Parent Community Book Talk Global Achievement Gap

1. Woodward Academy
North Campus
One Book,
One Community:
Global Achievement
Gap,
by Tony Wagner
October 23, 2014
***As you settle in for our meeting, please take a moment
to complete the ½ page found on your chair. We will be
using this in our discussion this morning.

2. Introductions
-name
-children & grade

3. "... I have observed that the longer our
children are in school, the less curious they
become. Effective communication,
curiosity, and critical thinking skills, as we
will see, are much more than just the
traditional desirable outcomes of a liberal
arts education. They are essential
competencies and habits of mind for life in
the 21st century."
- Wagner, The Global Achievement Gap (p xxiii)

4. “I worry about the future of science in
this country. For kids to get passionate
about science, they have to get their
hands dirty, literally, and learn to
observe…not just memorize facts from a
textbook. The kids who take my intro
lab have gotten top scores on all the AP
science courses, but they don’t know
how to observe, they want to know what
they should be looking for and what the
right answer is.”
Jonathan King, MIT professor of molecular
biology, Global Achievement Gap p. 7

5. ”A Harris Interactive survey of 2,001
U.S. college students and 1,000 hiring
managers last fall found that 69% of
students felt they were “very or
completely prepared” for problem-solving
tasks in the workplace, while
fewer than half of the employers
agreed.”
Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22, 2014

6. Per Wagner, The "Global Achievement Gap" is
the gap between what even our best schools are
teaching and testing
-VS-The
skills all students will need for careers,
college, and citizenship in the 21st century.
Do you agree that there is a
“Global Achievement Gap?”

8. 1. Critical Thinking & Problem-solving
2. Collaboration Across Networks
& Leading by Influence
3. Agility & Adaptability
4. Initiative & Entrepreneurialism
5. Effective Oral & Written Communication
6. Accessing & Analyzing Information
7. Curiosity & Imagination

9. HOW do we talk to our kids?
"What the teacher does is the means by which
the students learn -- not the end… I have
consistently found that the kinds of questions
students are asked and the extent to which a
teacher challenges students to explain their
thinking or expand on their answers are reliable
indicators of the level of intellectual rigor in a
class."
(Wagner, pp 52-53)

10. Guided by the Academy mission and vision statement,
Woodward has looked very closely at what and how we
teach for today’s learner and today’s world!
We focus on both hard and soft skills, with a new emphasis
on modeling and teaching
-the 4 C’s (collaboration, communication, critical
thinking, and creativity)
-developing an inherent love of learning
-developing a global view
-resilience
-flexibility and agility
-passion

11. Thank you, Shelley Paul, Woodard
Academy Director of Learning Design, for
for sharing your resources and creative
content which was used in part for this
presentation.