Tony Wagner, A Leader in Twenty-First Century Education

Tony Wagner is serving Harvard University as its first Innovation Educational Fellow within the college’s Technology and Entrepreneurship Center.  Wagner accepted this position after both founding the Change Leadership Group within the Harvard Graduate School of Education and serving as the organization’s co-director for more than a decade.  In addition, Wagner’s experience as a high school teacher, a K-8 principal, a university professor of education, and as the founder and director of Educators for Social Responsibility enable him to provide useful advice and poignant insight to institutions around the world as an educational consultant.

One of Wagner’s most important works is 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 (2008).  Wagner argues that while U.S. educational policy aims at closing the achievement gap between high-performing students and low-performing students (admittedly a praiseworthy goal), the policy fails to teach the skills necessary for success in the twenty first century.  Wagner outlines his “seven survival skills” necessary for success in careers, college, and citizenship:

                1) critical thinking and problem solving;

                2) collaboration across networks and leading by influence;
                3) agility and adaptability;
                4) initiative and entrepreneurialism;
                5) effective oral and written communication;
                6) accessing and analyzing information; and
                7) curiosity and imagination.

If our schools are either unwilling or unable to realign curriculum so the focus becomes the cultivation of these skills within students, then the U.S. will not adequately prepare its citizens to be competitive in the globalized labor market; for while students in California are preoccupied with regurgitating relatively meaningless facts about the Civil War (e.g., specific dates, particular generals, etc.), students in Finland are more likely to study the causes and consequences of all civil war, research and debate the plausibility of alternate courses of action, and work in groups to design web-based nonprofit groups that attempt to positively affect a region experiencing civil strife or civil war.

Want to learn more about Tony Wagner?

Click HERE for a link to a PowerPoint slideshow that summarizes The Global Achievement Gap.

Click HERE to view a Q & A session between Tony Wagner and Kevin Conlon about The Global Achievement Gap.

TED Talk — Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group has identified what he calls a "global achievement gap," which is the distance between what even our best schools are teaching, and the must-have skills of the future:

If you like what you see, click HERE to learn about Tony Wagner’s new book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (2012), or view this trailer:

TEDxNYED, April 28, 2012:  Tony Wagner on innovation.