(2012-04-19) Wagner Creating Innovators

Tony Wagner has a new book out: Creating Innovators. ISBN:9781451611496

Sounds a lot like the message for Raising Reality Hackers.

I tried to buy the EBook from Barnes And Noble but it's "enhanced". 2012-04-20-EnhancedNookBookWoes Hopefully an unenhanced version will be available from Barnes And Noble, too. (And the Kindle version won't even be out until May1.) (Update: Barnes And Noble eventually had a pure-EPub version, which I bought/read.)

He had a piece in the Wall St Journal Apr13: In conventional schools, students learn so that they can get good grades. My most important research finding is that young innovators are intrinsically motivated. The culture of learning in programs that excel at educating for innovation emphasize what I call the three P's—play (Play Ethic), Passion and purpose (Mission). The play is discovery-based learning that leads young people to find and pursue a passion, which evolves, over time, into a deeper sense of purpose. Mandating that schools teach Innovation as if it were just another course or funding more charter schools won't solve the problem.

Apr20: He gave a good talk at Skill Share's Penny conference.

Jonathan Martin reviews the book. *Although these young people become innovators not because of their K-12 schooling but in spite of it, two themes emerge strongly in what made the difference for them: “OutlierTeacher-s” and Project Based Learning... I have believed since 2008 that New Tech Network schools provide a Project Based learning curriculum equal to, and in some ways distinctly superior to, High Tech High...

• Wagner states “The culture of Olin College is radically different from the culture of most high schools and colleges in five fundamental respects,” and in doing so offers the best outline in this book to frame the key parameters of educating to innovate.
  • Collaborative more than Individual Achievement.
  • Multi-Disciplinary Learning more than Specialization
  • Trial And Error (Iterative) more than Risk Avoidance
  • Creating more than Consuming
  • Intrinsic Motivation more than Extrinsic Motivation
• Wagner situates his book’s three word slogan, play, passion, and purpose within the last of these five, explaining that “Teachers at Olin have an explicit goal of strengthening students’ Intrinsic motivations to be lifelong learners (Lifelong Learning), to be the architects of their own learning, their own careers, to bring into being that which they desire.”...
• Design Thinking, which Wagner quotes the Olin President identifying as the third and culminating stage of quality education– going beyond project-based learning– is about exactly this systematic process of problem identifying, but we only touch on the surface of it in the Olin discussion, as as a component of the capstone SCOPE project. Design thinking gets more attention in a subsequent, and also very valuable, discussion in this chapter of the Stanford Design School.*