Tony Wagner

Bio: Tony Wagner is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Academic standards & Accountability. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 13 publications receiving 1462 citations.

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

Abstract: Despite the best efforts of educators, our nations schools are dangerously obsolete. Instead of teaching students to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers, we are asking them to memorize facts for multiple choice tests. This problem isnt limited to low-income school districts: even our top schools arent teaching or testing the skills that matter most in the global knowledge economy. Our teens leave school equipped to work only in the kinds of jobs that are fast disappearing from the American economy. Meanwhile, young adults in India and China are competing with our students for the most sought-after careers around the world. Education expert Tony Wagner has conducted scores of interviews with business leaders and observed hundreds of classes in some of the nations most highly regarded public schools. He discovered a profound disconnect between what potential employers are looking for in young people today (critical thinking skills, creativity, and effective communication) and what our schools are providing (passive learning environments and uninspired lesson plans that focus on test preparation and reward memorization). He explains how every American can work to overhaul our education system, and he shows us examples of dramatically different schools that teach all students new skills. In addition, through interviews with college graduates and people who work with them, Wagner discovers how teachers, parents, and employers can motivate the net generation to excellence. An education manifesto for the twenty-first century, The Global Achievement Gap is provocative and inspiring. It is essential reading for parents, educators, business leaders, policy-makers, and anyone interested in seeing our young people succeed as employees and citizens.

Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools

Abstract: Foreword. Preface. Acknowledgments. About the Authors. ONE: Introduction: Reframing the Problem. A Knowledge Economy Requires New Skills for All Students. Greater Supports for Learning in a Changing Society. Reform or Reinvention? Technical Challenges Versus Adaptive Challenges. Organizational Beliefs and Behaviors. Individual Beliefs and Behaviors. Accepting the Challenge and the Risks:Moving Toward Communities of Practice via Collaborative Learning. PART ONE: Improving Instruction. TWO: Creating a Vision of Success. Challenges to Improving Instruction. Seven Disciplines for Strengthening Instruction. Using the Seven Disciplines. Launching an Instructional Improvement System: The Critical First Conversations. Developing a Shared Vision. Defining a New Framework for Effective Instruction. Linking the New 3 R's of Instruction. THREE: Committing Ourselves to the Challenge. Identifying Your Commitment. Spotting Your Obstacles Through Self-Reflection. Reflections. PART TWO: Why Is This So Hard? FOUR: Generating Momentum for Change. Obstacles to Improvement Versus Momentum for Improvement. Generating the Momentum for Systemic Change. Communities of Practice as a Strategy. FIVE: Exploring Individual Immunities to Change. Attending to Countering Behaviors. A Deeper Look. Finding the Competing Commitment. Taking the Next Step. Reflections. PART THREE: Thinking Systemically. SIX Relating the Parts to the Whole. Arenas of Change. Toward Transformation: Using the 4 C's. Another Use for the 4 C's. SEVEN: The Individual as a Complex System. Hidden Commitments and Personal Immunities. Big Assumptions and Immunities. Reflections. PART FOUR: Working Strategically. EIGHT: The Ecology of Change. Phases of Whole-System Change. Change Levers: Data, Accountability, and Relationships. Strategic Change in Action. Putting the Pieces Together: The Ecology of Educational Transformation. Measuring Success and the Challenge of High-Stakes Test Scores. NINE: Overturning Your Immunities to Change. Steps Toward Individual Change. Considering Steps for the Most Powerful Learning. Phases in Overturning Your Immunities. Becoming Fully Released from Immunities to Change. Reflections. TEN: Conclusion: Bringing the Outward and Inward Focus Together. Hold High Expectations for All Our Students. Involve Building and Central Office Administrators in Instruction. Choose a Priority and Stay Relentlessly Focused on It. Foster a Widespread Feeling of Urgency for Change. Encourage a New Kind of Leader. Develop a New Kind of Administrative Team. Shining a Broader Light on Change. Implications for the Change Leader: Toward Adaptive Work. Concluding ... or Commencing? APPENDIXES. A. Team Exercises. B. Recommended Reading. Index.

Leadership for Learning: An Action Theory of School Change.

Abstract: Today's successful educational leaders understand that they cannot make change alone or by edict, Mr. Wagner notes. They motivate groups to learn and to solve problems together by asking tough questions and naming the big problems while refusing to offer easy answers. I HAVE worked in education for 30 years - as a teacher, principal, teacher educator, and consultant and as head of several nonprofit organizations working with schools. For the past 12 years, I have both studied and facilitated the change process in numerous schools and districts in the U.S. and abroad. I spend most of my weeks working in schools and with various groups concerned about education. This article is an attempt to distill what I have learned about how successful leaders create change in schools - change aimed at improving learning for all students. I call this an "action theory" of change because it is a synthesis of ideas informed by theory but developed primarily from practice - trial and error and disciplined reflection. The theory describes how to create the conditions and capacities for sustaining change, which must be developed before more specific action plans can be considered. The first question that any theory of change should address is: What motivates adults to want to do new and sometimes very difficult things? This question is especially critical in education, as I believe that the temperament, training, and working conditions of most teachers predispose them not to want to change. On the other hand, leaders are often individuals who like change and so see teachers' reluctance to change as sheer stubbornness or indifference. In my experience, most teachers are neither stubborn nor indifferent, but they do resist change for reasons that leaders must understand. Three of the most common factors contributing to teachers' resistance are risk aversion, "craft" expertise, and autonomy and isolation. Risk Aversion Historically, most people have entered the teaching profession because it promises a high degree of order, security, and stability. In my experience, most educators are risk-averse by temperament, while many who thrive in the business world are risk-seekers. (I believe this fundamental difference in temperament is one reason why the two groups generally do not understand or even like each other, and this lack of understanding and communication contributes greatly to the absence of a more thoughtful, balanced dialogue about educational improvement.) The training and working conditions of most teachers have only reinforced this risk aversion. Schools of education foster docility with too many lecture courses and too few opportunities for problem solving and original thinking, and school district leadership rewards compliance rather than creativity and initiative. The educational "fads of the month" that have swept through schools for the past 30 years have served to reinforce the belief of many teachers that innovations are the fleeting fancy of leaders who are here today and gone tomorrow - and so are not to be believed. 'Craft' Expertise In traditional cultures, many individuals worked alone as farmers and craftsmen. Historically, education has also been a "craftsman's" trade - attracting people who enjoy working alone and take great pride in developing a degree of expertise and in perfecting "handcrafted products." For many teachers, their special units or courses - on Native Americans, Shakespeare, Advanced Placement (AP) biology - represent expertise they have developed over years and are sources of enormous pride. Teachers' greatest sense of job satisfaction often derives from introducing just a few students to their "craft." Teachers have told me that asking them to give up teaching such units would be like telling them to cut out a part of what makes them unique as human beings. And many perceive the call to create uniform standards as a demand that everyone teach the same thing in the same way. …

Change as Collaborative Inquiry: A Constructivist Methodology for Reinventing Schools.

Abstract: To make the implementation of higher standards a reality for most children, we must develop a new practice of "whole-school" change that is consistent with our understanding of how learning takes place and how organizations change, Mr. Wagner asserts. For the last several years, the big push in education reform has been to develop new, more rigorous state and district standards for learning. While the debate continues to rage in many communities over the exact nature and extent of these standards, as well as over how they will be assessed, it seems that we may have reached some kind of national consensus that there will be standards. For now, at least, many educational leaders have come to believe that the need to monitor progress toward genuine equality of educational opportunity and achievement outweighs the danger that the standards movement will simply lead to more of the same: more "coverage" of the same stale Carnegie-unit curriculum and more use of the same standardized tests for accountability purposes. So much for the easy part. The development of new learning standards was a fairly simple matter in comparison to what it will take to actually implement them. The adoption of new standards does not answer the question of how we make the necessary changes that will enable all students to achieve at higher levels and meet the new learning standards. Most approaches to systemic education reform are rooted in obsolete, top-down or expert-driven management beliefs and practices that reflect neither what we know about how people learn nor what we have come to understand about how organizations change.' To make the implementation of higher standards a reality for most children, we must develop a new practice of "whole-school" change that is consistent with our understanding of how learning takes place and how organizations change. We must connect our means and our ends. We need to create a methodology for a more collaborative, "constructivist" process of change in schools and districts, if we are to develop what Peter Senge calls a "learning organization." Since 1988 I have been studying and helping with the change process in K-12 public and independent schools in the U.S. and Brazil. Initially, I worked as a researcher and an independent consultant, but since 1994 I have headed a team from the Institute for Responsive Education that is working on whole-school change with clusters of K-12 schools in seven low-income communities around the country. In our work with our partner schools, we are developing new, "constructivist" approaches to whole-school change. Our methodology contrasts sharply with more conventional practices in each of the four stages of the change process, as I have outlined them in earlier work: 1) defining the problem, 2) developing the goals of change, 3) implementing change strategies, and 4) assessing results.(2) We are also coming to understand the new kind of leadership required in a successful school change process. Defining the Problem: 'Failure' Versus Obsolescence Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, a growing and increasingly shrill chorus of business and political leaders (Democrats and Republicans alike) and of national and local media has reached virtual consensus on one thing: U.S. schools are failing. You read it or hear it nearly every day in the media. This analysis of the problem, while lending itself to dramatic pronouncements, is fundamentally wrong and is a serious impediment to change in schools. By most objective criteria, American public schools are doing a better job than they were 25 years ago: a greater number of students - both white and minority - are graduating from high school, taking the SAT 1, and attending college.(3) Our schools are not failing. They continue to do exactly what they were designed to do nearly a hundred years ago: they sort out a small percentage of students to be prepared for further learning and for professional and managerial jobs, while giving the remaining students the minimal skills needed for manual labor or assembly-line work. …

Making the Grade: Reinventing America's Schools

Abstract: Introduction: What's really wrong with our schools? 1. How has the world changed for children? 2. What do today's students need to know? 3. How do we hold students and schools accountable? 4. What do 'Good' schools look like? 5. What must leaders do?

Teachers’ Professional Community in Restructuring Schools

Abstract: Professional community among teachers, the subject of a number of recent major studies, is regarded as an ingredient that may contribute to the improvement of schools. The research reported in this article is grounded in the assumption that how teachers interact with each other outside of their classrooms may be critical to the effects of restructuring on students. The analysis focuses on the type of professional community that occurs within a school and investigates both the organizational factors that facilitate its development and its consequences for teachers’ sense of responsibility for student learning. The findings suggest that wide variation in professional community exists between schools, much of which is attributable to both structural features and human resources characteristics, as well as school level. Implications for current school reform efforts are discussed.

Whither Opportunity?: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances

Abstract: This pioneering volume casts a stark light on the ways rising inequality may now be compromising schools’ functioning, and with it the promise of equal opportunity in America.

Enhancing interest and performance with a utility value intervention.

Abstract: We tested whether a utility value intervention (via manipulated relevance) influenced interest and performance on a task and whether this intervention had different effects depending on an individual's performance expectations or prior performance. Interest was defined as triggered situational interest (i.e., affective and emotional task reactions) and maintained situational interest (i.e., inclination to engage in the task in the future). In 2 randomized experiments, 1 conducted in the laboratory and the other in a college classroom, utility value was manipulated through a writing task in which participants were asked to explain how the material they were learning (math or psychology) was relevant to their lives (or not). The intervention increased perceptions of utility value and interest, especially for students who were low in expected (laboratory) or actual (classroom) performance. Mediation analyses revealed that perceptions of utility value explained the effects of the intervention on interest and predicted performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Does Entrepreneurship Education Really Work? A Review and Methodological Critique of the Empirical Literature on the Effects of University‐Based Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract: Does entrepreneurship education (E‐ed) really work to create business enterprise? We conducted a comprehensive review and methodological critique of the empirical research on the outcomes of univer...