The Teachers Guild Book Club
This October, We’re Reading Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith’s Most Likely To Succeed: Preparing Our Kids For the Innovation Era
“Our challenge isn’t making incremental improvements to an education model designed in 1893. Our opportunity — and our obligation to our youth — is to reimagine our schools, and give all kids an education that will help them thrive in a world that values them for what they can do, not the facts that they know.”
— Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
With our very first Collaboration concluded, we wondered how we might enhance the community experience with additional opportunities to exchange and interact with each other. With that, we’re launching our first ever Guild Book Club, an early prototype, to discuss big ideas in the world of education with our most powerful source of innovators — you, educators!
HOW IT WORKS
For each collaboration, we will select a book to read and discuss as a community. Each week, we’ll discuss a new set of questions. The discussions will take place right here on Medium, on Twitter, and in person at meet ups held throughout the month. We’ve created a reading schedule and a facilitator’s guide to help guide us along the way.
THE BOOK FOR OCTOBER
Our next Collaboration, which kicks off October 1st, will focus on sparking curiosity among students. To build upon our exploration of this question, we’ll read Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith’s newest book: Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing our Kids For the Innovation Era.
In Most Likely to Succeed, Wagner and Dintersmith call for a fundamental reimagining of education. They argue that our educational system no longer prepares our students for the world they are graduating into and note that our incremental changes focused on designing solutions to an obsolete system are useless and detrimental. If we want to produce adults that will be happy, thriving and informed (and curious!) citizens in the ‘innovation era’, we need to change our focus to cultivating core capacities such as curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration in our students; and we need new approaches to teaching and assessing those skills. We hope that the arguments, research findings and insights presented in Most Likely to Succeed will help prompt us to think of deeper, more effective systems, tools and strategies to spark student curiosity.
THE READING SCHEDULE
- Week 1: October 1–8 — Introduction through Chapter 3 (pages 1- 75)
- Week 2: October 8–15 — Millennial Interview: Jaime through Chapter 4 (pages 77–145)
- Week 3: October 15–22 — Chapter 5 through Millennial Interview: Rebecca (pages 145–190)
- Week 4: October 22 -29 -Chapters 6 and 7 (pages 191–266)
HOW TO PARTICIPATE
- If you haven’t already, create a Medium account. It’s very easy — if you have one, you can use your Twitter account info to log in.
- Read the book along with us.
- Tune in to our publication each Thursday afternoon to read that week’s questions.
- Answer the questions; share your favorite quotes and ideas; pose your own questions and reflections; and build upon other member’s answers.
- Host Book Club meet ups in your area! We’ve created a facilitator’s guide to help you plan and organize your meet up, view and download it here.
TWEET UPS & MEET UPS
We will be hosting two Tweet ups and meet ups during the month of October, both of which will take place on:
- Tuesday October 13th
- Tuesday October 27th
Join the conversation on Twitter, using the hashtags: #SparkCuriosity and #MLTS
We’ll also be hosting in-person meet ups around the country on those days — check out these tips on how to host your own local meet ups. Nothing formal, just a chance to get together with other educators in your area.
Happy reading!
