Tony Wagner on “Beyond Testing: 7 Disciplines for Strengthening the Instruction of Children”

Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Tony Wagner that first appeared in Education Week (November 11, 2003). Don’t let the publication date fool you. If anything, his recommendations are even more urgently needed now than they were then. To read the complete article, please click here.

© Tony Wagner

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With the new requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, and high-stakes accountability tests now in nearly every state, education leaders are under unprecedented pressure to improve student performance. The problem is, many don’t know what to do that is different from what they have always done.

Politicians and media pundits tell us that America’s schools are “failing” and need “reforming.” The implication is that educators once knew how to educate all students to higher standards and have just gotten lazy or forgetful. But after 20 years of reform efforts that have yielded few improvements, it is becoming clear that the overwhelming majority of school and district leaders do not know how to help teachers better prepare all students for the higher learning standards now required for future learning, work, and citizenship in a “knowledge society.”

And so the real challenge in schools today is not just to get more students to pass more tests, but to create new knowledge about how to improve the level of instruction for all students. More testing, alone, will not improve teaching. We must understand clearly all of the elements of a more systemic approach to strengthening teaching in every classroom.

At the Change Leadership Group within Harvard University’s graduate school of education, my colleagues and I work with educators to increase their effectiveness at implementing systemic improvements in their schools and districts. As a part of this effort, we’ve documented the strategies used for improving teaching in those districts that have dramatically raised the level of student achievement for the lowest quartile of students, including those from the most at-risk populations. We have identified seven practices that appear to be central to any successful instructional-improvement effort.

Districts as diverse as Lancaster, Pa., and New York City’s Community School District 2 have been pioneers in the development of these practices, but each has implemented them in its own, unique way. So what we call “The Seven Disciplines for Strengthening Instruction” should not be seen as a blueprint. It is, rather, an outline of both a process and a set of intermediate goals that are most likely to significantly improve student achievement. They are described briefly here:

1. The district creates an understanding and a sense of urgency among teachers and in the community for the necessity of improving all students’ learning, and it regularly reports on progress. Data are disaggregated and are transparent to everyone. Qualitative data (for example, from focus groups and interviews), as well as quantitative data, are used to understand students’ and recent graduates’ experience of school.

Too many districts use either the “hide and seek” approach to data or the reverse—flooding people with so much information that they drown in it. By contrast, Vicki Phillips, when she became the superintendent of Pennsylvania’s Lancaster schools, chose a single piece of data to disseminate throughout the community: the number of students who read at grade level by 4th grade. Then she took students to adult gatherings all over town to dramatize the data. She’d explain that only two out of 10 students in the district left the 4th grade meeting the reading standard. She’d have 10 students standing on stage with her, request that eight of them sit down, and then ask the audience, “Which eight of our students will we leave behind?”

We have found that gathering and sharing qualitative data can often create more urgency for change than numbers alone. When we began working with the West Clermont, Ohio, school district, for example, we conducted several student focus groups, which revealed that students longed for teachers who were more respectful of them and offered more challenging, “hands-on” learning activities. Mark Peters, who was the principal of one of the high schools at the time, tells a dramatic story of his conversion to high school “reinvention” during such a focus group, when one of his most at-risk students demanded: “When is it my turn to get a good teacher like the honors kids get? One who will answer my questions and care about my learning?”

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Tony Wagner recently accepted a position as the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. Prior to this, he was the founder and co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for more than a decade. He consults widely to schools, districts, and foundations around the country and internationally. His previous work experience includes twelve years as a high school teacher, K-8 principal, university professor in teacher education, and founding executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility. He is also a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and a widely published author.

Tony’s latest, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World, has just been published by Simon & Schuster. His recent book, 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 has been a best seller and is being translated into Chinese.  Tony’s other titles include: Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools, Making the Grade: Reinventing America’s Schools, and How Schools Change: Lessons from Three Communities Revisited.  He has also recently collaborated with noted filmmaker Robert Compton to create a 60 minute documentary, “The Finnish Phenomenon: Inside The World’s Most Surprising School System.” He earned an M.A.T. and an Ed.D. at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

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