Different intelligences
Child-centred teaching cultivates the various intelligences often ignored in traditional schools
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There's not just one 'sort' of intelligence, says American psychologist and educationist Howard Gardner. Education systems that do not address this are destined to fail the children that go through them, he believes.
The usual way of assessing intelligence in Europe and the USA is to give people an IQ test. The traditional test looks mainly at logic, reasoning and skills with words and comprehension through words. But this goes nowhere near measuring every aspect of human capability.
Gardner's first theory claimed seven intelligences:
- linguistic, covering all aspects of language comprehension and language use
- logical-mathematical, which includes the ability to understand pattern and to use rational deduction and number
- musical
- bodily-kinesthetic, which is the way our brain impacts on our physical movement
- spatial intelligence is needed to understand the workings of open and confined spaces
- interpersonal intelligence allows for empathy with other people
- intrapersonal intelligence is an understanding of one's own emotions and motivations.
Gardner has since added moral intelligence to this list. He now suggests that further research might reveal even more.
A multiple-intelligence approach
Gardner and the education reformers who have put his ideas into practice in the USA and elsewhere hold that:
- the seven (at least) forms of intelligence are more or less independent of each other, but they do not necessarily operate independently
- every individual has each intelligence to some degree, but the way their intelligences blend and work together is unique to each person.
In schools that adopt a multiple intelligence approach, the teaching is child-centred:
- teachers start with looking at how a child learns and then develop their teaching, the curriculum and the way the child's achievement is assessed to reflect those needs
- they don't try to make the child fit the curriculum
- teachers stop teaching in a way that gets better exam or test results, and instead teach in order to bring out the best in the child
- teachers are asked to be more creative, flexible, independent and energetic
- success is about far more than test or exam scores.
'Cultivating the intelligences, which invariably happens when learning through them, leads to greater enjoyment in life.' – Thomas Hoerr, Director of New City School, St Louis, Missouri, which uses a multiple-intelligence approach
Find out more about Howard Gardner's intelligences.
'The
facilities at [my primary] school were primitive. It had a piano you weren't
allowed to play, a tambourine you weren't allowed to shake and beanbags
that didn't make any noise' – Midge Ure, musician
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