Education Facelift Needed in New Global Economy, Speaker Tells Moorestown Friends Teachers

Tony Wagner is advocating a monumental undertaking.

The world has changed and what students need to succeed in that new world has changed. But education has not (yet) evolved to meet that new challenge, he told teachers at . “We have to reinvent education for a new century. We cannot teach in the ways that we have been taught and be successful.”

Moorestown Friends has already bought into what Wagner—a former instructor turned author/speaker and recognized nu-education expert—is selling, featuring the themes laid out in his bestselling book, The Global Achievement Gap, prominently in the school’s revised strategic plan.

The key now is how to implement those plans effectively.

“It looks quite good,” Wagner said of the school’s strategic plan. “The challenge is in implementation. The devil is in the details as they say.”

Wagner spent about an hour speaking to and engaging dozens of Moorestown Friends teachers Tuesday afternoon, beginning by laying out his “Seven Survival Skills for Career, College and Citizenship.” Those skills include critical thinking and problem solving (one of the most highly sought-after skills by employers, Wagner said), collaboration, and effective oral and written communication.

The “global achievement gap” Wagner refers to in his book describes “the gap between what our best schools are doing versus the skills all students need … For the most part, these are skills we neither teach nor assess.”

Schools need to nurture innovation, Wagner said, because the only people who will have secure jobs in the new global economy will be the innovators. That means creating collaborative classroom environments, encouraging intrinsic (rather than extrinsic or “carrots and sticks”) motivation, finding out what students are passionate about and, perhaps paradoxically, accepting failure.

“How are we going to teach our kids to take educational risk and to fail, and to learn from failing?” he said.

This last point proved difficult for the teachers to grasp—in so much as they don’t know how to create an environment where failure is acceptable.

“I don’t know how to introduce (failure) to a student body that sees it as a negative and parents that see it as a negative,” said one teacher.

“It’s an interesting and important challenge,” Wagner said.

Parker Curtis, a history teacher at the middle school, said the greatest challenge is getting parents away from a “bottom-line ... focus on grades.”

Another teacher suggested increased collaboration would reduce the likelihood of student failure.

Wagner spoke to Moorestown Friends School parents on Tuesday evening.

It’s important to remember these changes can’t and won’t be made in one fell swoop, said Kristen Makatche, a physical education and health teacher.

“It’s not something you can do all at once,” she said. “It’s the timing issue.”

For more information on Tony Wagner, visit his website.