About the Authors
Jay McTighe brings a wealth of experience developed during a rich and varied career in education. He served as director of the Maryland Assessment Consortium, a state collaboration of school districts working together to develop and share formative performance assessments. Prior to this position, Jay was involved with school-improvement projects at the Maryland State Department of Education, where he helped lead Maryland’s standards-based reforms, including the development of performance-based statewide assessments. He also directed the development of the Instructional Framework, a multimedia database on teaching. Well known for his work with thinking skills, Jay has coordinated statewide efforts to develop instructional strategies, curriculum models, and assessment procedures for improving the quality of student thinking. In addition to his work at the state level, Jay has experience at the district level in Prince George’s County, Maryland, as a classroom teacher, resource specialist, and program coordinator. He also directed a state residential-enrichment program for gifted and talented students.
Jay is an accomplished author, having coauthored seventeen books, including the award-winning and best-selling Understanding by Design series with Grant Wiggins. His books have been translated into six languages. Jay has also written more than forty articles and book chapters and been published in leading journals, including Educational Leadership and Ed Week.
Jay has an extensive background in professional development and is a regular speaker at national, state, and district conferences and workshops. He has made presentations in forty-seven states within the United States, in seven Canadian provinces, and internationally to educators in thirty-seven countries on six continents.
Jay received his undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary, earned his master’s degree from the University of Maryland, and completed postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University. He was selected to participate in the Educational Policy Fellowship Program through the Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington, DC, and served as a member of the National Assessment Forum, a coalition of education and civil rights organizations advocating reforms in national, state, and local assessment policies and practices.
To learn more about Jay’s work, visit www.jaymctighe.com or follow @jaymctighe on Twitter.
Greg Curtis is an author and independent educational consultant. He is based in Beijing and has spent much of his career working with schools around the world in system-wide capacities. Greg has been a technology director, a curriculum and professional learning director, and a strategic planner for international schools in Europe and Asia. He also works with organizations such as EdLeader21, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Jay McTighe & Associates Educational Consulting, Mastery Transcript Consortium, and many schools and districts around the world. His work focuses on long-term, systems-based change and strategic transformation in schools and districts around Impacts and modern learning. He is the author of Moving Beyond Busy and coauthor of Learning Personalized: The Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom with Allison Zmuda and Diane Ullman.
Greg holds a bachelor of arts from Wilfred Laurier University, a bachelor’s of education from Queens University, and a master’s of education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.
To learn more about Greg’s work, visit www.gregcurtis-consulting.ca or follow @jgcurtis on Twitter.
Foreword
By Yong Zhao
The 21st century was once the distant future. Hence 21st century used to be a popular phrase for marketing products, ideas, and policies by evoking hopes and fears that may eventually exist. As a result, 21st century education has become a vision that compels bold actions—actions that ensure a safe departure from the past and guarantee success in the future.
The 21st century has arrived. The once-distant future has become our reality. While 21st century education has gained a diverse set of definitions that transcend the scientific meaning of 21st century as simply a reference of time, conversations about 21st century education can no longer be futuristic, driven by bold claims, fanciful imaginations, or fearmongering rhetoric. It is no longer meaningful to argue why we need or why we do not need 21st century education, nor is it productive to continue the debate over how 21st century education may differ from the education in the 20th, 19th, or 15th century.
It is time that we delivered a modern education that both meets the challenges and takes advantage of the realities of the 21st century. However, this is not an easy task, because while we are living in the 21st century, the institution of education started in the 19th or 20th century. It was built to meet the challenges of the past. It was built with the resources we had before. And once it was built, society spent the last century perfecting it. As Winston Churchill said, “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”—the already-built institution has shaped our education mindset.
This mindset accompanied us into the 21st century. It continues as a persistent force that shapes our views and defines our actions in education. In essence, we are prisoners of the past. To create a modern institution of education, we have to escape from the past first. We have to look at education with a fresh perspective, a new mindset. This new mindset must be grounded in today’s realities, yesterday’s lessons, and tomorrow’s possibilities. The new education must start with the most recent discoveries about human beings: why they learn, how they learn, and where they learn. It must take into consideration the resources we have, all the learning opportunities we can harness in a globally connected society. It must also consider new outcomes—people not only able to cope with the 21st century but also able to create a better future for all.
However, we cannot flip a switch and change our mindset instantly. It takes time to change. But just spending time waiting for the arrival of a new mindset also does not work. We need to engage in real actions that are neither random nor sporadic. They need to be well-organized, carefully designed, and deliberately planned. They also need to be understood and undertaken by all members of an education community. For this to happen, we need a blueprint, just like the blueprints that architects create to guide the construction of modern buildings. This is just what Jay McTighe and Greg Curtis offer in this text: a blueprint for modernizing education.
Jay and Greg present a design process schools can follow to redesign education for 21st century learning. The process guides schools to engage in strategic moves that can ultimately lead to a new type of education needed for the 21st century. From vision to mission and from mission to action, Jay and Greg lay out a systematic process of redesigning schools with abundant evidence, proven strategies, and practical tools.
To be sure, this is not the first book I have seen that claims to provide practical guidance to education redesign. I have seen plenty of “blueprints” in education, and not all are equal; they can be good or bad. What makes me think this is a good blueprint is much more than the extensive practical strategies and actions. It is the sound research base behind the suggested strategies and actions and the ambitious goals these strategies and actions can help achieve. But most important, it is the bridge Jay and Greg build between distant, abstract, and grand ambitions and present, immediate, and small steps. They make the daunting task of designing a brand-new education achievable. It gives me, and all who desire a better education, confidence.
A blueprint can run the danger of being overly prescriptive