~ The MI News ~
Spring 2000 Edition
(Volume 2, Number 1) |
Publisher Branton Shearer | Editor
Cliff Morris |
Table
of Contents
1 Welcome message by Clifford Morris
2 The parenting corner by
Debra Jones
3 Individually configured
education by Howard Gardner
4 Recent MI presentations by
Clifford Morris
5 For your minds only by
Clifford Morris
1. Welcome message by Clifford Morris
For those of you who are visiting for the first
time, MI-News is provided free by Branton Shearer's Multiple Intelligences (MI) Research and
Consulting. The goal of this newsletter is to provide you with
theoretical and practical information about Howard Gardner's MI Theory.
We try to explore MI applications via discussion, contact and sharing.
This publication marks the first issue of Volume
II. In our nine 1999 issues,
we were able to present a variety of MI topics, ranging from personal comments
and interviews, to excerpts from Howard Gardner's writings, to informative
articles from Multiple Intelligences (MI) practitioners. We hope to
continue this practice with this first issue of Volume II. Feel free to
contact and tell us your current involvement with MI. And to those of you
who also visited us in the last millennium, welcome back. We are pleased
to have you as continued readers. And as just mentioned, please also feel
free to contact us with your MI comments.
2. The parenting corner by Debra Jones
My twins are as different as night and day. So it is
often difficult to find something that works well for both of them. One
of my daughters is highly interpersonal. She longs for companionship and
is always the peacemaker among her friends. She does not enjoy doing things
alone. My other daughter is quite the opposite. She is a very deep
thinker (for a six year old) and she likes to find her own path in life.
She also enjoys being a leader in a group (whenever she can find someone
willing to follow her).
So when I look at possible activities for my children, I try
to find things that have a good mix: something that both of my daughters can
enjoy. That is why we have been so please with our experience in Girl
Scouting. This will be their second year in scouts (and my first as their
leader). What scouts offer to my twins is an outlet for one to enjoy
interpersonal relationships and work in groups; while the other is having the
opportunity to enjoy taking on responsibility and leadership roles.
The best part of scouts is that it also gives them an
opportunity to stretch in many of the areas they may not be as comfortable in,
without feeling pushed or put on the spot. From my own personal
experience in scouting, and from what my daughters have experienced, I can see
how this organization lends itself to girls with many different strengths and
areas of preference. But it also allows the girls to step out of their
comfort zone and to try new things, perhaps things they might never have attempted
on their own.
Scouting may not be the right choice for everyone.
There are many things to consider (one of which is the time demands it places
on your family). But we have found it to be a worthwhile adventure for
our family. And I am sure many others can benefit from the experience as
well. If you would like more information on Girl Scouting in the U.S.A.,
you can look at their web site at: http://www.gsusa.org.
And for those of you with sons, you can look over the Boy Scouting program at
this web site: http://www.bsa.scouting.org/
3. Individually Configureed Education: The key educational
imperative by Howard Gardner
Excerpted with permission of the
author from
Intelligence Reframed:
Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century
Basic Books, 1999
As I have made clear, almost any number of educational
programs can be crafted in the shadow of MI theory. However, there is one
form of education that is antagonistic in spirit to MI – the uniform
school. Unfortunately, throughout human history, the schooling of choice
has been uniform, and so it is necessary to understand its power as well as its
fundamental flaws.
The essence of uniform schooling is the belief that every
individual should be treated in the same way: study the same subjects in the
same way and be assessed in the same way. At first, this seems fair: No
one has special advantages. And yet, a moment's thought reveals the
essential inequity in the uniform school. The uniform school is based on
the assumption that all individuals are the same and, therefore, that uniform
schooling reaches all individuals equally and equitably. But we obviously
look different from one another and have different personalities and
temperaments. Most important, we also have different kinds of
minds. Indeed, if we follow the line of reasoning in this book, no two
people have exactly the same kinds of minds, since we each assemble our
intelligences in unique configurations.
As educators, we face a stark choice: ignore these
differences or acknowledge them. Sometimes, they are ignored out of
ignorance; sometimes they are ignored because educators are either frustrated
by the differences, or convinced that individuals are more likely to become
members of a community if they can learn to be more alike. But those who
ignore the differences are not being fair -- and are typically focusing only on
the language-logic mind (as perhaps most perfectly embodied in the mind of the
law professor). To the extent that the student and the teacher share that
focus, the student will do well and consider herself smart. But if the
student has a fundamentally different kind of mind, she is likely to feel
stupid -- at least while attending that school.
What is the alternative? One possibility is individually
configured education -- an education that takes individual differences
seriously and, insofar as possible, crafts practices that serve different kinds
of minds equally well. Because it is not an educational goal in the sense
I have been discussing, individually configured education can fit comfortably
with a variety of goals: a traditional or experimental curriculum, an education
aimed at breadth or depth, an education that seeks to develop liberal arts
sensitivity, or an education oriented to the world of practice, vocations, or
civic-mindedness. The crucial ingredient is a commitment to knowing the
minds -- the persons -- of individual students. This means learning about
each student's background, strengths, interests, preferences, anxieties,
experiences, and goals, not to stereotype or to preordain but rather to ensure
that educational decisions are made on the basis of an up-to-date profile of
the student.
It is not necessary to move directly from this goal to a
formal assessment of intelligence. Whatever their philosophies, good
teachers, tutors, and coaches have always sought to know their students
well. And these pedagogues have rarely used formal instruments to
identify individuating features; they have observed, reflected, and spoken to
the students and those close to them. The theory of multiple
intelligences can be helpful because, as Mindy Kornhaber has pointed out, it is
a good initial organizer. If one wants to know students well, it is
helpful to have a set of categories by which one can describe their strengths
and weaknesses, bearing in mind my cautions about labeling. One needs to
go well beyond the eight intelligences, because they represent, at the most, a
first cut. And one must be prepared to update the descriptions regularly,
because, happily, the minds of students -- and, indeed, even the minds of their
elders -- are subject to change.
Knowing the minds of students represents but the first
step. Crucial, thereafter, is an effort to draw on this knowledge in
making decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Of course,
if one chooses to have a curriculum rich in electives (or choices), then the
role of MI ideas becomes clear. One can designate subjects (disciplines),
teaching methods, hardware, software, and means of assessment that honor the
particular cluster of intelligences of student under one's charge. But
individually configured education is also compatible with a required standard
curriculum. All young people should study the history of their country,
the principles of algebra and geometry, and basic laws that govern living and
non-living objects. A commitment to some common knowledge does not mean
that everyone must study these things in the same way and be assessed in the
same way.
MI theory makes its most important contribution to education
on this point. The theory stimulates teachers and students to be
imaginative in selecting curricula, deciding how the curricula are to be taught
or "delivered," and determining how student knowledge is to be
demonstrated. Sometimes, all students will be exposed to a variety of
curricula or assessments. At other times, certain students will learn and
be assessed in one way, while other students—or even an individual student—will
be instructed and assessed in other, more appropriate ways. These
practices have been routine in some endeavors: for example, individual arts or
sports coaching, academic tutoring, and "special education" for
students with learning problems or disabilities. These students typically
have difficulty mastering a subject, such as reading or mathematics, because
they cannot learn in the "uniform way" available in their
schools. The only choices are to give up, assuming that the students are
ineducable, or to teach in another way. As we would now put it, the
learning specialist must mobilize the students' spared intelligences so that
they can learn, and can demonstrate that learning in ways that make sense to
them.
Even those sympathetic to individually configured education
doubt that it can be mobilized on a wide scale. This vision may be right,
they say, but it can be provided only to those who are wealthy or to those who
qualify for special government-funded programs. (Indeed, in my community, some
parents seek out a "learning-disabled" label just so their children
can qualify for tutoring.) It may be hard to think of individually
configured education in a classroom with thirty or more students, not all of
them as docile or motivated as one might like, but it is not
impossible. Among the possible strategies are the following:
· Cull as much data a possible about how a particular
child learns and share that knowledge with the teacher and with the
child. As children get older, they can provide much information and
feedback themselves.
· Allow students to remain with the same teacher(s) for
several years, so that they can get to know one another very well.
· Assign teachers and student flexibly, so that more
compatible matches can be made.
· Have an effective information-transmission system in
the schools, so that the next year's teachers know as much as possible about
their new students. Also, make sure that the teachers have ready access
to this information and can update it as needed.
· Have older students work with younger students, or
have students with compatible or complementary learning approaches work
together.
One
fact will make individually configured education a reality in my lifetime: the
ready availability of new and flexible technologies. Already, it is
possible to use technology to vary the presentation of important materials—from
physics lessons to musical composition. Such technology can also be
"smart": It can adjust on the bases of earlier learning experiences,
ensuring that a student receives lessons that are optimally and individually
crafted.
Once
parents learn that there are indeed several ways to teach most topics and most
subjects, affluent families will acquire the materials for home use. And
pressures will mount for schools and teachers to have available, say, the
"Eight Roads to Pythagoras" or the "Eight Paths to
Plato." No more will teacher say, "I have taught it well, and
she could not learn it." Rather, all involved in education will be
motivated to find the ways that will work for this student learning this
topic, and the results will be widely available in planning for future work.
4. Recent MI presentations by Clifford Morris
Since
the publication of the December 1999 issue of the MI-News, (Volume 1, Number
9), I have been delivering a series of Multiple Intelligences (MI)
presentations. Now I wish to introduce these presentations to you.
Hopefully, in this same way, some of you might duplicate my efforts and thus
inform others, in particular, state-funded public school educators, of the
Gardner MI model.
The
planning stage of these MI presentations commenced when towards the end of
1999, I was asked by some of my former professors at the University of Ottawa,
at the University of Toronto, and elsewhere, to be a guest speaker in one or
more of their classes, to present information to their students about Howard
Gardner and his Multiple Intelligences. That I have gladly accomplished
as I feel that the Gardner model of the mind ought to be broadcasted to all
within such university walls, especially to those future teachers currently
studying in pre-service Faculty of Education programs. To read the
complete introductory comments to these presentations, click here.
5. For your minds only by Clifford Morris
Recently,
I received from Maurice Fisher, a package containing a hard-copy of his review
of Howard Gardner's 2nd 1999 book, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple
Intelligences for the 21stCentury. Fisher's book review is printed in
the latest issue (Volume 9, Number 3) of Gifted Education News. To quote
Fisher directly, "This book summarizes Dr. Gardner's 30 years of research
and theoretical work on multiple intelligences."
I bring
this to your attention, as I was impressed with his detailed two-paged
review. If you are interested in receiving a hard copy of this, contact
Fisher at Gifted Education Press, 10201 Yuma Court, P.O. Box 1586, Manassas,
VA, 20108; 703 369-5017. The URL is: http://www.giftedpress.com.