I am attending an Evaluator Approval III training workshop at GWAEA and was very impressed with the following information from the work of Tony Wagner as it relates to academic rigor and preparing students for their futures.
Today's
students need to master seven survival skills to thrive in the new world of
work. And these skills are the same ones that will enable students to become
productive citizens who contribute to solving some of the most pressing issues
we face in the 21st century.
1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
To
compete in the new global economy, companies need their workers to think about
how to continuously improve their products, processes, or services. Over and
over, executives told me that the heart of critical thinking and problem
solving is the ability to ask the right questions. As one senior executive from
Dell said, “Yesterday's answers won't solve today's problems.”
2. Collaboration and Leadership
Teamwork
is no longer just about working with others in your building. Christie Pedra,
CEO of Siemens, explained, “Technology has allowed for virtual teams. We have
teams working on major infrastructure projects that are all over the U.S. On
other projects, you're working with people all around the world on solving a software
problem. Every week they're on a variety of conference calls; they're doing Web
casts; they're doing net meetings.”
3. Agility and Adaptability
Clay
Parker explained that anyone who works at BOC Edwards today “has to think, be
flexible, change, and use a variety of tools to solve new problems. We change
what we do all the time. I can guarantee the job I hire someone to do will
change or may not exist in the future, so this is why adaptability and learning
skills are more important than technical skills.”
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Mark
Chandler, senior vice president and general counsel at Cisco, was one of the
strongest proponents of initiative: “I say to my employees, if you try five
things and get all five of them right, you may be failing. If you try 10
things, and get eight of them right, you're a hero. You'll never be blamed for
failing to reach a stretch goal, but you will be blamed for not trying. One of
the problems of a large company is risk aversion. Our challenge is how to
create an entrepreneurial culture in a larger organization.”
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
Mike
Summers of Dell said, “We are routinely surprised at the difficulty some young
people have in communicating: verbal skills, written skills, presentation
skills. They have difficulty being clear and concise; it's hard for them to
create focus, energy, and passion around the points they want to make. If
you're talking to an exec, the first thing you'll get asked if you haven't made
it perfectly clear in the first 60 seconds of your presentation is, ‘What do
you want me to take away from this meeting?’ They don't know how to answer that
question.”
Summers
and other leaders from various companies were not necessarily complaining about
young people's poor grammar, punctuation, or spelling—the things we spend so
much time teaching and testing in our schools. Although writing and speaking
correctly are obviously important, the complaints I heard most frequently were
about fuzzy thinking and young people not knowing how to write with a real
voice.
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
Employees
in the 21st century have to manage an astronomical amount of information daily.
As Mike Summers told me, “There is so much information available that it is
almost too much, and if people aren't prepared to process the information
effectively it almost freezes them in their steps.”
It's
not only the sheer quantity of information that represents a challenge, but
also how rapidly the information is changing. Quick—how many planets are there?
In the early 1990s, I heard then–Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine
say in a speech that the half-life of knowledge in the humanities is 10 years,
and in math and science, it's only two or three years. I wonder what he would
say it is today.
7.
Curiosity and Imagination
Mike
Summers told me, “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.”
Daniel
Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind, observes that with increasing
abundance, people want unique products and services: “For businesses it's no
longer enough to create a product that's reasonably priced and adequately
functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful.” Pink notes that developing young people's capacities for
imagination, creativity, and empathy will be increasingly important for
maintaining the United States' competitive advantage in the future.
Have a great Bobcat Weekend!
