The Global Achievement Gap: Chapter 4

5 main points:

Teachers want to make their classrooms and schools more efficient to teach the seven survival skills but once they finally have the chance they are putting it on the back burner for these reasons: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "nobody else in the country is doing any of this, so why should I" And because it's challenging to change the way your school system and classroom systems already work so you just don't want to do it. Which is incredibly sad because you are putting your students on the back burner as well.

Are teachers really prepared to be effective teachers once they are out of college? and who is there to mentor them when they start they first years of teaching? Tony Wagner explains that he was confused on how to be the BEST teacher once he graduated from college. He wanted to be the best teacher but had no one to tell him if he was doing a good job or not. It seemed like no one really cared. He wanted insight to his teaching and what methods he could use to become the best teacher and he didn't know where to find it.

Teachers think that their school and their teaching is fine just the way it is. They do not see a need to transform their teaching. Randy from this chapter explains it well, " The major problem is the adults, not the students. They came through the system, and they were successful... It's all they know." If teacher education programs are flawed and aren't teaching future teachers the right stuff how will teachers be prepared to teach students in today's world? It is time for a change.

What a person has to do to become certified as a teacher is nearly identical to what a student has to do for a high school diploma. They have to take a collection of courses of uneven quality and then pass tests that rarely measure the skills that matter most. Basically, we need to identify the skills that matter most to be an effective teacher and then develop ways to teach this to future teachers. If teachers are learning to teach this way, how will we ever close the global achievement gap?

The training of future teachers needs to be modified to so that we can teach students the skills needed in today's world. Education leaders and policymakers need to agree on the skills that matter most for administrators and then to develop ways to assess them. A way to do this would be a portfolio requirement like the one described in chapter 4.