Here's a great 10-minute video from Professor Tony Wagner of the Harvard School of Education in which he shares the findings from his most recent book Creating Innovators.  Wagner has done as much as anyone in the field to explain the shortcomings of the traditional educational model and to provoke thinking about what kinds of change are needed to prepare our students for the world beyond the classroom.  Here at Friends, we used his Global Achievement Gap as a starting point for developing the Teaching and Learning at Friends School Paradigm, which has guided our curriculum development, hiring, evaluation and professional development programs over the past five years.  As we prepare to build upon the changes that we have made to this point, Creating Innovators and other works that push us to re-imagine this thing we call "school" will be critical catalysts for our purposeful re-invention of the student experience at Friends School.

More Evidence of the Need to Re-Invent Education

This editorial by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman dates from March of 2013, but its message has only become more timely in the past year.  Friedman references the work of Tony Wagner, the Harvard professor and author of several thought-provoking books on education, who believes that one of the primary goals of education (and one that our current system is not designed to achieve) is for students to be "innovation-ready" when they emerge from school.  Wagner explores this concept in greater depth in his most recent book Creating Innovators which I highly recommend as a primer on the case for re-designing education.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/friedman-need-a-job-invent-it.html?ref=thomaslfriedman