TONY WAGNER SPEAKS ABOUT CREATING INNOVATORS

BY YADA – CLASS OF 2014

–Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind

“If you are an educator, a parent of a child struggling with conventional education, or an employer looking to have a pipeline of creative talent, then read this book, take note of the ideas and play your part in creating the change we must make happen.”

–Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

A pioneering and invaluable work about what it really takes to build innovation capability in society – by planting and cultivating innovators, one person at a time.

–John Kao, Chairman, Institute for Large Scale innovation and author of Innovation Nation

Many have written about the paucity of innovation in America. Others have chronicled our schools’ struggles to improve on dimensions of skills that matter. In this book, Wagner has positioned himself astride these critical challenges in a way that clarifies what we must do to address these problems, and how we can do it – making this a must-read for anyone interested in the education of our nation.

–Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School, and author, Disrupting Class.

In the equation of world success, superior innovation is the only factor that can keep America #1.  Two passionate citizens, innovators in their own right, have produced a compelling prescription for our time.  Read it, watch it, and spread the word.

–Mitch Daniels, Governor, State of Indiana

In my life I have met and worked with individuals who help create the world they live in—innovators. Their lives are so much more fulfilling than people who live in a world of someone else’s creation. This book, in a clear, tangible way, explores how to help young people access skills of innovation and lead richer lives.”

–Brad Anderson, former CEO, Best Buy Corporation

“To combat the competitive threat from economies like Brazil, Russia, India and China, we must develop empowered entrepreneurs and innovators. Creating Innovators is a masterful work that shows us how.  Tony Wagner’s case studies reveal more about these fine innovators than he may have realized.  World leaders, business executives, educators, policy makers and parents, take note!”

–Dr. Annmarie Neal Founder — Center for Leadership Innovation and Former Chief Talent Officer, Cisco Systems

“This is the best book on creating entrepreneurs that I have ever read. Tony Wagner nails the future, and shows what it looks like today.”

–Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus, OISE/University of Toronto

“In just the click of a mouse, we left the Industrial Age for the Information Age. Now just as quickly, we find ourselves in a new age of our society and economy; the “Innovation Age.” Tony Wagner and Bob Compton have provided a powerful tool for parents, educators and students seeking success in this new society and economy.  In short, innovation must be taught if our children are to be competitive in a global economy.  To meet this need, educators must see what an innovative education looks like.”

–Dr. Tony Bennett, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction

The 21st Century will be global, dynamic, and fiercely competitive.  In Creating Innovators, Tony Wagner offers an indispensable guide to US education and economic strategy.  Unless young Americans can create their own jobs, they face the prospect of limited economic opportunity.  In delving into remarkable initiatives that foster innovation and deep learning, Mr. Wagner shows the way forward for our entire education system — and offers hope that the US can retain global economic leadership in the 21st Century.  This book is a must for every parent, teacher, administrator, and policy-maker in our country.

–Ted Dintersmith, Partner Emeritus, Charles River Ventures

Boston-area college students increasingly see their classes as a minor nuisance and rarely the place where their most important learning happens. As David Sengeh, (Harvard, class of 2010) recently told me, “I don’t remember a thing from my undergraduate classes — except for Spanish. Everything I learned that I value came from my experiences and mentors out of class.”

All students must learn to become innovators in order to find interesting, well-paying work. Education for innovation is also critical to the economic future of our country. Students who lack the capacity to bring innovation to their work will see the jobs they have rapidly being off-shored or automated. At the same time, more and more of this millennial generation want to make a difference in the world, a major reason why many of today’s students see their classes as irrelevant. Students today want to learn things that will enable them to make a difference in the world.

In my recent research, I have found some college and graduate schools that are educating young people to be innovators — places like Olin College, the Media Lab at MIT, and the Institute of Design at Stanford. The culture of learning in these highly successful and very popular programs is consistent. No matter which one you visit, you see very similar practices in teaching and learning, but these practices are radically at odds with the culture of learning in most of academia:

Individual Achievement versus Collaboration: Schooling in America ranks and sorts students according to their levels of achievement, as measured by tests and grades. Serious, sustained collaboration is not an expectation, for students or faculty. Not so the aforementioned schools, where there is an understanding that collaboration is essential for innovation. Every class requires forms of teamwork and collaboration, and learning how to collaborate is one of the most-valued educational outcomes.

Specialization versus Multi-Disciplinary Learning: To be clear: there is and will always be an important role for specialists and
specialization. But learning to innovate requires crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to solve a problem or create something new. Most of the courses in the three programs I highlight are interdisciplinary; at Olin, nearly half of the students create their own interdisciplinary majors.

Risk Avoidance versus Trial and Error: The most innovative companies embrace failure as part of the process. But it is the rare college class that genuinely encourages students to take intellectual risks, and which encourages learning from — rather than penalizing — failure. Olin and MIT’s Media Lab students, on the other hand, have been taught to view trial and error — and failure — as an integral part of the process of problem solving.

Consuming versus Creating: Learning in most conventional education settings is overwhelmingly passive. The college experience for
students in most courses consists of listening to lectures. In classes at Olin, the primary goal is not the acquisition of knowledge but to develop a set of skills in the process of solving a problem, creating a product, or generating a new understanding. Students retain more of what they learn because they have studied and used the knowledge in an applied context.

Extrinsic versus Intrinsic Motivation: Conventional academic classes rely on extrinsic incentives as motivators for learning; students learn in order to get good grades or high GPAs. But Olin’s founders and teachers understand that the desire to innovate is not primarily driven by extrinsic incentives – and courses at Olin provide numerous and varied intrinsic incentives for learning.

The question for higher education is whether they can embrace these innovations in learning in order to help their students learn to be the innovators they want to be — and that our future needs them to be.

From a prominent educator, author, and founder of Harvard’s Change Leadership Group comes a provocative look at why innovation is today’s most essential real-world skill and what young people need from parents, teachers, and employers to become the innovators of America’s future.

I N  T H I S  G R OU N D B R E A K I N G  B O O K , education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. In profiling compelling young American innovators  such as Kirk Phelps, product manager for Apple’s first iPhone, and Jodie Wu, who founded a company that builds bicycle-powered maize shellers in Tanzania, Wagner reveals how the adults in their lives nurtured their creativity and sparked their imaginations, while teaching them to learn from failures and persevere. Wagner identifies a pattern—a childhood of creative play leads  to deep-seated interests, which in adolescence and adulthood blossom into a deeper purpose for career and life goals. Play, passion, and purpose: these are the forces that drive young innovators.

Wagner then looks more widely at the education system and shows how we can apply this knowledge as educators and what parents can do to compensate for poor schooling. He takes readers into the most forward-thinking  schools, colleges, and workplaces in the country, where teachers  and employers  are developing cultures of innovation based on collabora- tion, interdisciplinary problem-solving, and intrinsic motivation. The result  is a timely, provocative and inspiring manifesto that will change how we look at our schools and workplaces, and provide us with a road map to creating the change makers of tomorrow.

Creating Innovators will not just be a book about innovation.  It will be innovative in its format, as well.  Noted filmmaker Bob Compton, who teamed up with Tony to make “The Finland Phenomenon,” has produced more than 60 original videos that expand on key ideas and passages in the book through interviews with young innovators, their parents, teachers, mentors, and senior executives from some of the world’s most innovative companies; footage taken in highly innovative schools and companies, like IDEO, is also included in the book.  These short 1-2 minute videos will be embedded in the e-book and also accessible in the print version by scanning QR codes that will be placed throughout the book.  Sample videos and a book trailer will be available on this website prior to the book’s publication in April.
You can watch a presentation by Tony about this book and the connection to his earlier work here.

Buy the book

Buy the ebook

May. 2 2011 – 5:27 pm

By E.D. KAIN

The Finland Phenomenon, from documentary filmmaker, Bob Compton, follows Dr. Tony Wagner through Finland’s extraordinary school system. It’s a short, to-the-point documentary, but it had quite an effect on me, if only because it illustrates so succinctly why our recent approach to education reform is so wrong-headed.

In Finland there are no standardized tests. In fact, there is really very little testing at all. Finnish teachers are not monitored or rated based on test scores, and teachers (as well as their students) have a great deal of autonomy. It is a system built on trust, and the film really drives home the notion that trust – rather than faux accountability – leads to real results, leads to teachers and students and members of government all wanting to live up to the trust given to them rather than simply scraping by.

But trust is something that a society has to work at, and that is tied inextricably to demographics, population size, and history. And the United States simply doesn’t compare to Finland on the trust scale:

To be honest, I finished the film feeling a bit angry – angry that for all the talk of school-choice in our current education debate, the choices available to me and to my children (not to mention the countless people far less fortunate than myself) are really false choices. No matter whether you attend a public school or a charter, you are really bound to the modern testing regime. And if you’re poor you are very likely bound to end up in a bad school, unless you are one of the lucky few that manages to get into one of the really stellar charter schools.

The problem, I think, with the current conception of charter schools is that they create even more losers and winners than the status quo. In Finland there is a certain base-level of quality that every school is require to meet. Teachers are treated as professionals and teaching is an exclusive, competitive field. All students have free transportation and free meals.

Every school is staffed by excellent teachers, and teaching is a profession that excellent people want to enter. Teaching is a life-long career, unlike American schools where 50% of teachers drop-out before five years. Finnish teachers follow a basic national curriculum, but are free to develop their own and use their own teaching methods. They also work as mentors with newer and student teachers.

In America, we have nothing even close to this level of commitment to our poorest students. In the modern reform system and in the old status quo, money flows up to the top and rarely trickles back down. This is represented also in our lack of commitment to vocational education. The Finland Phenomenon illustrates the extraordinary effort the Finnish school system has placed in its vocational track. Fully 40% of Finnish students forego the academic track to learn a skill in their high school years. And these are not under-funded shop classes, but rather high-tech, hands-on classrooms taught by industry professionals who are also teaching professionals.

I’d heard of the successes of Finland’s schools before, but this film really highlighted the gap in vision between Finland and the United States. At the same time, it revealed a certain common ground that I think is important. Unlike the strict, uniform approach to education you might find in a country like Japan, Finland emphasizes a more free-wheeling, creative, and self-driven approach to teaching and learning. These are all qualities Americans have in spades. We should capitalize on those qualities, not subvert them by testing everything to death.

If we can draw one lesson from the film, it is that America has the right DNA for a phenomenal education system, we just haven’t tapped into it yet. Finland has, and so can we.

Finland is the highest performing education system in the world, and in the Spring of 2010, Tony was invited by the Finland National Board of Education to share his ideas on the new skills all students need today. Bob Compton, executive producer of the highly acclaimed education documentary, “2 Million Minutes,” sent a film crew with Tony and shadowed him as he consulted to senior officials, visited schools and teacher training programs, and talked to teachers, parents, and students. The resulting 60 minute video, “The Finnish Phenomenon: Inside The World’s Most Surprising School System,” had its world premiere on March 24 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The New York Times journalist, Thomas Friedman, and other distinguished panelists discussed the video after its showing. The DVD also contains bonus material, including a video of a keynote Tony gave at the Asia Society conference in 2009.  You can view the trailer here, and you can buy a copy of the video here.

The video link below is a 30 minute keynote Tony gave at the Asia Society summer conference. As of February 2011, it had been viewed more than 75,000 times on YouTube. It will be most useful for teacher and administrator audiences.

Asia Society Keynote

You can go to this link to see a series of short videos for school board members, administrators, teachers, and legislators that Tony taped in the fall of 2010 for the Iowa’s Future Project.

http://www.iowafuture.org/toolkit/

This is a link to the September 2009 Iowa Public Television broadcast of the opening to Tony’s day-long session with Iowa educators, policymakers, and parents. It represents the most complete, yet concise (55 minute) video presentation on the Global Achievement Gap and what educators and policymakers can do to address the problem. It includes an introduction by Judy Jeffrey, Director of the Iowa Department of Education, and questions from the audience.

http://www.iptv.org/video/detail.cfm/5189/ittv_20091011_172/format:wmv

This is a video of a 45 minute keynote speech Tony gave at the Council of Chief State School Officers’ Summer Institute. It will be of greatest interest to state education leaders and state and national policymakers.

http://ccsso.kzoinnovations.com/plugins/webcast/form.php?id=541

Below is a video of the first four minutes of Tony’s recent keynote at the International Conference on Corporate Citizenship.

Watch a forty minute interview with Tony, produced at Cisco Systems and moderated by Bill Symonds, former Education Editor for Businessweek Magazine.

http://tools.cisco.com/cmn/jsp/index.jsp?id=85895

Tony recently conducted a series of focus groups with high school students and recent high school graduates for the Highline School District, outside of Seattle, WA. In this moving video, successful and struggling students and graduates talk about their school experiences and what they need from teachers in order to be successful. Available for viewing here.