Thoughts from (co)lab Summit: How do we foster innovation in schools?

This past Sunday and Monday I was fortunate to attend the (co)lab Collaborative Leadership Summit.  Billed as a “summit, where today’s executives and tomorrow’s leaders from our business, education and civic communities connect, communicate and collaborate on issues vital to a thriving Atlanta region”, (co)lab featured a variety of speakers within three different “strands”: attracting and retaining talent, cultivating innovation, and transforming education.  For obvious reasons, I stuck with the transforming education strand during the summit and was struck by some common threads among many of the speakers.

Tony Wagner, a former school teacher and principal and now a member of the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, spoke of his work with major business leaders to identify what they consider to be the seven most critical skills for students to possess when they graduate from school:

  • Critical thinking and problem solving
  • Collaboration across networks
  • Agility and adaptability
  • Initiative and entrepreneurship
  • Effective oral and written communication
  • Accessing and analyzing information
  • Curiosity and imagination

Wagner made clear that most schools at the K-12 level do not effectively develop these skills in students, in large part, he said, because standardized test-based accountability systems discourage them from doing so.  He highlighted several successful schools, such as High Tech High in California, that have made the conscious decision to not put their primary focus on how well their students perform on the state’s standardized tests (according to Wagner, the scores are about average as compared to similar schools) but instead on assessing students’ ability to develop skills like the ones above and their readiness for college.  He urged the audience to “bring business leaders and educators together to develop assessments that can measure the skills and outcomes that actually matter–the current tests don’t do that.”

Another speaker was Sir Ken Robinson, a globally-known author and thinker about education.  I tried to find video of his (co)lab talk but wasn’t able to do so.  However, this TED Talk from earlier this year hits on many of the same themes as his (co)lab speech, so if you’ve got 20 minutes to spare, I’d watch it.  Like Wagner, Robinson argued that current educational policies do not promote the sort of teaching and learning that will be most beneficial for students.  In considering the purposes for schooling being economic, cultural, social, and personal, he said he is often left wondering why the economic purpose–school is for students to develop economic independence and for the U.S. to have a more talented workforce than other countries–so often gets tied to standardized test scores when he says that his experiences in other countries and with innovative and successful schools in the United States have shown that these schools and countries often don’t emphasize standardized tests and/or place significant resources into other aspects of schooling.  In large part, he thinks, it is because educators are not included in any genuine way in the development of educational policies at the state or local level.  They know the answers to many of the questions policymakers are trying to solve but are rarely given voice to share them.

The audience at (co)lab–full of business leaders, educators, elected officials, and more–seemed to whole-heartedly embrace these ideas (at least based on the level of applause and standing ovations).  And it’s my hope that this might lead to real change.  During one of the breaks at (co)lab, I was a part of a discussion among people from APS, several foundations, and other educators.  There is talk of working together to spark innovation in schools, especially across southeast Atlanta.  That’s exciting stuff, especially if we listen to the wisdom of people like Tony Wagner and Ken Robinson and others to include teachers in the planning and thinking and are willing to challenge the assumption that standardized tests tell us everything–or even the most important things.


Comments

2 responses to “Thoughts from (co)lab Summit: How do we foster innovation in schools?”

  1. Anna Coan Avatar
    Anna Coan

    I definitely have Cardboard Challenge on the brain, but Sir Ken Robinson is in this video about the Challenge too, albeit very briefly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul9c-4dX4Hk
    I also wanted to say thank you for providing such informative and insightful posts. I have appreciated reading them.

  2. Matt Underwood Avatar
    Matt Underwood

    Thanks for the feedback–glad to know someone is reading these posts! And I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of the Cardboard Challenge!