JPGB Enters the 21st Century

October 1, 2010

You may have noticed some changes on the Jay P. Greene’s Blog.  We’ve added buttons on each post so that readers can share them easily via Facebook and Twitter.  We’ve also established a page on Facebook so that readers can follow our posts by “liking” the blog’s page.  And we’ve established a Twitter account so that people can follow our posts that way.

Watch out, Tony Wagner!  We’re getting all 21st century-skillsy around here.

1 Comment | blogging | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

More 21st Century Skills

September 14, 2009

I’ve written before about Tony Wagner and the 21st Century Skills movement, here, here, here, and here.  My colleague Sandra Stotsky has an excellent review in the current issue of The Weekly Standard of Tony Wagner’s book, The Global Achievement Gap.

Here’s the money quote:

It is disingenuous to imply that the development of analytical thinking and effective oral and written communication (goals of the lyceum in ancient Greece) are new to the 21st century. American education schools and their satellite networks of professional development providers heavily promoted such “21st-century skills” as critical thinking, problem solving, and small group work throughout the 20th century.
 
If our teaching corps hasn’t yet been able to figure out how to translate these buzzwords into effective classroom lessons, what does this tell us about the teaching skills of our very expensive standing army of teacher-educators, either to prepare teachers properly in the first place or to get them up to snuff after they’ve failed in the field?…
 
Evidence-free rhetoric in support of reducing academic content in the schools, diluting academic standards for K-12, and eliminating large-scale academic testing, has found a receptive audience across the country among those who don’t want any form of real accountability. Unfortunately, the valuable skills misidentified as 21st-century skills cannot be taught and assessed without a strong emphasis on academic substance, standards, and objective assessments–as academic researchers know.
 
Wagner is the latest in a long line of educational pied pipers leading an uncritical and growing mass of school administrators and teachers into a curricular wilderness. And this latest book is just the current manifestation of the goal driving most of our education schools and professional development providers–how to reduce the academic content of the curriculum while claiming to enhance it–this time in the name of closing the “gap,” or providing worker bees for this century’s employers.

1 Comment | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Post-Apocalyptic 21st Century Skills

March 4, 2009

I can’t figure out how to embed this, but it is well worth clicking on the link.  The Onion does a news analysis of the real skills our children will need for the post-apocalyptic 21st century.  One analyst emphasizes the need for basic skills, like how to collect water from the morning dew in human skulls.

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/are_violent_video_games

UPDATE:  Here it is embedded:

4 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Wagner and the Wisdom of Tevye

February 17, 2009

Townsperson: Why should I break my head about the outside world?  Let the outside world break its own head….

Tevye: He is right…

Perchik: Nonsense. You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.

Tevye: He’s right.

Rabbi’s pupil: He’s right, and he’s right.  They can’t both be right!

Tevye:  (Pause). You know, you are also right.

 

Fiddler on the Roof is coming to Fayetteville (the Ozark center of Yiddishkeit) in May.  But it felt like Fiddler arrived early with Tony Wagner’s visit yesterday to promote his 21st Century Skills (TM) concept.  People asked him a variety of questions and as it turns out, they were all right.

 

My colleague Gary Ritter commented that Wagner’s anecdotes sounded more like examples of bad teaching than of a bad curriculum.  You’re right, Wagner replied.  There is also bad teaching out there.

 

A student questioned his lack of empirical evidence to support his claims.  You’re right, Wagner replied.  He admitted to lacking quantitative evidence but said he was a qualitative researcher.

 

Stuart Buck noted that in the book Wagner profiled 3 schools that ignored the state tests, taught in a way they believed best, and still did very well on those exams.  So is the problem really with accountability testing?  You’re right, Wagner replied.  The problem is in the unnecessary over-reaction of risk-averse educators.

 

A math professor asked about whether too much content was really the problem.  You’re right, Wagner replied.  He’s not against content and agrees that content is essential for developing his 7 essential skills (TM).

 

It didn’t really seem to matter if his answers contradicted claims he made in the book or even ten minutes earlier in his presentation.  In the end, everyone was right and he was for everything people suggested.  He was for accountability testing (as long as it was done right).  He was for academic content (as long as it was the right amount and on the right stuff).  He was for teaching to the test (if the test was a good one). 

 

The quick, confident answers and the futuristic jargon may have wowed some, but it left me and many others a bit bewildered.  He can’t be for all these things.

 

Happily there is a video record of his lecture.  It’s actually from his web site, but it is almost identical to the lecture that he gave at least three times yesterday to different audiences.  Notice that in minute 20 he clearly says that our kids don’t need content; they need “competencies.”  And the best part of watching this video on the web is that it is free as opposed to the $20,000-$25,000 consulting fee that Fayetteville schools paid him for more or less the same thing.

See: http://www.schoolchange.org/videos/the_global_achievement_gap_video.html 

7 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene