EDUCATION BY FRANK MCKONE
[For further information see http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-howard-gardner-interview . Link added 22 September 2015]
When Hawker Brownlow, education publishers, advertised a conference in the second last week of January, during peak Australian beach time, they thought perhaps 300 teachers would attend. But from across Australia, New Zealand and further afield, some 800 people found $400 a more than worthwhile investment, including a dozen from the ACT. Here was a summer school par excellence: with Professor Howard Gardner from the Harvard Graduate School of Education the main presenter, who would not forego three days of sun and sand?
Titled Using Your Brain, this conference at the World Congress Centre, Melbourne, was important not simply because innovative ideas about teaching were given philosophical support, and certainly not as a self-congratulatory talk-fest. Here, at last, real information was presented which scientifically backs the creative approaches which teachers in Australia and Canberra in particular have been experimenting with, developing and improving for more than 20 years.
Professor Gardner told his research story, backed by detailed sessions on teaching practice from already locally known American authors Dr David Lazear (Seven Pathways of Learning) and Dr Robin Fogarty (Blueprints for Thinking in the Co-operative Classroom), as well as widely respected Australian consultants Dr Julia Atkin and Dr John Baird.
The story begins in Paris, 1900, but you won't see it at the National Gallery. A psychologist, Alfred Binet, was asked to "devise some kind of a measure that would predict which youngsters would succeed and which would fail in the primary grades of Paris schools." For nearly a century since then we have lived with the IQ (Intelligence Quotient), which depends on the idea that people's different types of abilities are aspects of just one thing: General Intelligence (g), and convenient tests can be made up to measure 'g' with the average set at 100. People's results can range from very low (below 60 IQ) to occasional prodigies (above 200 IQ).
However, in 1983, after 4 years' research, Gardner published Frames of Mind and introduced the theory of multiple intelligences. He discovered by studying gifted children and brain-damaged people that people's different types of abilities could not be added together and averaged to make 'g'. 80 years after Binet, neurological studies of the brain showed probably seven different "intelligences", only two of which were measured by the standard IQ tests. Each intelligence is distinct, with its own centre in the brain. Some people are good in all seven areas, but each of us has our own personal profile which makes us different from the next person.
Pencil and paper IQ tests only measure Verbal-Linguistic and Logical-Mathematical intelligences. Some others can measure Visual-Spatial intelligence. But the 'g' approach ignored the Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Musical-Rhythmic and Bodily-Kinaesthetic intelligences. As a consequence, our education systems in the western world valued only those areas which could be measured, while the rest have been vilified as Mickey Mouse.
The Multiple Intelligence theory is scientifically derived from neurological studies. More recent techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) support Gardner's theory more strongly today than 15 years ago, and it seems that there may be two more intelligences yet to be revealed - Naturalist and Existential - though claims for these have yet to be thoroughly researched.
Australian teachers have long been suspicious of 'g'. Cook Primary School, with Judy Perry at the helm, has made a special project of teaching through multiple intelligences. Dr Baird's Melbourne-based Project for Enhancing Effective Learning has been widely successful in Scandinavia. Dr Julia Atkin, from Harden - only a short distance from Canberra - works in schools throughout Australia demonstrating her highly practical, how-to-do-it application of learning and thinking theory.
Thanks to this conference, teachers can teach and assess their students' learning not just on tests of the old kind, but by using visual materials; activities like drama, dance, music and song; group interaction activities (interpersonal intelligence); and especially "processfolios". These are collections of activities which students present which reveal the process and progress of their learning in any subject area. Students enhance their intrapersonal intelligence as they publicly reflect on their folios, reassessing their strengths and weaknesses. This is called "metacognition" - thinking about one's own thinking. Where conventional tests, through fear of failure, often cause people's thinking to shut down and rely on simple memorising, processfolios cause people's thinking to open up and expand - and so they learn much more, and more quickly.
Gardner talks of "education for understanding" (not going to school just to get a higher score). If the IQ represents the 20th Century, then multiple intelligences (MI) is the educational stuff of the 21st.
(Note [sent with submission to The Canberra Times]: Photos of the ACT contingent were taken by Irene Lind, Principal, Lyneham Primary School)
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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