of my first conversations was with Clay Parker, president of the
Chemical Management Division of BOC Edwards—a company that, among other
things, makes machines and supplies chemicals for the manufacture of
microelectronics devices. He's an engineer by training and the head of
a technical business, so when I asked him about the skills he looks for
when he hires young people, I was taken aback by his answer.
“First
and foremost, I look for someone who asks good questions,” Parker
responded. “We can teach them the technical stuff, but we can't teach
them how to ask good questions—how to think.”
“What other skills are you looking for?” I asked, expecting that he'd jump quickly to content expertise.
“I
want people who can engage in good discussion—who can look me in the
eye and have a give and take. All of our work is done in teams. You
have to know how to work well with others. But you also have to know
how to engage customers—to find out what their needs are. If you can't
engage others, then you won't learn what you need to know.”
I
initially doubted whether Parker's views were representative of
business leaders in general. But after interviewing leaders in settings
from Apple to Unilever to the U.S. Army and reviewing the research on
workplace skills, I came to understand that the world of work has
changed profoundly.
Today's students need to
master seven survival skills to thrive in the new world of work. And
these skills are the same ones that will enable students to become
productive citizens who contribute to solving some of the most pressing
issues we face in the 21st century.
1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
To
compete in the new global economy, companies need their workers to
think about how to continuously improve their products, processes, or
services. Over and over, executives told me that the heart of critical
thinking and problem solving is the ability to ask the right questions.
As one senior executive from Dell said, “Yesterday's answers won't
solve today's problems.”
Ellen Kumata,
managing partner at Cambria Associates, explained the extraordinary
pressures on leaders today. “The challenge is this: How do you do
things that haven't been done before, where you have to rethink or
think anew? It's not incremental improvement any more. The markets are
changing too fast.”
2. Collaboration and Leadership
Teamwork
is no longer just about working with others in your building. Christie
Pedra, CEO of Siemens, explained, “Technology has allowed for virtual
teams. We have teams working on major infrastructure projects that are
all over the U.S. On other projects, you're working with people all
around the world on solving a software problem. Every week they're on a
variety of conference calls; they're doing Web casts; they're doing net
meetings.”
Mike Summers, vice president for
Global Talent Management at Dell, said that his greatest concern was
young people's lack of leadership skills. “Kids just out of school have
an amazing lack of preparedness in general leadership skills and
collaborative skills,” he explained. “They lack the ability to
influence.”
3. Agility and Adaptability
Clay
Parker explained that anyone who works at BOC Edwards today “has to
think, be flexible, change, and use a variety of tools to solve new
problems. We change what we do all the time. I can guarantee the job I
hire someone to do will change or may not exist in the future, so this
is why adaptability and learning skills are more important than
technical skills.”
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Mark
Chandler, senior vice president and general counsel at Cisco, was one
of the strongest proponents of initiative: “I say to my employees, if
you try five things and get all five of them right, you may be failing.
If you try 10 things, and get eight of them right, you're a hero.
You'll never be blamed for failing to reach a stretch goal, but you
will be blamed for not trying. One of the problems of a large company
is risk aversion. Our challenge is how to create an entrepreneurial
culture in a larger organization.”
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
Mike
Summers of Dell said, “We are routinely surprised at the difficulty
some young people have in communicating: verbal skills, written skills,
presentation skills. They have difficulty being clear and concise; it's
hard for them to create focus, energy, and passion around the points
they want to make. If you're talking to an exec, the first thing you'll
get asked if you haven't made it perfectly clear in the first 60
seconds of your presentation is, ‘What do you want me to take away from
this meeting?’ They don't know how to answer that question.”
Summers
and other leaders from various companies were not necessarily
complaining about young people's poor grammar, punctuation, or
spelling—the things we spend so much time teaching and testing in our
schools. Although writing and speaking correctly are obviously
important, the complaints I heard most frequently were about fuzzy
thinking and young people not knowing how to write with a real voice.
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
Employees
in the 21st century have to manage an astronomical amount of
information daily. As Mike Summers told me, “There is so much
information available that it is almost too much, and if people aren't
prepared to process the information effectively it almost freezes them
in their steps.”
It's not only the sheer
quantity of information that represents a challenge, but also how
rapidly the information is changing. Quick—how many planets are there?
In the early 1990s, I heard then–Harvard University president Neil
Rudenstine say in a speech that the half-life of knowledge in the
humanities is 10 years, and in math and science, it's only two or three
years. I wonder what he would say it is today.
7. Curiosity and Imagination
Mike
Summers told me, “People who've learned to ask great questions and have
learned to be inquisitive are the ones who move the fastest in our
environment because they solve the biggest problems in ways that have
the most impact on innovation.”
Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind,
observes that with increasing abundance, people want unique products
and services: “For businesses it's no longer enough to create a product
that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be
beautiful, unique, and meaningful.”1
Pink notes that developing young people's capacities for imagination,
creativity, and empathy will be increasingly important for maintaining
the United States' competitive advantage in the future.
The Schooling Students Get
I've
spent time observing in classrooms across the United States for more
than 20 years. Here is a sampling of what I've seen recently. These
examples come from secondary honors and advanced placement (AP) classes
in three school systems that enjoy excellent reputations because of
their high test scores.
AP Chemistry
Students
work in groups of two and three mixing chemicals according to
directions written on the chalkboard. Once the mixtures are prepared,
students heat the concoction with Bunsen burners. According to the
directions on the board, they are supposed to record their observations
on a worksheet.
I watch a group of three
young men whose mixture is giving off a thin spiral of smoke as it's
being heated—something that none of the other students' beakers are
doing. One student looks back at the chalkboard and then at his notes.
Then all three stop what they are doing, apparently waiting for the
teacher to come help them.
“What's happening to your mixture?” I ask the group.
“Dunno,” one mutters. “We must have mixed it up wrong.”
“What's your hypothesis about what happened—why it's smoking?”
The three look at one another blankly, and the student who has been doing all the speaking looks at me and shrugs.
AP U.S. Government
The
teacher is reviewing answers to a sample test that the class took the
previous day. The test contains 80 multiple-choice questions related to
the functions and branches of the federal government.
When
he's finished, he says “OK, now let's look at some sample free-response
questions from previous years' AP exams.” He flips the overhead
projector on and reads from the text of a transparency: “Give three reasons why the Iron Triangle may be criticized as undemocratic. How would you answer this question?”
No one replies.
“OK, who can give me a definition of the Iron Triangle?”
A student pipes up, “The military-industrial-congressional complex.”
“OK,
so what would be three reasons why it would be considered
undemocratic?” The teacher calls on a student in the front row who has
his hand half raised, and he answers the question in a voice that we
can't hear over the hum of the projector's fan.
“Good.
Now let's look at another one.” The teacher flips another transparency
onto the projector. “Now this question is about bureaucracy. Let me
tell you how to answer this one. . . .”
AP English
The
teacher explains that the class is going to review students' literature
notes for the advanced placement exam next week. The seven students are
deeply slouched in their chairs, arranged in a semicircle around the
teacher's desk.
The teacher asks, “Now what is Virginia Woolf saying about the balance between an independent life versus a social life?”
Students
ruffle through their notebooks. Finally, a young woman, reading from
her notes, answers, “Mrs. Ramsey sought meaning from social
interactions.”
“Yes, that's right. Now what about Lily, the artist? How did she construct meaning?”
“Through her painting,” another student mumbles, her face scrunched close to her notes.
“So what is Woolf saying about the choices these two women have made, and what each has sacrificed?”
No reply. The teacher sighs, gets up, goes to the board, and begins writing.
A Rare Class
Once
in a great while, I observe a class in which a teacher is using
academic content to develop students' core competencies. In such a
class, the contrast with the others is stark.
At
the beginning of the period in an Algebra II class, the teacher writes
a problem on the board. He turns to the students, who are sitting in
desks arranged in squares of four that face one another. “You haven't
seen this kind of problem before,” he explains. “Solving it will
require you to use concepts from both geometry and algebra. Each group
will try to develop at least two different ways to solve this problem.
After all the groups have finished, I'll randomly choose someone from
each group who will write one of your proofs on the board, and I'll ask
that person to explain the process your group used.”
The
groups quickly go to work. Animated discussion takes place as students
pull the problem apart and talk about different ways to solve it. While
they work, the teacher circulates from group to group. When a student
asks a question, the teacher responds with another question: “Have you
considered . . .?” “Why did you assume that?” or simply “Have you asked
someone in your group?”
What makes this an
effective lesson—a lesson in which students are learning a number of
the seven survival skills while also mastering academic content? First,
students are given a complex, multi-step problem that is different from
any they've seen in the past. To solve it, they have to apply
critical-thinking and problem-solving skills and call on previously
acquired knowledge from both geometry and algebra. Mere memorization
won't get them far. Second, they have to find two ways to solve the
problem, which requires initiative and imagination. Third, they have to
explain their proofs using effective communication skills. Fourth, the
teacher does not spoon-feed students the answers. He uses questions to
push students' thinking and build their tolerance for ambiguity.
Finally, because the teacher announces in advance that he'll randomly
call on a student to show how the group solved the problem, each
student in every group is held accountable. Success requires teamwork.
Rigor for the 21st Century
Across
the United States, I see schools that are succeeding at making adequate
yearly progress but failing our students. Increasingly, there is only
one curriculum: test prep. Of the hundreds of classes that I've
observed in recent years, fewer than 1 in 20 were engaged in
instruction designed to teach students to think instead of merely
drilling for the test.
To teach and test the
skills that our students need, we must first redefine excellent
instruction. It is not a checklist of teacher behaviors and a model
lesson that covers content standards. It is working with colleagues to
ensure that all students master the skills they need to succeed as
lifelong learners, workers, and citizens. I have yet to talk to a
recent graduate, college teacher, community leader, or business leader
who said that not knowing enough academic content was a problem. In my
interviews, everyone stressed the importance of critical thinking,
communication skills, and collaboration.
We
need to use academic content to teach the seven survival skills every
day, at every grade level, and in every class. And we need to insist on
a combination of locally developed assessments and new nationally
normed, online tests—such as the College and Work Readiness Assessment (www.cae.org)—that measure students' analytic-reasoning, critical-thinking, problem-solving, and writing skills.
It's
time to hold ourselves and all of our students to a new and higher
standard of rigor, defined according to 21st-century criteria. It's
time for our profession to advocate for accountability systems that
will enable us to teach and test the skills that matter most. Our
students' futures are at stake.
Endnote
1
Pink, D. (2005). A whole new mind: Moving from the information age to the conceptual age. New York: Riverhead Books, pp. 32–33.
Tony Wagner is Codirector of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; tony_wagner@harvard.edu; www.schoolchange.org. The themes of this article are discussed more fully in 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 (Basic Books, 2008).
MORE ON TONY WAGNER
Tony Wagner has served as Co-Director of the Change Leadership Group (CLG) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education since its inception in 2000. He is also on the faculty of the Executive Leadership Program for Educators, a joint initiative of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Business School, and Kennedy School of Government. Tony consults widely to public and independent schools, districts, and foundations around the country and internationally and has been Senior Advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the past nine years. Tony has worked for more than thirty-five years in the field of school improvement, and he is a frequent keynote speaker and widely published author on education and society. Prior to assuming his current position at Harvard, Tony was a high school teacher for twelve years; a school principal; a university professor in teacher education; co-founder and first executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility; project director for the Public Agenda Foundation in New York; and President and CEO of the Institute for Responsive Education. He earned his a Masters of Arts in Teaching and Doctorate in Education at Harvard University. Tony’s publications include numerous articles and four books.
Tony's latest 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 has just been published by Basic Books. His other titles include:
- Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools, Making the Grade:
- Reinventing America’s Schools, and How Schools Change: Lessons from Three Communities
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