Tony Wagner Bio

Tony Wagner is the Co-Director of the Change Leadership Group (CLG) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also the Senior Advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the past nine years. Wagner has worked for more than thirty-five years in the field of school improvement. Prior to his current position at Harvard, Wagner 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 has definitely come up the ranks.

Wagner earned a M.A. in Teaching and Ph. D. in Education at Harvard.

Wagner has had two books published in the last year:
The Global Achievement Gap
Change Leadership

Rigor Redefined

In his article, "Rigor Redefined", Tony Wagner lays out his case for a paradigm shift in education. He outlines 7 sets of survival skills that students need to demonstrate fluency in to be well prepared for the dynamic, global, information-saturated environment that they will relatively soon inhabit independently. While some things are not new, like the communication skills, what is new is the argument that these process-oriented skills are as vital as content-driven curriculum.

This article is an excellent synopsis of Wagner's book, The Global Achievement Gap (GAG), and a lot shorter!

As Wagner explains in the article, GAG tells about the hundreds of interviews he conducted with business leaders asking what they noticed young people lacked. A fascinating and very pragmatic approach: start at where we need to end up and design backwards. The most often answer that Wagner was given was that the young adults need to ask good questions, reflecting a dire need for better critical thinking skills.

“First and foremost, we 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.”

"We can teach them the technical stuff", the content. What Wagner discovered was more process-oriented critical thinking skills were needed.

Are our learning environments, teaching habits, and curricular objectives set up to foster the type of critical thinking skills Wagner suggests?

The 21st Century Survival Skills

Wagner's list of 21st century survival skills is being used widely in education to redesign and reframe curriculum at both the secondary and university level. Wagner asserts that these seven sets of skills are critical for students to gain today in preparation for their future work and citizenship. Here is Wagner's essential list:

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

In a society where adaptability to new situations and where there is a need to continually upgrade products, processes and services, Wagner found that business executives told him that the ability to ask the right questions lies at the heart of critical thinking and problem solving. He asserts that in areas where markets quickly change, incremental improvement is no longer an option. Businesses need people who offer options that haven't been done before. In this way, critical thinking is closely aligned with creativity.

2. Collaboration and Leadership

Knowing how to influence for change through collaboration and the use of leadership skills will be critical as the 21st century unfolds. Teamwork will mean more than working with those in your department or building. Today's teams work together across time zones in the U.S. and throughout the world using Web casts, Wikis, Blogs, and virtual telecasts.

3. Agility and Adaptability

Many businesses today expect their employees to think, be flexible, ready to change and use a variety of skills and tools to solve unexpected problems. Wagner shares that Clay Parker at BOC Edwards points out that "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

Self-directed people who have an achievement focus and a drive for results are being sought out in business and government. The world is facing some very challenging problems and needs creative solutions. Taking initiative and leading teams of peers through influence to solutions that bring about successful change is a highly sought after skill set.

5. Effective Oral and Written Communication

Whether writing a report, sending an e-mail, giving a presentation in a business setting or taking part in the democratic process, effective communication is critical. Effective communication is key in everything we do, especially across cultures. Clear communication of one's thoughts in a concise way that brings focus, energy and passion will allow our students to be more successful in the workplace, society and in making a contribution to the world.

6. Accessing and Analyzing Information

With the advent of the internet, Google searches, and Wikipedia, we know that there is a tremendous amount of information available at the touch of a button. Businesses and effective governments need citizens who are able to process, analyze, and evaluate information effectively. Finding the important details in the information and using it to make informed decisions is critical to effective businesses and a democratic way of life.

7. Curiosity and Imagination

It's not enough in today's world to be smart and get good grades. Highly valued employees must also know how to come up with creative solutions and design products and services that are noticeably different than the competitions. This takes not only intelligence and disciplined thinking but curiosity and imagination as well. Wagner quotes author Daniel Pink from his book A Whole New Mind:

"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.... In an age of abundance, appealing only to rational, logical, and functional needs is woefully insufficient. Engineers must figure out how to get things to work. But, if those things are not also pleasing to the eye or compelling to the soul, few will buy them. There are too many other options."

How do we create curriculum around these essential skills for all the grade levels we serve?
What is the resistance in doing so?
What do we really believe when we hear, "we already do that"? Do we?
Do the think the traditional teacher-at-the-front-of-the-room teaching style is the best pedagogy for these outcomes? Why or why not?
What do we need to do, learn, adapt, foster in ourselves to create the learning environments and outcome that Wagner suggests?

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is the key organization producing a framework for schools and teachers that incorporates 21st century skills through curriculum and project-based learning. Their website is an invaluable resource for teachers and administrators seeking to understand the big picture in 21st century education. Their recommendations combine specific skills, content knowledge, expertise and literacies, not just reading but concepts like media literacy, visual literacy, global literacy (understanding of other cultures).

The foundation recommended is the familiar core subjects: English, World Languages, Arts, Math, Economics, Science, Geography, History, Government. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills also recommends weaving the interdisciplinary themes of global awareness, financial and entrepreneurial literacy, Civic literacy, and Health literacy. So the new core, once more people adapt, will be fuller.

In essence, what the 21st century requires is much of what we have been doing and more. Yet, we only have so much time. So, the bottom line is some things have to go to make room for the breadth that is required. Teaching for content will also have to include the layering of other skills and competencies that can be utilized in a project-based approach. If one has not been teaching in that way, learning about project-based teaching will also be necessary.

Where are we now?
Where do we want to go?
How will we get there?

Councils Release New Maps

Many of the curriculum councils are partnering with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). In June the National Science Teachers Association, and the National Council for Geographic Education released new curriculum maps that included the 21st century survival skills that Tony Wagner highlights in The Global Achievement Gap. Maps for social studies and English were released in 2008.

Read about these new maps in Education Week's Curriculum Matters column.

Wagner on YouTube

"No one has done anything wrong." This is what Wagner believes. The problem, or a better word, is that the world has changed. Fundamentally changed, and education has not. The American education system (public and private) is much as it has been over the last 120 years. Very much design (that you Frederick Taylor) to prepare its students for work in an industrial economy (think GM, Xerox, IBM, newspapers). We now have an information society (think Google). Wagner's message is much like what we heard from Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind, and Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not a passing pad. This is a fundamental, lasting shift. Just as we could not imagine going back to carbon copies, memeograph machines, and Britannica Worldbook Encyclopedia A-Z, we will not return to a slower, more stable culture. Schools are in a gap and have to adapt. And, it's difficult for lots of reason.

What are the main reasons we find adaptation difficult?
How might we break through in our understanding, our sense of necessity, and our sense of urgency?

Global Achievement Gap Powerpoint

This is a nice Powerpoint that summarizes Wagner's GAG. It was posted to YouTube by Ben Johnson, Iowa State University student and Assistant Principal at Fort Dodge Senior High in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

Tony Wagner at The Asia Society

This is a longer keynote address that Tony Wagner gave to educators this summer at The Asia Society in New York. I like how he formulates the situation in which we as teachers, administrators, and citizens find ourselves: between a rock and a hard place. This is an especially good presentation to help grasp the essential imperative which is a different sort of education that creates different needed outcomes.

Do you believe his case statement and argument?
If not, why not?
If so, what are you prepared to do about it?
How can others support you?
If it were your child caught in this gap, what would you want for him or her?
How would you want school to be different for him or her?

Some Wagner Quotes

Below are some quotes that I have collected from Wagner's The Global Achievement Gap. As you can infer from his bio and seeing his videos, he is not puffy like some academics. His written language is down-to-earth, clear, yet determined to make his case.

"In today's highly competitive global "knowledge economy," students need new skills for college, careers, and citizenship. The failure to give all students these new skills leaves today's youth-and our country-at an alarming competitive disadvantage. Schools haven't changed; the world has. And so our schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete-even the ones that score the best on standardized tests."

"The "problem," simply stated, is that the future of our economy, the strength of our democracy, and perhaps even the health of the planet's ecosystems depend on educating future generations in ways very different from how many of us were schooled."

"The global achievement gap remains invisible to most of us-in part, because it is fueled by fundamental economic, social, political, and technological changes that have taken place so rapidly over the last two decades that they seem more like static in people's lives than like tangible forces that are shaping our future. But these changes are powerful, and until we understand them and rethink what young people need to know in the twenty-first century and how they are best taught, our future as a country remains uncertain."

"I have observed that the longer our children are in school, the less curious they become. Effective communication, curiosity, and critical-thinking skills, as we will see, are much more than just the traditional desirable outcomes of a liberal arts education. They are essential competencies and habits of mind for life in the twenty-first century."

"Corporate CEO most values asking good questions; his child gets into trouble at school for asking the teacher a question. The problem of students getting into trouble for challenging something a teacher says is not new to me, but I found this juxtaposition especially jarring."

"Taking issues and situations and problems and going to root components; understanding how the problem evolved-looking at it from a systemic perspective and not accepting things at face value. It also means being curious about why things are the way they are and being able to think about why something is important. Indeed, Ms. Neal herself went on with a list of questions: What do I really need to understand about this; what is the history; what are other people thinking about this; how does that all come together; what frames and models can we use to understand this from a variety of different angles and then come up with something different?"

(about the schools in Singapore which are called Thinking Schools. Singapore aims to become a Learning Nation)
"Thinking Schools will be learning organizations in every sense, constantly challenging assumptions, and seeking better ways of doing things through participation, creativity and innovation. Thinking Schools will be the cradle of thinking students as well as thinking adults and this spirit of learning should accompany our students even after they leave school. A Learning Nation envisions a national culture and social environment that promotes lifelong learning in our people. The capacity of Singaporeans to continually learn, both for professional development and for personal enrichment, will determine our collective tolerance for change."

A Teacher on 21st Century Teaching

21st century Pedagogy: We need a new DNA. This is a rather nice video that just states the fundamental gap. A new world needs a new way of teaching the digital learner.

Writing with Voice

One of the areas most severely underdeveloped, the CEOs reported to Wagner, was young people's ability to write with Voice. They noted that students tended to write without much personality and unable to take a stand, that they writing lacked critical thinking.

These following articles offered further discussion of the importance of teaching students to write persuasively.

Researchers Try to Promote Students Ability to Argue

An Argument Worth Having