Book Summary, Notes & Highlights

This book helped me understand why today's education is failing. How we should rethink teaching and learning, to rebuild the future of education and schools for our young generation. Tip: 7 Skills for fixing the education Systems

Read more on Amazon

The gaps

• quality of schooling that most middle-class kids get in America and the quality of schooling available for most poor and minority children—and the consequent disparity in results.

• the gap between what even our best suburban, urban, and rural public schools are teaching and testing versus what all students will need to succeed as learners, workers, and citizens in today’s global knowledge economy

As a country, we’ve been striving to close the first achievement gap by bringing our poorest schools up to the standards of our middle-class schools—mainly through increased testing and greater accountability for progress, as measured by the tests. However, it has become increasingly clear to me that even in these “good” schools, students are simply not learning the skills that matter most for the twenty-first century

the quality of teachers’ preparation, continuing professional development, and supervision is very low in our nation’s schools—a problem

all of the state tests for which teachers have to prepare students are computer-scored, multiple-choice assessments of factual recall.

• no strong evidence that any of the Seven Survival Skills are being taught at any grade level in American public schools.

• focused on teaching only the skills and content that will be tested

• not making any progress toward solving the very problem the No Child Left Behind law

• 87% of 8- to 17-year-olds play videogames,

• 75% of online teens use instant messaging (IM)

• 75% of adolescents spend two to three hours per day downloading or listening to music online

• Teens do use computers for research and other schoolwork, but their primary use of their computers is for entertainment

• Young people also use the Internet as a serious tool both for creating and for disseminating their artistic work.

• 90% of 1st, 3rd, 5th graders time spend on seating and listening to the teacher or working alone

• only 7% of their time working in groups

• More than 60% of 5th grade students time was spent on improving basic literacy or math skills

• less than 25% of their time was devoted to science and social studies.

• 5th grader received 5x as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem solving or reasoning. this ratio was 10:1 in 1st and 3rd grades

About the research

• over 100 learning walks in dozens of school districts in order to train administrators to be instructional leaders. This Tests where taking place a high performing school with teachers, leaders with the willingness to learn and improve. Not the schools the researches know they will fail for many years

• National Institutes of Health, this is one of the largest studies of its kind. Researchers observed more than 2,500 1st, 3rd, and 5th grade classes in more than 1,000 schools, spread across 400 predominantly middle-class public school districts.

Learning walks

is one way to essentially audit what’s taking place in a group of classes in a given period of time. If you spend ten minutes or so in eight to ten classes over several hours (along with district or school administrators and teacher leaders who may accompany you), you have a snapshot of the teaching and learning that take place in that school. It’s obviously not a way to evaluate individual teachers or an entire course, but this kind of sampling detects patterns within and across schools.

• The longing for more meaningful work and the desire for a different kind of relationship with adults were recurring themes among the young people

• Motivating young people to do their best in school today requires teachers to rethink what and how they teach as well

• We truly have to rethink the concept of who a teacher is and what a teacher does: the teacher as facilitator versus information dictator.

• Need mentoring, coaching, a different kind of relationship with their teachers. Kids say

  • “I need a teacher I can really talk to,”

  • “And not just about school things, but things going on in my life.”

  • “I want to know that a teacher cares about me,”

• Motivation by asking „ where do you want to be in 5 years?“

• listen to what kids do in their free time and then try very hard to figure out how to get students from where they are to where they need to be

• teaching through the use of questions = develops students’ abilities to ask good questions, play with ideas, reason, weigh evidence, and communicate clearly

• We knock creativity out of kids, with our focus on memorization, teaching to the test, and making them learn things that they don’t have to. Because of the web, they don’t have to memorize all of what we used to memorize.

• In the age of the Internet, using new information to solve new problems matters more than recalling old information.

If a teacher ask a school kid a question they can google in a few minutes, the teacher has failed, not the children

• They want their boss to take the time to get to know them and to treat them more like an equals

• make the classroom walls transparent. We have to do ‘learning walks’ together and talk about what we see. We have to videotape ourselves and one another—not just in our classrooms but in our coaching sessions with teachers and even in our meetings. We need to talk about elements of good practice and then strategies for helping everyone in the system improve every year.

• To better understand how young people today are differently motivated, we need to see that they’re growing up in an environment that is radically different from previous generations. In the simplest terms, they are coming of age while tethered to the Internet, as well as to a host of instant communication devices that were unimaginable twenty years ago — We need to accept that fact. Meet children where they are right now

• young people long for today are not just with the information and games. They also crave a constant connection to others. Young people are growing up today with an astounding number of tools for communicating with friends and making new ones.

• 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

come to understand that there is a core set of survival skills for today’s workplace, as well as for lifelong learning and active citizenship—skills that are neither taught nor tested even in our best school systems.

Work is no longer defined by your specialty; it’s defined by the task or problem you and your team are trying to solve or the end goal you want to accomplish.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

asking good questions, critical thinking, and problem solving go hand in hand in the minds of most employers and business consultants

Teams have to figure out the best way to get there—the solution is not prescribed. And so the biggest challenge for our front-line employees is having the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills they need to be effective in their teams—because nobody is there telling them exactly what to do. They have to figure it out.”

Critical-thinking skills include the ability to apply abstract knowledge to solve a problem and to develop and execute a solution—the ability to think broadly and deeply. It means having and using a framework for problem-identification—assumptions and facts, acquiring information, viewing alternative solutions. Another part of critical thinking is surrounding yourself with people who have differences of opinion and who can help you come to the best solution: team-based leadership.

Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence

How will corporations respond to workers who add value by creating better products and services, but who also demand more corporate responsibility? Can critical-thinking skills be “compartmentalized”—selectively turned on and off or applied only to certain problems? I doubt it. Or will critical and questioning voices be stifled in corporations, in ways that we do not yet understand? Or might these voices increasingly become the conscience of corporations in the future?

Example

indeed, GM had encouraged more active discussion of what products it should be making, instead of attending to short-term shareholder returns, it might be in a far more competitive position today. It’s interesting to note that Toyota, which is expected to surpass GM in 2008 as the largest car maker in the world, is a company widely known for more actively and intentionally involving employees in decisions about how to improve its products than any other. (Its method is called the “Toyota Production System,” which we’ll learn more about later.) And Toyota is a global leader not only in profits and quality but also in the development of hybrid cars and other “green” technologies. I wonder if greater employee involvement leads to a stronger sense of corporate citizenship?

Agility and Adaptability

New world of work is complex. shift from a hierarchal authority that tells you what to do to a team-based environment has been both rapid and profound. Similarly, the intensifying rate of change, the overwhelming amount of data, and the increasing complexity of problems that individuals and teams face every day in their work are dramatic new challenges for everyone in the organization.

“People’s jobs change very rapidly. I’ve been at Dell a long time in similar sales and marketing functions—but what I do today versus what I did five or six years ago is completely different. To survive, you have to be flexible and adaptable and a lifelong learner — Karen Bruett

agility and adaptability are important in improving both quality and productivity in assembly-line jobs as well. “Today’s employees must adapt to change; they can’t be satisfied with the status quo,” he said. “If we did 20,000 cases on the line today, why can’t we do 21,000 tomorrow? — Mark Maddox

West Point, “We’ve added an integrative experience where cadets have to demonstrate that they can present leadership skills to solve problems in a changing and uncertain world.” “You have to be able to take in all sorts of new information, new situations, and be able to operate in ambiguous and unpredictable ways“— Rob Gordon

Initiative and Entrepreneurialism

“we need self-directed people who . . . can . . . find creative solutions to some very tough, challenging problems.” — Mark Maddox from Unilever

Effective Oral and Written Communication

ability to express one’s views clearly in a democracy and to communicate effectively across cultures is an important

curiosity as an essential element of critical thinking.

“People who’ve learned to ask great questions and have learned to be inquisitive are the ones who move the fastest in our environment because they solve the biggest problems in ways that have the most impact on innovation.” — Mark Summers

Algebra II. It is the beginning of the period, and the teacher is finishing up writing a problem on the board. He turns to the students, who are sitting in desk-chairs that are arranged in squares of four that face one another. “You haven’t seen this kind of problem before,” he explains. “And solving it will require you to use concepts from both geometry and algebra.

Each group will try to develop at least two different ways of solving this problem. After all the groups have finished, I’ll randomly choose someone from each group who will write one of your proofs on one of the boards around the room, and I’ll ask that person to explain the process your group used. Are there any questions?” There are none, and the groups quickly go to work. There is a great deal of animated discussion within all of the groups as they take the problem apart and talk about different ways to solve it.

While they work, the teacher circulates from group to group. Occasionally, a student will ask a question, but the teacher never answers it. Instead, he either asks another question in response, such as “Have you considered . . .?” or “Why did you assume that?” or simply “Have you asked someone in your group?” What are some of the design elements that make this an effective lesson—a lesson in which students are, in fact, learning a number of the Seven Survival Skills, while also mastering academic content? First, students are given

complex, multi-step problem that is different from the ones they’ve seen in the past and, to solve

Mere memorization won’t get them very far in this lesson; critical-thinking and problem-solving skills are required.

Just getting the correct answer isn’t good enough; they have to explain their proofs—using effective communication skills.

Third, the teacher does not spoon-feed students the answers; he uses questions to push students’ thinking—as well as the limits to their tolerance for ambiguity. Finally, because the teacher has said that he’ll randomly call on a student to show how the group solved the problem,

each student in every group is held accountable. The group can’t rely on the work of one or two students to get by,

and the teacher isn’t going to just call on the first student to raise a hand or shout out an answer. Teamwork is required for success.