Tony Wagner
Posted: April 1st, 2014 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 4 Comments »
Tony Wagner is the keynote speaker. I listened while eating a bunch of muffins. Now I need more coffee.
Wagner is affiliated with Harvard Innovation Lab. The i-lab generously hosted our Bridge’s Boston office for our first 6 months, so we’re fans of Tony by extension. He’s a popular author. Here’s his recent book, The Global Achievement Gap.
Wagner (my notes are always riddled with errors, this is the gist):
Knowledge is free. It’s on every device. It used to be teachers had corner on market of knowledge. You had to go through teachers to get it. The more knowledge you had, the more value you had in the marketplace. No longer true.
What is a teacher for? How do you add value in marketplace, if next guy will just learn what needs to be learned, just in time?
What do kids need, if knowledge can just be looked up? Wagner says:
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 imagination
I think this is a popular perception, that kids need skills, not knowledge. Some scholars disagree, though. It just takes longer to explain why. It’s hard to argue against the list of 7. But there are a few underlying challenges here.
Here’s University of Virginia’s Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist. He writes:
(The notion of skills over knowledge) is based on several flawed assumptions about human cognition.
(Faulty) Assumption 1: Knowledge and Skills are separate.
…They don’t understand how knowledge and skill work together. The P21 documents describe them as though they are separate, as though it’s possible to train skills on their own and so train students to be “good critical thinkers.”
As E. D. Hirsch emphasized in his talk at the forum, and as I’ve described elsewhere, thinking skills are intertwined with domain knowledge.
Hirsch noted that Steven Spielberg is a brilliant thinker when it comes to cinema, but that doesn’t mean that he could manage the New York Yankees. Critical thinking in one domain does not apply to another.
This is true because (1) knowledge is sometimes required to identify the root nature of the problem you’re dealing with and (2) you might understand the problem and know what you’re supposed to do, but still need background knowledge to use the critical thinking skill you want to apply. The danger in describing knowledge and skills as separate is that it is a short step from that belief to putting knowledge on the back burner.
I would add: particularly in the developing world, though it’s not “sexy” to talk about perhaps, most kids still lack “the basics.”
(Faulty) Assumption 2: Teachers don’t have cognitive limits.
Everyone’s cognitive system has limits. We can’t remember everything that happens to us. We can’t pay attention to five things at the same time. This is important in the classroom because the methods that P21 encourages teachers to use (as the ones most likely to develop 21st-century skills) are incredibly demanding—so demanding that almost no one can use them effectively without a great deal of preparation and training.
The demanding methods include project-based learning, small-group learning, and others in which students have some voice in the direction of the lesson plan. These methods are difficult because it’s so hard to plan for them; you can’t know what’s going to happen in the classroom until you get there.
Then, too, the knowledge that the teacher might need is broader—students have a say in what they will study, so the range of topics that the teacher must know is concomitantly broader. The greater cognitive demand of these lessons has been acknowledged by prominent proponents of them, including John Dewey and Michael Pressley. These types of lessons are also tougher from a classroom management perspective—a certain amount of hubbub is expected, and teachers might wonder whether hubbub will devolve into chaos, a point made by John Goodlad and by Mary Kennedy.
….This doesn’t mean that students should never do projects—it means that we should be clear-eyed about the challenges that projects present, and have a plan to meet them, rather than to simply suggest that projects (and other methods) are a good idea.
Yes. Another thing is if a country, particularly in poor communities, has a bunch of citizens who don’t know much about science, then it’s likely teachers may struggle with discussions about science, which means open-ended projects about science have some challenges: who will navigate the kids when they’re wrong and stuck?
(Faulty) Assumption 3: Experience is equivalent to practice.
Just because you do something doesn’t mean that you get better at it.
I have been driving for about 30 years, but I don’t think I’m a better driver than I was 29.5 years ago. I’ve gained experience, but I haven’t practiced.
Practice entails trying to improve: noticing what you’re doing wrong, and trying different strategies to do better. It also entails meaningful feedback, usually from someone knowledgeable about the skill. This means that 21st-century skills like “working well in groups,” or “developing leadership,” will not be developed simply by putting people in groups or asking them to be leaders.
So that’s the pushback. In fairness, I think I recall Wagner trying to address point number two in his book.
It’s interesting to process Wagner with this audience. I’m sitting next to a guy from Minerva. Minerva is a VC-backed college to compete against Ivies. So if Bridge works with poorest kids in world, he works with kids who come from top 1%, who have admissions from top regular colleges but may choose Minerva instead. And for him, this make sense.
A teacher named Erin writes this review of Wagner’s book on GoodReads:
Wagner’s main point, and the one I both agree with and struggle with, is that students need to be thinking critically and collaborating in all their classes. I work to incorporate collaboration into my classes, and try to include as much critical thinking as I can. It is often hard to generate the compelling, open-ended questions and student assessments that Wagner cites in his examples of schools that work.
Where I find the tension is between devoting the time to developing those deep questions with students and covering the content students are expected to know for their college classes.
Yes, let’s acknowledge this as a tension. The Kenyan grade 7 syllabus, for example, has so many topics that this sort of tradeoff makes every second precious. Even though we’re private, Bridge must (and does) follow the 8-4-4 national syllabus.
Teacher Erin continues:
Another point Wagner makes too much of is that academic content is constantly changing, and changing rapidly. He’s very hung up on whether there are eight or nine planets, but at least for science, Pluto’s “demotion” is the exception that proves the rule.
While the Periodic Table students see in chemistry grows slowly (at around the pace new particle colliers are constructed), the elements I have students memorize are not in constant flux. It would make more sense to think of physical science as an expanding pool of knowledge. While changes are occurring on the shoreline, much of the knowledge students are learning in high school is in the very center. It’s important for students to see the changes on the edges (Higg’s boson-type stuff) to know that interesting science is still being done, but Wagner needs to recognize that there are core sets of principles students can learn that are not in danger of becoming instantly obsolete.
In the end, I think Wagner’s got a big legit point that applies to the developing world: many traditional classrooms are stale. Way too much teacher lecture. The Kenyan syllabus has big issues, it doesn’t prioritize the “right knowledge.” Pedagogically, in Kenya, schools would benefit to Wagner’s prescription of teacher saying less, doing more circulating and coaching, kids doing the work. That part, I agree with wholeheartedly.
Bonus: they just showed a nice pre-release of documentary about the fab High Tech High Charter School, and I’m seeing my friends Larry and Ben up there on the screen!
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Michael. I very much regret that people who merely hear my talks – rather than read my books – interpret my remarks as suggesting that skills can be learned without academic content. (And certainly don’t subscribe to any of the assumptions above.)
As a former high school English teacher, I understand the importance of teaching academic content knowledge and skills together! It cannot be done any other way. And I understand and struggled with the challenge of trying to figure out which content is most important.
My main point is that students today need content knowledge, skill, and will – meaning intrinsic motivation. If the 3, I believe that motivation is most important and the one we do the most damage to our existing forms of schooling. A student who is intrinsically motivated will continuously learn new content knowledge and skills throughout his/her life – and will need to do so in order to thrive and to succeed.
Finally, of course students need “the basics.” But it very much matters how and when they learn them. When I taught at-risk high school students, I learned that I had to help them discover an intinsic reason for wanting to learn to read and write before they would be willing to consider learning “the basics.”
And not to blow smoke by any means, but I read Wagner’s “Creating Innovators” and it is certainly does not advocate throwing out content. So thank you, Dr. Wagner, for your clarification. I just heard Don Buckley speak at the ISAST conference in New Orleans and he put it this way: It is more important for teachers to focus on PROCESS than content. It’s not that you don’t cover content at all OR that we throw out the basics, but I agree that teaching how to FIND and ANALYZE (use) good content is more important than MEMORIZING it.
Thanks Tony. Appreciate your commenting, and the substance. I agree that
a) There’s a complicated sequencing question
and
b) There’s an inherent challenge to all the leading thinkers, and you and Hirsch are good examples, where folks react to the talks and not the books. I’m not sure how to resolve that one, since you can’t cover all the nuance of a book in a talk. Yet the absence of the nuance often leads to conclusions you’d disagree with by audience members.
Interesting post and comments below. It is always a great thing to see intellectual discussion and not bellowing. One thing I would add, is that yes, it is cognitively demanding to do the things that teachers must do to give our world the best chance of being the best place it can be. That is why we must do what we can to a.) give high quality training to teachers that are already in the career field b.) make it harder to be a teacher. We need our best and brightest to want to teach.