A School Based on MI Principles

The following is an excerpt from the MI Network Newsletter edited by Dr. Tom Hoerr, former Head of The New City School, Missouri. Sign up for the newsletter here.

The theory of multiple intelligences is a statement about human potential because it recognizes that each of us has a profile of many different intelligences. 

But unfortunately, that isn’t the reality is how most schools operate. Too often educators limit their efforts to preparing students to succeed on the next test, to do well in a particular course, or to be accepted at the next school, and the focus becomes the scholastic intelligences, the 3 R’s. Teachers teach through the scholastic intelligences and they require students to indicate their knowledge and skills through those same 3 R’s. That narrow view of problem-solving creates a hierarchy of intelligences, with the 3 R’s at the top, while problem-solving using the other intelligences – musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, naturalist, and the personal intelligences – is relegated to after-school clubs, teams, or recess.

Certainly we want children to perform well in school, but how might education differ if the focus was on preparing students to succeed in life, not just to do well in school? It might look like what happens every day at The Howard Gardner School (HGS) in Alexandria, VA, founded by Katherine Keith and Emily Pavot in 2004.

I was particularly interested in talking with Erick Johnson, their Head of School, because the HGS is a middle- and a high school, for students in grades 6-12. I have met many educators who were implementing MI in their schools or classrooms, and in most cases, this was happening at the elementary level. That was my experience at the New City School, a preschool through elementary school in St. Louis, MO. In large part, this is because high school teachers tend to be subject matter specialists so it is more difficult for them to leave their comfort zone and use a range of intelligences in teaching. (Also, the rigid schedule of high schools makes it more difficult to create extended times so that students can use their range of intelligences.)

The faculty at HGS (students chose the school's name) recognizes that each person possesses an array of different – multiple – intelligences, and their curriculum is designed to tap into each child’s potential. The pragmatic and inclusive educational approach at The HGS is reflected in its mission statement:

It is the mission of The Howard Gardner School to help bright, creative, non-traditional learners use their unique strengths to thrive academically, intellectually, and emotionally.

Erick Johnson has a non-traditional background for an educator, i.e., he was trained as a litigation consultant and then became an Academic Success Coordinator for a school in Michigan. When we spoke, he shared his experiences as a football coach, and described a “diversity of athletes” as a way of capturing the range of ways players solve problems. While their strength, speed, and coordination (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence) were key, their ability to see situations and identify opportunities (spatial intelligence) and know how to follow, lead, and push themselves (personal intelligences) were also integral. His comment “Not everyone’s brain is the same” is true on playing fields and in the classroom.

The HGS is intentionally small, with 42 students in the high school and 13 in the middle school (the schools are two separate entities). This enables them to create non-traditional learning experiences that tap into and develop students’ many intelligences. The first week of every school year is a bonding time, an opportunity for students to learn about MI. Teachers present the theory and students engage in using all of their intelligences. Approximately forty percent of students’ time is spent outside classrooms, away from the school. Tuesdays are field trip days, and students will go on 36 trips during the school year, visiting power plants, national parks, national forests, and museums, for example. In almost every venue, he notes, docents and guides willingly share – teach – the students.

The pragmatic focus on what works for students is apparent in the non-traditional schedule at HGS. Students in grades 10 & 11 spend six to eight hours each Friday engaged in a professional internship. The entire school comes together for Community Fridays, times when students share what they have learned about themselves as learners. Erick says:

“Monday, Wednesday, Thursday morning are ‘standard’ days; Tuesdays  are  Field Studies; and Thursday afternoon is community meeting. The activities on Friday vary, based on students’ age/maturity.

“Community Fridays are for younger students to learn about themselves; Professional Internships are for older students ready to be in the adult world a bit more; Senior Fridays are about learning to be an elder in a community, tactical leadership/followership training, and schedule support for all the challenges that Seniors face (what's next? for instance), as well as "Packing the Suitcase" which is when students are helped to actively recognize what has helped them succeed to this point, and what they need to take with them wherever they go. Community Meetings are held on Thursday afternoon, they are student-run and handle community issues and community building.”

As a way to enable students to use MI to solve problems and show what they have learned, students create a symposium in the fall. (“Right before Thanksgiving break,” Erick says, “so folks have time to recover from the effort.”) Examples he offers:

• Renewable Energy Demonstration Conference

• Play-in-a-Week: Three Original One-Act Plays (including having to turn the school into a theatre, because we don't have one - this was the year the marketing team sold out a matinee that we didn't know existed)

• A Charity Bike Race (in fact, two races, one for speed, one for style - there's an "elephant" bike on top of the tech shed from that)

• Turned our Campus into a Nature Center 

• Pop-Up Restaurant (complete with a Maître D’ and his assistant, both in tuxedos, thus fulfilling my promise to the faculty of getting our smallest student into a top hat and tails)

• Single Shot, no Edit Action Movie

• Time Bureau: An Interactive Multi-Escape Room Adventure

The faculty always gives special attention to how are students feeling and thinking. An example of this awareness is that classes begin at 10 am each day. The goal is to help students become partners in the learning process, and that requires attention to their SEL as well as academic growth. He shares that the HGS graduates attend a diverse array of universities and programs and boast a 99% first-choice acceptance rate.

Erick says that human diversity in an organization enables progress from good to great, and MI is a positive example, recognizing students’ neuro-diversity. He likens this diversity to cogs in a wheel, latching together and creating some tension in order to gain movement. Students’ experiences at the HGS have been so positive that a second campus will be opening in the fall for students in grades 9-12. It will be on the border of Fairfax County, VA, and Loudoun County, VA, named, "HGS: Fairfax-Loudoun" with the current campus being "HGS: Alexandria." Readers who would like to learn more about the school can contact Erick Johnson at erick@thehowardgardnerschool.org.!

Metacognition and Intrapersonal Intelligence: Shall the Twain meet?

In a recently published book, Know Thyself, cognitive scientist Stephen Fleming describes “the science of self-awareness.” He reviews the many studies carried out in recent decades under the less snappy phrase “meta-cognition.” 

Clearly, on the whole, meta-cognition is a good thing. In school, those individuals who are aware of what they need to do, how to achieve it, what help they might need, are far more likely to be successful than those who daydream, or forget what they were told to do, or who lack a skill or concept and yet don’t have the wherewithal to address that lack. Similarly at work, without meta-cognitive skills, you are unlikely to carry out tasks successfully, determine where you have gone wrong, know when and how to consult others, how you fit into the rhythm of the workplace, deduce when it’s time to move on... and where you want to end up and succeed.

Of course, meta-cognition helps one at home, on holiday, and in relations with others—be these superficial or deep, friendships or romances. 

In my work on “MI theory,” I wrote about the two personal intelligences—interpersonal intelligence (understanding of others) and intrapersonal intelligence (understanding of self). Interpersonal intelligence is far easier to explain, to study, to evaluate—we can observe how well you navigate the world of other persons. 

But what of self-knowledge? I have never been pleased with my (or others') efforts to assess self- knowledge, even in the abstract. Our selves are strange entities—with due respect to Socrates, what does it mean to “know thyself?” And indeed, I’ve quipped that only your psychoanalyst can assess how well you know yourself. 

It would be convenient if intrapersonal intelligence could be equated to meta-cognition. But I don’t think it can be. Meta-cognition helps you to navigate the world—the worlds—more successfully; and unless you get obsessed by such reflection on your mind, that’s a good thing.  

But one can understand one’s own mental capacities (and incapacities) quite well without having significant insight into how distinctive you are as a person, how you differ from others, in what ways, and what difference those differences make. Moreover, it's not clear whether, and if so how, your understanding of yourself might help you to be a different or better person—a major set of insights that one hopes to gain from therapy. I believe that’s because emotions, feelings, affect are vital parts of our person, our persona—and yet they only have meaning if you actually experience them—unless you feel fear, it does not help to know that you are 'fearful' or 'frightened' or 'anxious.' 

Put differently, I can easily see a computer program or robot becoming meta-cognitive; but when I ask about the intrapersonal intelligence of the program or robot, that seems—at least at present—to be a category error.

Photo by Laurenz Kleinheider on Unsplash

A Carpet Cleaner who Speaks 24 Languages: Clues to Linguistic Intelligence

Recently The Washington Post ran an article (link here) about a man who cleans carpets for a living—and who speaks 24 languages! Since most Americans struggle to master more than one language—this feat seems remarkable to us. Perhaps it would be slightly less remarkable if we lived in Europe, where much of the population is bilingual or even multi-lingual… and where English-as-a-second language is increasingly taken for granted. But once one goes beyond 4-5 languages, we would expect such multilingual skill to be present chiefly among individuals whose stock-in-trade is speaking or writing—and not someone who earns his living in a household trade. 

In spending time with Vaughan Smith, the reporter Jessica Contrera, learned that Smith remembers names, dates, and sounds far better than most persons. As a youth, he found fascinating the existence of multiple languages, and always wanted to know what particular messages meant. He also could remember what he read much better than most of his classmates. And yet, he only completed high school and since then has had various odd jobs. Learning languages is a hobby—not related in any significant way to his livelihood. 

When Smith came to the attention of scientists at MIT, they wanted to determine whether there is anything unusual about his brain. There is! 

But it is entirely different from what I—and, I suspect, most others—would have supposed. Rather than having larger areas of the brain devoted to language... and rather than the language areas being particularly active—MRI revealed the opposite pattern. Malik-Moraleda, a researcher working under neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko, explains “Vaughan needs less oxygen to be sent to those regions of his brain that process language when he is speaking in his native language.. He uses language so much, he’s become really efficient in using those areas for the production of language” 

On almost any definition of the phrase, we can say that Vaughan Smith has exceptional linguistic intelligence. And clearly, there is a brain basis for his talent. And yet, for reasons which remain to be explicated, it’s in the way that he uses his brain—or his brain uses him—that makes him outstanding. 

And this may be true in other kinds of intelligence—perhaps musically gifted individuals also use their brain real estate far more efficiently. 

I can add that mastery of language is certainly a key component of linguistic intelligence. But how one uses that skill, that talent, the intelligence can vary enormously. Poets, novelists, journalists, comedians, scholars, lawyers all benefit from significant linguistic intelligence—but how that is represented in the mind—and in the brain—and in the world of practice—remains an unexplored area. 

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

"Intelligences" vs. "Languages"

I was pleased to see The New York Times article by Siobhan Roberts about Stanislas Dehaene's claim that geometry is a unique human capacity just as is language (link here). He proposes, therefore, that humans have "multiple languages." When I originally developed “multiple intelligences theory” forty years ago, I used the analogy of eight separate computers (one for each intelligence). I was critiquing the notion of a single all-purpose computer which is the construct underlying the standard IQ view of intelligence. (In the vernacular, according to the traditional view, people are either smart, average, or dumb).

At the time that I developed "MI theory," building on the work of Chomsky, Fodor, and others, I was using “natural language” as my prototype intelligence. And within language, my focus fell on syntax—semantics, much less so, pragmatics not at all. 

Reading about Dehaene's use of the term "multiple languages" led me to blog (link here) that he might just as well have used the term "multiple intelligences." Dehaene responded that his use of the term language refers to a formal "computer-like language whose expressions correspond to human mental representations and whose minimal description length captures psychological complexity." He went on to say, "As far as I know, multiple intelligences are not so well defined."

When I reflect on my original list of seven intelligences, I acknowledge that the personal intelligences are not well-described in traditional computational terms. Selma Mehyaoui seems to be alluding to personal intelligences when, responding to Dehaene, she says that language is not just a matter of representation but also involves pragmatics. I also don’t think of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence in traditional computational terms, but as robots become “smarter” they may also reveal the extent to which the uses of the body can be captured in computational language.

However, I submit that four of the original list of multiple intelligences do indeed fit the Chomskian and Dehaene model of language: not only linguistic intelligence and spatial intelligence (Dehaene's geometry language), but also mathematical and musical intelligence.

Multiple Languages, Why Not Multiple Intelligences?

When The New York Times elects to devote more than a page to a news story (link here), that’s news in itself—even more so if the story is about psychological research.

On Tuesday, March 22, 2022, in the print edition of the paper, there was a major story on “decoding shapes” with the subtitle “Grasping geometrical concepts may make humans special.”  The story describes the research of neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene, an expert on numerical and mathematical cognition.

Dehaene and colleagues have demonstrated that human beings, but not baboons, can pick the “odd one out” when shown several instances of the same geometric shape (e.g., a five-sided irregular form presented in different sizes and orientations) along with a regular five-sided geometrical shape (e.g., a pentagon.) In other words, humans have the concept of regular vs. irregular shapes. When the same task required selecting a cherry as the odd one in the midst of images of watermelon slices, baboons had no trouble in doing so.

Here are the kinds of problems used to test baboons:

Image from The New York Times | Source: Mathias Sablé-Meyer, Stanislas Dehaene et al.

On this seemingly modest basis, Dehaene builds a vast superstructure. He says that human beings are capable of perceiving and creating geometric forms, and this capacity in turn enables them to construct systems for representing ideas—as is needed in creating artistic renderings, or geometric numerical systems. And since he introduced these ideas at a workshop at the Vatican last fall, he adds the following bold conjecture: “The argument I made in the Vatican is that the same ability is at the heart of our capacity to imagine religion.” 

I’m less interested in the possible link between conceptions of geometric forms and conceptions of god (or, if you prefer, God) than in the fact that geometry is now being posited as a uniquely human capacity, just as language has been argued to be uniquely human by linguist Noam Chomsky. Over half a century ago, Chomsky marshaled a huge amount of evidence that linguistic capacity is an exclusively human faculty, and one that allows—via syntax—all kinds of relations to be expressed among objects, actions, and ideas.

Both Chomsky and Dehaene are arguing for a uniquely human capacity, and these two capacities probably overlap little if at all. Language and geometry have very different evolutionary histories and draw on very different neurological systems. Indeed, if any two human capacities merit separation, discursive language and geometric forms would be high on the list. (Music could be a third).

Just this line of thinking induced me, over forty years ago, to conceive of the human intellect as decomposable into separate cognitive systems. When I wrote about spatial intelligence, I had geometry in mind. When I wrote about linguistic intelligence, I had expressive and discursive language in mind. And when I wrote about logical-mathematical intelligence, I had in mind arithmetic, algebra, and logical reasoning.

It’s therefore revealing to me when The New York Times article ends with the following sentences:

“Language is often assumed to be the quality that demarcates human singularity, Dr. Dehaene noted, but perhaps there is something that is more basic, more fundamental. We are proposing that there are languages—multiple languages.”

Perhaps someday, he or his colleagues, will bite the bullet and say “multiple intelligences.”