Intelligence is not fixed - Brian Boyd
Howard Gardner is Professor of Cognition at the University of Harvard, and with his colleague, David Perkins, has been the co-founder and co-director of Project Zero - which is a huge project based around the liberal arts and trying to look at learning and teaching within educational establishments within America, initially. But what they’ve done, emerging out of that, is that they've developed, in Gardner's case, a theory of intelligence and, in Perkins’s case, a theory of teaching for understanding.
Taken together these two ideas are amongst the most powerful available to teachers, at the moment, across the world. Because what they’re, essentially, saying is that all young people have the potential to be effective learners and if you really want them to be learners who can actually adapt and transfer their learning to new and unfamiliar circumstances then you need to focus in on their understanding. And the only way you can determine if someone has understood something is to give them opportunities to perform their understanding.
So these two ideas, I think, are quite powerful... and I think Howard Gardner, having been writing now for something like 35 years, or so, hasn’t stood still - he’s had his phase of Multiple Intelligences, he’s moved on with some of his colleagues to look at Good Works and now, his most recent idea is Five Minds for the Future - which takes multiple intelligences and moves them on to another level.
And I think, essentially, what’s underpinning all of this is the idea that in the 21st century, then the kind of teaching methods of the 20th century will no longer suffice and we are going to have to equip young people with the skills to be effective learners and they have to, essentially, learn how to learn. And knowing that intelligence is not fixed and is not limited and can be grown and can be improved and that you can work on the things which you’re not naturally good at, I think, is a very optimistic way of looking at the human condition.
Professor Reuben Feuerstein is a psychologist who studied under Jean Piaget and who was working at, roughly, the same time as Vygotsky - but the two of them didn’t know of each other’s work because Vygotsky’s work was banned by Stalin in Russia and wasn’t published until the late 1960s. Essentially, what he has done is to try and identify the kind of gaps that there may have been in someone’s learning - in their cognitive development, whenever he comes across them. And through a process of what he called Dynamic Assessment, he can identify the areas that they, then, need to focus on to become powerful learners.
He’s worked with a whole range of different groups of people; from holocaust survivors to people who have suffered brain damage in modern-day Israel, because of a whole range of things - including bombing and so on. But, also working with a huge influx into Israel in the 1950s, of people from Somalia - who arrived having had no education at all, and who, on using conventional IQ tests, appeared to be non-educatable. And he argued that simply on the basis of interacting with these people, it was clear that they were anything but.
So he’s developed this very, very rigorous, very detailed, very complex set of dynamic assessment techniques, and he would claim to be able to identify in any human being, the gaps that they’ve had in their cognitive development, and to be able to mediate with them so that they can fill those gaps. So, he would argue that nobody is incapable of being an effective learner, and one of the phrases he uses - which is quite an interesting one - is, 'chromosomes do not have the last word'.
So, it doesn’t matter if your genetic inheritance is… that should never limit your potential as a learner. So, I think, the notion that if someone presents themselves as being unable to understand something, then you don’t make the assumption that they are unintelligent. You, rather, assume that their intelligence is lying dormant and the process of mediation by a teacher is to allow that intelligence - that latent intelligence - to come to the surface. Now, that’s quite a different model, a different paradigm, I think, than the one that existed prior to the work of Howard Gardner and Reuben Feuerstein.