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In a class of 40 to 50, there is no discussion time. I haven't read the book yet, only the reviews, so I gave it 5 stars just because I had to fill in the field. The Chinese are the ones who we are supposedly competing against. Chinese students do not question- they memorize. They are willing to work longer for less money and the sheer number of these kind of talented applicants is something the US may not be able to compete with. Are they educating their students in the way Mr.
I'm suggesting that the global achievement gap and competing for global jobs may present challenges different from the ones discussed in this book. I've worked overseas in Taiwan with some classroom experience there and am somewhat familiar with the educational system in China. I'm not suggesting we copy China. Wagner suggests. No. The Chinese have a strong work ethic and being able to work as a part of a team is built into their culture.
I think Bill Gates is feeling guilty cuz he knows Microsoft is going to make more money from cheap Chinese/Indian etc intellectual labor than American intellectal labor- just like they made more money from cheap third world manual labor than they could by paying American labor a fair wage.
This is an eye opener. Everyone, especially any decision maker over math education should be required to read this book before they make any suggestions that involves what should be taught and how it should be taught.
Wagner made some good points, especially about the shortcomings of typical student assessments, these strengths could not overcome the books many weaknesses. What matters is arranging the contingencies of work to get high performance. The schools he cites may, in fact, be very good schools but they are not replicable on a large scale and their methods do not translate to the large school settings common across the United States. Wagner presents his examples of exemplary schools that work. Wagner's editors must have decided that seven was more marketable and combined similar, but not identical learning domains to reach the marketing target).Dr. While I have my issues with E.D.
Hirsch's work, I do agree with him that education is not content free and that any claims to the contrary are misguided. (By the way, if you read the list of seven skills closely, it becomes apparent that more like a dozen process skills are seen as essential - one of Dr. I wanted to like this book and while Dr. Wagner is firmly rooted in the current fashion of educational romaticism that grips our national reform debate. Workplace contingencies are basically the same everywhere and in every profession. He does not enlighten us on that point.The book fails us again when Dr. He offers yet another unrealistic model for educational reform based on faulty assumptions.
He continues to perpetuate the insular view that there is something unique about working in schools compared with all other lines of professional work. For instance, the gathering of opinions about what students should learn in school, passed off as "research," and then coverted into the hopelessly vague "Seven Survival Skills for Teens Today" reveals a biased methodology that undermines the work's credibility.Furthermore, the "Seven Survival Skills" continue the recent trend of suggesting that the goals of education are simply generic process skills. What we need is guidance on how to make the schools we have as good as they can be, not admonitions to make schools that can not be.I could go on, but you get the point. Wagner's discussion of improving the education profession also fell short. There is not. Dr. If you are looking for insight into useful school reforms, I suggest you look elsewhere.
It is estimated that 50% of students starting college never complete a college degree. But perhaps it is better if we all collaborate on solving that problem. In today's fast-changing, complex environment, teams are given broad objectives and asked to find the best way to achieve them. Today's corporate work environment consists of clusters of business expertise distributed globally and connected via high-speed communications links.
Wagner's interviews with students and professors suggest that what is missing is not content knowledge, but competencies. Similarly, there are seldom any "right answers" in politics, or healthcare, or any other aspect of society - including education. Further, the average 5th grader received 5 times as much instruction in rote learning than they received instruction focused on problem solving or reasoning. Wagner argues that the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which attempts to close the achievement gap between our best and worst schools, has instead left us with schools that are less effective than ever in preparing our children for college, work and life. As a consequence, not only are best practices not promulgated, but there is little consensus among teachers about what constitutes good teaching. While it is wonderful to see such examples, they are all small schools. Instead of group activity, they get one-way lectures and individual worksheets.
Yet in our schools we drill on facts and basic skills, and seldom encourage or even tolerate questioning, innovation, exploration, or collaboration.Wagner presents seven "survival skills" that students should be learning in school in order to prepare for college and adult life:*Critical Thinking and Problem Solving*Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence*Agility and Adaptability*Initiative and Entrepreneurialism*Effective Oral and Written Communication.*Accessing and Analyzing Information*Curiosity and ImaginationYet, according to a NIH study published in Science (2007), 5th-graders in middle-class public schools across the United States spent 90% of their time in their seats listening to the teacher or working alone, and only 7% of their time working in groups. Outside of school, our children have team sports and group activities, and are immersed in the Internet world of interactivity, social networking, and visual information access. Wagner also looks at the problem of how our current teaching practices fail to engage and motivate students. As adults, we have learned that history is always a selective interpretation of past events, and that the most effective communicators often break the established conventions. Workers collaborate in their local team and with other teams around the world to define and solve open-ended problems. Despite legitimate concerns about addictive behavior, violent content and cyber-bullying, Wagner points out that our kids online experience, including even gaming, is much more relevant to the kind of activity found in most information-intensive careers. Our children want group connections, open-ended exploration, immediate feedback response, and relevance. In general, degree programs for teaching and school administration suffer the same flaw of content over competencies.
The US high school graduation rate is only 70%, and 40% of all students who enter college must take remedial courses. Wagner takes us beyond the usual complaints about tenure and unions to examine disfunctional structural components of the educational system. Instead of open-ended exploration, they get drills and tests. Our schools are still mired in educational content and methods from the industrial age; our children get more of the skills they really need outside of school, from extracurricular activities, personal exploration and social networking, if they are fortunate enough to have those opportunities. Our schools offer students little of what engages them.
Multi-tasking, search, and filtering are natural tasks to them, while they have little patience for long, linear, non-visual texts. Instead of rich interactive, multimedia information, they get dry textbooks. It is probably not feasible nor desirable to open hundreds of thousands of new schools in every neighborhood, and Wagner doesn't offer much perspective on how we can translate these examples to the large schools that make up most of our national school system. Instead, Wagner suggests, most teachers have little recourse other than to re-discover effective teaching on their own, in a hit-or-miss manner. There are no pre-defined "right answers" in the business world, only profitable and unprofitable strategies.
School does not engage them, and they correctly perceive a lack of relevancy to their current and future lives.Finally, Wagner offers us some profiles of a few schools that are "doing it right". In core classes and even in AP courses, students are drilled in specific content and vocabulary necessary to pass standardized tests, rather than trained in open-ended inquiry, assessment, reasoning, collaboration and presentation. Once they graduate, teachers are seldom given more than checklist evaluations, and rarely sit in on one another's classrooms or collaborate for instructional improvement. Wagner argues that most high-school school drop-outs occur not because the student lacks ability, but because they lack motivation. I highly recommend this book by Tony Wagner as a starting point.
This book engrosses the problems our schools face, from the overpopulating classrooms to the limited flexibility of our educators. This book is a must read for all concerned and especially for the law makers we put in congress. Todays educators are faced with preparing our young people for success in this competitive and often cruel society we live in. Our schools need to be modernized and must be provided with the tools to succeed in educating our young people.All teachers should read this book as well as all school board members and parents.I give this book 3 stars.
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