The Global Achievement Gap - Chapter 2

1)In chapter two of the Global Achievement Gap, the author, Tony Wagner, visits a few of the top schools in the United States to see what the children are learning and how they are learning. He was looking to see if they possessed the 7 skills that he went over in chapter one. 2) When he goes to the first school he finds out that the kids there do not have the 7 skills, they have just learned how to memorize answers for tests and nothing more. He sees this when he goes into the Science room and som of the kids messed up on their lab and their stuff started to smoke. Insted of seeing what they could have done wrong, they went straight to the teacher to see what had went wrong. 3) Throught out the whole chapter he finds very few teachers are actually teaching the kids how to commuicate, use critical reasoning, and problem solving. 4) One teacher that he did find was really helping the kids with the 7 important life skills was an Algebra teacher. The teacher made the kids learn how to solve problems on their own without help from the teacher and the teacher also had the kids work in groups so they could figure out the problem, which caused the kids to use teamworking skills. Although this was a good classroom the rest of the classrooms in that school were not as well managed. 5) At the en of the chapter he talked about how the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) act was not helping children learn, it was actually making the problem worse. The NCLB act is only teaching kids how to take tests and not how to use critcal reasoning and the other skills they need to make it in this economy today. The global achievement gap is only becoming bigger because of this.