The Global Achievement Gap: Chapter 2

*In the second chapter of The Global Achievement Gap Wagner visits some of the top public schools in America to see what and how the students are learning. What they saw was a teaching style that mainly taught students how to take standardized test and not the 7 most important survival skills

*The first thing that Wagner mentioned and that shocked him about the first school he visited was in a placement chemistry course. Students were in groups and they were supposed to follow directions to make a mixture and one of the groups mixtures started to smoke. Instead of thinking critically about what may happen they instead watied for the teacher to tell them what happend. When Wagner asked what their hypothesis was and they couldn't even give him an answere. This was just the beginning of the discouraging things that were seen throughout the chapter.

*In one of the schools that he visited Wagner and the superintendent visited the classrooms unannounced and normally the superintendent would tell the teachers when she was coming in. She said the teaching style that day was completely different than what she sees when she lets the teachers know she is coming. The teachers seemed less prepared to teach and encourage students to learn.

*The one classroom Wagner actually saw a great teaching style was in an Algebra II classroom. The teacher put a problem up on the board and had the students in groups of four. He told them that they have never done a problem like this but the needed to use the skills they have already learned in previous lessons to help them figure it out. He also told them that he would randomly pick one student from each group to come up to the board and explain two different ways to do the problem. This teacher was really making his students think critically and also they were using teamwork to put their minds together and figure out how to go about doing the problem. By telling them he would randomly pick a student this encouraged all the students to be engaged in the process since they didn't know who would  be going up to the board. I think this type of teaching style shows so many of those survival skills that were said at the beginning of the book and this is the type of teaching we all need to bring into our classrooms.

*Although the algebra teacher did a great job teaching his students, the other classes mentioned did not. Most of the classes consisted of memorization and preperation for tests. This just encourages kids to memorize things instead of actually learning the material. Wagner never blames the teachers he just stress how important it is that we change the way our students are learning. The NCLB act is actually putting our students further behind and we need to think of a better way for students to learn.