Willard Daggett

Over the next few years, schools will face a series of challenges and opportunities that will have a major impact on both students and teachers. Fueled by moving to the Common Core State Standards and, more importantly, new assessments tied to these standards, schools must make a fundamental shift in both what is taught and how it will be taught. Students will be assessed on standards that are far more rigorous and much more applied than in the past, and therefore teachers will need to match their instruction to those higher levels of rigor and relevance. Dr. Daggett will lay out why these changes are being made, the impact they will have on curriculum and instruction, and ways that the nation’s most rapidly improving schools provide a blueprint to meet the challenges successfully.

The nation's most rapidly improving schools have created a culture of high expectations for all students, not simply because of the pending demands of the Common Core State Standards, next-generation assessments, and the new teacher evaluation requirements, but rather because they understand the need to prepare their students for our increasingly technological, globally competitive society. Dr. Daggett will explain the imperative for high expectations and provide suggestions on how schools can achieve them.

This informative keynote discusses the skills, knowledge, and attitudes 21st-century learners bring to our schools and the skills, knowledge, and attitudes they will need to be successful in the technological, globally driven world. Dr. Daggett will describe what schools must do to meet these challenges in order to prepare students for their future rather than our past.

Using research and analysis of the nation's most rapidly improving schools, the International Center for Leadership in Education created the Effectiveness and Efficiency Framework. The framework is now guiding the decision-making process and work in many districts across America. Dr. Daggett will describe the framework and provide suggestions on how districts can use it to ensure that resources are directed to the most effective programs and approaches for instructional improvement.

Highly successful schools have academically rigorous curricula that also incorporate real-world relevance. These schools understand that rigor, while essential, is not adequate to lead all students to high levels of achievement. This presentation will provide an in-depth look at the Rigor/Relevance Framework, created by the International Center for Leadership in Education, which has become a cornerstone of curriculum and instruction for schools throughout the country and abroad. Two additional R's, which are also critical to maximizing student success, will be described: the importance of the relationships between student and teacher, student and student, and teacher and teacher; and the need to provide opportunities for reflective thought on what is being taught and learned.

Both the workplace and postsecondary education are demanding higher levels of literacy. This reality is behind the higher expectations that underpin the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Assessments. Meeting these demands means literacy must become a bell-to-bell responsibility of all educators. Dr. Daggett will describe best practices for driving literacy across the curriculum found in the nation's most rapidly improving schools.