During last night’s Academy Awards, I was struck by the celebration of the different arts and sciences needed to make a movie and win an Oscar. From the 71 year-old screen writer to the actors thanking their mothers, there was real joy and generosity in applauding the particular skills and intelligences of each nominee.
While I was watching the glitz and glamour, I had today’s blog in my mind (!). I know the Awards are a contest, but talk of losers is rigorously avoided. I am often dismayed as we turn education into a contest, especially one with winners and losers. Often based on business models and assumptions, some schools compete for status through the performance of their workers (teachers) and clients (students). Desperate to ensure our children's academic success, we separate them early into programs which feed our own agendas. For instance, check out today’s story in The Toronto Star about parents in wealthy neighborhoods donating money for special resources and programs to boost the academic results of their kids' schools.
Now this blog is about curriculum design and learning resources, not the politics of education. However, the challenge remains to differentiate learning for all students not differentiate students for success. How can we use the teacher’s art and science to create, deliver, and assess individualized learning for every student, through well-funded and rigorous programs of inclusion and diversity?
If there were an Academy Award for Education, my award for Best Performance by a Researcher would go to Howard Gardner. Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His famous work on multiple intelligences has deeply influenced teachers world-wide, though they have somewhat erroneously confused these intelligences with ‘learning styles.’ For me, the key application of this research is that we should first meet our students at the gate of their own ‘way of knowing’ before driving them down a path of our own preference.
Designing for multiple intelligences is still an untapped resource in our schools. I have added operative terminology to the evolving list of strategies on Page 1 and encourage readers to comment on their use of Gardner’s work.
By the way, Gardner has a brilliant FAQ resource to read as we consider ways to design curriculum to meet the needs of all our students. He also comments in his article Can Technology Exploit Our Many Ways of Knowing on the promise of technology to answer the challenge of designing learning to meet individual student needs and natures.
Now perhaps if Colin Firth played Howard Gardner in his next Academy Award winning film ...
0 comments:
Post a Comment