New Children's TV Series is Based on MI Theory

A global children’s television company has acquired a series based on the theory of multiple intelligences for worldwide distribution. The co-director of the series, Nathalie Martinez, said “We have based the series’ educational philosophy on Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which is reflected in the daily trials and tribulations of this modern family and their comedic adventures.”

The TV show, Hero Dad, “ is centered on a father who arrives home from work each day, changes into his superhero costume – rain boots, kitchen gloves, a tablecloth cape and a swimsuit over his trousers – and takes care of, teaches and plays with his curious 3-year-old daughter, Miao. The non-dialogue animated comedy, aimed at preschoolers 2 to 6, features the misadventures of this homemade superhero, who is kind of clumsy and ultimately always ends up being rescued by his clever little daughter, who learns the lesson of the day as the student becomes the teacher.” 

Click here for more details.

Denouncing Dermatoglyphics

The Indian Psychiatric Society has denounced the Dermatoglyphics Multiple Intelligences Test (DMIT) as having no scientific basis, as published in recently in The Times of India - click here for link. Dermatoglyphics purports to discern Multiple Intelligences based on fingerprinting.

As I mention under the Malpractices section of this website,

• The belief that one can infer intelligences from fingerprints is unfounded.

• There is no reason to think that fingerprints would be yoked to a specific intelligence or the Theory of Multiple Intelligences.

• Knowledge of one’s intelligences does not dictate life trajectory. We should not predict someone’s career choices based on their intelligences, let alone on the basis of their ‘fingerprints.’

It is good to see that the above is being recognized by the Indian Psychiatric Society.

"How to Teach History Using MI Theory" by Duarte Nuno Duarte

(With Note by Howard Gardner Below This Guest Post)

“There are schools that are cages and there are schools that are wings” – this is how Brazilian psychoanalyst and educator, Rubem Alves, distinguished the main models of school. It's not that hard to see why most young people don't like school or classes. After all, who likes to be trapped in a cage?

It is probably more comfortable for us teachers to keep students caged, so they become more predictable and we can take them exactly where we would like. But is this what we really want? Is this efficient? And does this, perhaps comfortable, tack make any sense these days?

In a subject like history, the current challenges are enormous. Nowadays, students have very quick access to information – it’s just a click away. Teachers are no longer the guardians or gatekeepers of knowledge. In addition, students do not seem to show much interest in studying the past. That territory seems a strange place to them, without any relevance to their daily life or future.

Therefore, teachers, and particularly history teachers, need to address two essential points: How can we motivate students to study our subject? And how can we help them master our subject in a truly meaningful way?

During my experience as a teacher, I realized that all students are different – they have different interests, different talents, different weaknesses, and different predispositions. So long as we teach them in only one way, they will not all learn to the same extent. Just because they are in the same cage does not mean that they are the same birds! And if we teach them all in a “traditional” and unidimensional way, we will lose most of them along the way. Furthermore, they will not express their unique talents or display their creativity as they might - as Rubem Alves pointed out, “caged birds are no longer birds, since the essence of birds is flight.” It seems clear to me that the most significant way to achieve educational success is by promoting a well-sustained pedagogical differentiation. And that’s what I’ve tried to do.

Since students have multiple talents and their intellectual potential is multidimensional, it seemed appropriate to base my pedagogical differentiation approach on Howard Gardner’s MI Theory. On the one hand, as educators, we must know each of our students in depth, in order to promote their academic and personal growth and development. Goethe advised us to treat others as if they were what they should be, so that we could help them to become what they could be. On the other hand, history offers a number of ways of mobilizing the skills of all students.

As suggested by MI Theory:

• History entails the linguistic challenge of constructing and/or deconstructing historical narratives.

• Logical-mathematical intelligence is drawn upon in the interpretation of statistical data, as well as efforts, through the analysis of historical facts, to reach conclusions about the present or predictions about the future.

• Songs that address/mirror historical events, such as the Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture, delight any “musical” student.

• The analysis of Roman stadiums and aqueducts, or of Picasso's paintings, can be sources of inspiration for students who reveal spatial skills.

• A scholar with kinesthetic strengths can assume various historical roles and recreate historical scenes.

• “Naturalistic” pupils benefit from field trips to important sites.

• Students can use their intrapersonal skills to put themselves in the shoes of historical agents.

• Any historical event that involves interactions among personages may engage students with interpersonal predispositions.

I believe that students learn more meaningfully if they, themselves, are the main builders of their knowledge. Accordingly, I believe that teachers should work more backstage, providing young scholars with the resources, materials, and support they need. And those resources should be as plural and diverse as possible, in order to reach all the young ones. In a phrase: we must pluralize our teaching.

            Moreover, in order to harness the potential of all students, and to gain both in motivation and understanding, it is necessary to individualize the teaching-learning process.

            These two educational implications – pluralization and individualization – form the basis of my intervention as a teacher. And both have led to significant success, in terms of both motivation and understanding.

            An example: when we were examining the artistic movements of the late nineteenth century, some students focused on literature, others on painting, others on music, others on the social context, others on the logical sequence of changes, others on a more interpretative dimension, others on the categorization of the specific characteristics of each current, and others on the artists themselves. These groups were organized according to pupils’ intellectual predispositions. In the end, the groups came together; we discussed the multiple products, and we connected them all into a single frame, achieving a more comprehensive and substantial grasp of this period. Along the way, all students were important in this construction, they all took their part, and they all were motivated – they had the opportunity to show their strengths. Even the most marginalized students became interested, integrated and presented good and creative work. For example, a scholar who, in a more “traditional” way, had poor results and was about to fail, became one of the best students in the class, making particular use of his spatial and intrapersonal abilities. To return to my earlier image, in this way each student has the opportunity to get out of his cage and show how well he can fly.

            Overall, throughout this intervention, my students were able to paint, to dramatize, to play musical instruments, to edit videos, to play the role of historical figures, to manipulate images, to build timelines, and to develop narratives, etc. This multi-pronged approach demonstrates that there are various ways to learn, and multiple paths to exhibit historical (disciplinary) knowledge and intellectual skills.

            Additionally, it was shown that pedagogical differentiation, sustained by MI theory, is not synonymous with simplification. On the contrary, many “non-traditional” efforts were incredibly creative and revealed a high level of cognitive complexity. For example, a drawing about the French Revolution, filled with a lot of subliminal messages, managed to say, with apparent simplicity, more than a 500 word text. Having started from a “non-traditional” approach to historical knowledge, students could more easily achieve “formal” knowledge, while in the process, learning history in a broader and more substantive way.

            And further, with this methodology, students can begin to better understand the various strands of historical studies, and to realize the importance of the subject in their daily lives. History teachers should always try to make the connection between the past and the present. For instance, when teaching about abolition, we can compare the slave practices after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with the slave practices of today, after the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

            When this approach is well implemented, students become more interested in the subject, more motivated; they may even become better students and more informed citizens. Furthermore, they can display their talents, develop their intelligences, and exceed their own expectations. As a result, applying my central image, school is no longer an information cage but rather a window of knowledge and opportunity.

             I believe teachers mainly intend to encourage birds to fly, and our greatest fulfillment is to see our students flying beyond us. Let's give everyone a chance to do it.

Duarte Nuno Duarte is a Portuguese history teacher and educational researcher. His research topics include pedagogical innovation and differentiation, as well as history’s didactics.

Note by Howard Gardner:

I am very pleased to learn about the numerous ways in which Duarte Nuno Duarte invites his students into the discipline of history. In many ways, I am a historian and it’s a source of regret that so few students nowadays want to study history — indeed, in several studies, students in the United States said that history was their least favorite topic! No doubt an approach like the one described here should make historical studies more inviting, and, indeed, can be adapted for almost every scholarly discipline, from language study to geology or geography.

That said, I’d raise two points:

First, while a multiple intelligences approach can be useful for just about any topic, there is no reason to draw on every possible intelligence. It’s just possible that the naturalist intelligence will not be much help in studying physics — we need to try it and see. What’s important is that the use of a particular intelligence helps to bring out an important part of that discipline’s ways of thinking.

Second, even when we can draw students into the study of a discipline that they might otherwise not find attractive, we cannot simply assume that they will do well on standard measures of achievement. As we pluralize entry points, we also need to pluralize modes of assessment. The student of Duarte Nuno Duarte who showed much understanding of the French Revolution might have failed a standard multiple choice measure, or an essay on a assigned topic. It may well be that certain aspects of history can only be assessed through linguistic instruments; but that certainly does not mean that only linguistically skilled individuals can understand history — and of course, many individuals with high linguistic intelligence show no historical knowledge or understanding whatsoever.

Melding methods of instruction with measures of understanding are an important challenge for our time.

Why Learning Styles Based on Sensory Organs Make No Sense

This article (click here for link) describes what is occurring in the human brain when an individual encounters a literary work. I used the word “encounter” deliberately. That’s because, according to the research team quoted here, the same areas of the brain are activated, whether one encounters the literary work through reading a book or through listening to a recording, for example on a podcast.

I have always taken care to distinguish “multiple intelligences” from “learning styles” (see my article in The Washington Post, click here for link.) And what I have found particularly objectionable is the claim that individuals have “auditory” or “visual” or other sensory-based learning styles. Were this the case, then how we process literature would differ, depending on whether we read it or listen to it. In contrast, in speaking of intelligences, I always stress that the intelligence becomes operative only after information has been received by the cortex, whether it is received by sensory organ A or sensory organ B. And, thinking specifically about language, what matters is not whether the language is heard (auditory), read (visual) or perceived by touch (tactile, as with braille). This research nicely confirms this important distinction.

Where is Talent?

Times Higher Education recently published my article on talent (click here for link). You can read the full text below.

July 31, 2019

By Howard Gardner

Nurturing talent is complex – and it is not enough

Students’ talents wear many guises, depending on the person, the field and the judge. But instilling ethics is also crucial, says Howard Gardner

For those with educational responsibilities, how we choose and promote learners is crucial. In universities, if we are asked how we select our students, we typically say that it is a case of identifying and building on raw talent. But what does that really mean? And does it bear scrutiny?

Dating back at least to biblical times, our species has had a notion of talent. Speaking broadly, talent was something inborn – a gift from God or the gods that allowed its possessor to perform extraordinarily well. And barring extraordinary circumstances, talent was expected to be readily noticed, developed and publicly displayed.

If the talent appeared in an offspring of privilege, it could be readily nurtured. And if it manifested itself in an unexpected place, neighbours were expected to lend a hand so that the talent could partake of educational opportunities. And so it remains in certain spheres, such as sports or the arts.

With respect to academic talent, more technical means of identification were introduced in the past century. Even if they lived in remote surroundings, young people with a high IQ or an unexpectedly high SAT score (or its overseas equivalents) would have the opportunity to study at first-rate institutions of higher learning. And, if the stars aligned, they could undertake a career in teaching, research and scholarship.

I contend that we should think about this issue in a quite different way. Instead of asking “Who is talented?” or “What is talent?”, we should ponder “Where is talent”?  In so doing, we need to consider at least three entities: the person, the domain of expertise and the field of judges.

Regarding the person, psychological testing has led us to think of intellect as being singular, of a piece. But we now recognise that there are various spheres of intellect – what I have called multiple intelligences. A person may be strong in language but not in mathematical thinking, or vice versa. And neither of those strengths or weaknesses predicts how the person will perform in an art form like music, or in understanding other people (often called social intelligence) or themselves (sometimes called emotional intelligence).

In short, individuals can have quite different intellectual strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, there are other issues of character, will and motivation that determine whether talents will develop and how they will be deployed.

Just as individuals can be intelligent in various ways, they can excel in a multiplicity of domains, spheres or sectors. Even within the academy, it takes quite different skills to become an expert physicist or chemist, as opposed to an esteemed historian or philosopher – let alone an outstanding lawyer, doctor, engineer or teacher. Each of these domains has its own set of requirements for training – and a still further set of skills and desiderata come into play when it comes to leadership or collaboration.

It is also important to bear in mind that these skills and desiderata change over time. Looking at institutions of higher learning, we might say that until the 20th century, skills in language were primary. In the 20th century, mathematical and scientific thinking became valorised. In our time, both computational and interpersonal skills are at a premium. And perhaps, looking ahead, as AI and deeper learning tools gain in power and versatility, we may look for yet different human skills – or perhaps human-cum-device skills.

In an ideal world, talent and expertise might speak for themselves. But in every sector of which I am aware, across the arts and sciences, there are individuals and rules that determine how talent is noticed and evaluated – and, therefore, who is given an opportunity, who is promoted and who is rewarded – and, conversely, who is denied those opportunities. Those rules, moreover, are highly time- and culture-bound. For example, while the field judging painting talent in the 18th century would have favoured realism, it would not have done so in the 20th century.

We would like to think that these judgements are entirely objective. But even when obvious favouritism and bias are eliminated, judges are rarely neutral: often, they favour individuals like themselves – or, in an effort to counter bias, they may go to the opposite extreme. Presumably, in the past, many potentially excellent students and scholars were overlooked, precisely because they did not resemble the archetypal talented young person.

So identifying and nurturing talent is not simply a case of looking for markers and pushing along those so marked. All three nodes of the talent triangle must be taken into account, and their interaction noted.

Moreover, our job as educators is not simply to identify and nurture talent. We need to do more. We need to form individuals who will use their talents to do the right thing. To do this, we must exemplify and reward the models of human behaviour and character that we desire in our future workers and leaders – and sanction those of which we disapprove.

History shows that talent devoid of ethical character may just as easily bring humanity to its knees in gas chambers as enable giant leaps for mankind in spacesuits.

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs research professor of cognition and education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. He will be speaking on a panel about new definitions of talent at Times Higher Education’s World Academic Summit at ETH Zurich on 10 to 12 September, whose theme is how talent thrives. He is grateful to his teacher, Nelson Goodman, and his colleague, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, for suggesting how to go beyond a simple definition of talent.