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Good Morning. It's fun to be the first one off the bat. I feel like I've brought a stick
to a gun fight. No PowerPoint I've been PowerPoint free for about a year now I'm
proud to say. But in any event it's interesting because we're all talking about
problems in education today, and believe me we have a lot of them, but I would
submit to you that our big problem is actually our focus on the problem.
So think about where we are right now. All the news stories, even our approaches
as entrepreneurs and folks trying to support education, we're focused on mainly
what's wrong with schools, how ineffective teachers are, and what our students
don't know. That's our orientation. In fact I would argue that we are looking at
education through a deficit based model and lens. And we've even gotten to
appoint where we've coined a term we call it Ed Reform, and some of us even call
ourselves reformers. Now I can't think of a least inspiring word
in the English language than reform but that's yet what we're kind of coining in terms
of how we think about what we're going to do to solve the education problems
in America. It's no surprise then that Americans actually are rating education, our
public schools, public colleges and universities, at an all time low in the history
of Gallup measurement. So we've got a long way to go from here.
Gallup knows a little something about big data. We poll 1000 Americans every
single night. We've been basically measuring the pulse of Americans for the last
70 years. We've also done studies on what makes the most successful people
successful. We've done the largest study of managers in the world, 80,000
managers, we know have employee engagement surveys for more than 22 million
people around the world, and we've also studied more than 2 million teachers in
terms of what makes them best. So let me just tell you what we've learned
from all of this. And there's two really important things. The one is the most important
finding that Gallup has ever uncovered in all of our work and that is about
the fundamentals of human development. What we know is that people who
become successful didn't get that way by focusing on their weaknesses.
They found out what they were good at, their innate talents, and they turned
those into strengths by putting them to work every single day. So the best Americans,
the most successful people in the world, the most successful organizations,
they didn't spend time focusing on their weaknesses, in fact they actually did the
opposite they put all their eggs into the basket of focusing on strengths and turning
them into absolute excellence. What we also know about the best teachers
is this that they have a high degree of what we call Individualization. That they
just instinctively want to know what makes each and every single student in their
classroom tick. That they're relational they build relationships with that
student, with that student's parents, with the ecosystem of people who support them.
And so if you think about where we are right now, if we know that human development
rest on growing our strengths not focusing on weaknesses, and
if we know that what the best teachers do is identify each individual student's
strengths, putting 100% of our eggs in the basket of standardized testing
which is where I'd argue we are right now, is the absolute wrong place to be.
Now I'm not suggesting that we eliminate standardized testing, but if we've got
100% of our eggs in that basket right now I don't know what the right percentage
is but it's much less than 100%. What we need to be doing is thinking about how
we free up those best teachers to do more of that individualization, more of that
relationship building, and how we get students to a place where they discover
their innate talents as they go through their educational lifetime and into their
career. So Gallup is really excited today to announce
that Strengths Quest, which is our student version of our famous Strengths Finder
tool which helps individuals identify their innate talents, now includes
My Data Downloads so that students can take with them across their educational
experience their record of what they do best. So this is different from a skills
assessment, this is different from knowledge, this is different from experience
and even personality, these are literally the ways in which you are hardwired,
what Gallup would call recurring thoughts, emotions or behaviors.
We've got a way to assess this. We've now sent 8 million people through this so
we've honed this science of the years. And imagine where we can be if each
student knows their innate talent, if each teacher is targeting and personalizing
their education to that and putting that to work on a daily basis. See here's the
thing about talent their only strengths if you put them to use all the time. So if I
say I do what I'm best at once a month that's not good enough, once a week
that's not good enough. If I say I do what I'm best at every day and I bet many of
you in this room can say yes to that, that's when we see lights out performance.
So I'll give you the one example of this. New Technology High School in Napa,
California is an amazing model of blending technology and project based learning.
I was just there last week and was absolutely blown away by the students. In fact
I'd hire every single one of them that I met right out of high school wouldn't think
twice about it, that's how good they are. But this entire school, which is a public
school by the way, is setup around technology infusion and project based
learning. Now they've had every single student and teacher
in this school go through Strengths Quest and Strengths Finder. They
all know their individual talents but what they're doing is really unique. They're
setting up the teams of students in their project based learning clusters based
on the student's strengths as part of a team. So here's what we've learned about human
development. The best people became successful by focusing on their strengths.
They don't turn out to be well rounded individuals. If we think about some
of the most successful people in the world today, and think of all the tech titans
and entrepreneurs that we know of they're not necessarily well rounded, but
their teams are. So when we think about the ability to apply
strengths to project based learning for students in the classroom they will build
powerful teams, and not only work in harnessing their own personalized individual
learning, but as a group in general. So I'm delighted to be part of this initiative
and thank you very much for the opportunity to address you today. Thanks.
BRANDON BUSTEED - DATAPALOOZA
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