Honor Your Learner Experience

We need to revolutionize the ways we work, the ways we teach and the ways we learn. Not simply reform the old model, but transform public education into a new, global, innovating enterprise that becomes the engine for a revitalized economy. To accomplish this, we need to address the disconnect between using technology in focused meaningful ways, as opposed to using it just because we can. We need to design lessons that connect technology to lessons seamlessly and incidentally. When designed well, technology-infused instruction is a naturally occurring series of learning opportunities in the classroom. A good friend is fond of saying, “the map in your hand should match the view on the ground.” Instruction is that map, and your classroom is learning’s ground zero.

Educators have been using technologies in classrooms for centuries, and while the technologies change over time, successful teaching and learning have not. Simply put, it’s not about the technology. Identify first the ways we want to reach students and the ways in which we want them to demonstrate understanding, and the appropriate technologies will make themselves evident. Becoming preoccupied with the latest gadgets, bells and whistles is a distraction. Mastery of content, skills and processes stay with students for a lifetime; the “coolness factor” of the technologies they use fades away. Fifteen years ago we used 56K dial up connections, gophers, bulletin board services and three-and-a-half inch floppy disks to save student work. Those students are now out in the workforce being creative and productive with a whole new generation of tech tools. And just as today’s Web 2.0 technologies have blown away memories of technologies circa 1995, so too will the semantic web replace the current crop of tech tools in the not-too-distant future.

Here’s a good litmus test. When you consider utilizing a technology in the classroom, ask yourself, “Is this technology being selected for my teaching preference or my students’ learning success?” If it is your teaching technology of choice, you may want to step back and reassess your instructional priorities. There are good reasons this week’s national dialogue on education did not include a focus on educational technology as part of the solution. It’s not about the technology!

A new age demands a new paradigm, and educators are on its precipice. In a recent day-long workshop, a veteran high school vocational education teacher named Bob voiced his concerns that his students needed real-world skills and experience to be successful. Typically his students came to him after falling short of the mark in the school’s academic track, and he had little patience for pie-in-the-sky educational pedagogy that is more theory than substance. For his students, every day is full of authentic tasks and assessments. Either you get it right or the engine won’t start. You build with know-how or your structure falls apart. The proof is in the doing. There is no room for fluff.

This is a critical point to make about multiple intelligences theory in education. Gardner’s work is extremely popular among educators and is currently in vogue as the antithesis of current trends in testing and accountability. In short, MI can easily become a feel-good theory that symbolizes the kind of fluff Bob and millions of educators like him vehemently oppose. If multiple intelligences theory is reduced to an I’m OK – You’re OK rationalization of what we have always done as teachers, we completely short-sell its potential to transform teaching and learning in the Information Age. If teachers simply use MI theory to validate the way they have always taught, what’s the point? Why waste our time giving Gardner any lip service at all?

It is my contention that MI theory is not fluff and should not be left on the trail of fads educators have left behind in the past. Rather, it provides for us a framework for understanding all the paths to learning so that all learners can be successful. For all his concern about pie-in-the-sky theories, Bob revealed in our workshop discussion that he actually has been accommodating all the intelligences with his learners for years, even before Gardner gave them a name, even those intelligences not traditionally valued in the academic track of his high school. This is true of so many teachers working outside of the mainstream, from vocational and trade classrooms to special education and alternative education settings. This accommodation of all the intelligences can also be seen in the primary grades, where teachers provide learning experiences that are multisensory and multimedial in nature. There are pockets of MI in action in every school open today. With all we know about the human mind today, we have an obligation to nurture those pockets of activity and encourage them to overflow across our schools.

It’s time for a sea change in education; a sea change that raises every learner to the same level of opportunity to succeed. No longer is education a sink-or-swim deficit model inherited from a past era. Regardless of where or what we teach, the emphasis should be on who and how we teach. Sure the influx of new technologies can force the issue, but new technologies put in the hands of a teacher who still teaches only to his intelligence strengths and only within the confines of a specific discipline and class period will not change how he tries to reach his students. What is the good of bringing in blogs, wikis and podcasts into the classroom if they are only used for traditional verbal and logical tasks? MI theory can help teachers make use of these new technologies in ways that transcend their own MI comfort zone and expand their instructional repertoire, transforming their classroom into an authentic, connected, real-world learning zone.

No aspect of learning has been more neglected in education than the affective. From the dawn of standardized testing, the focus has always been on mastering content because content mastery is easy to measure. The Bloom commission identified affective and psychomotor educational objectives, but it is the cognitive objectives that have received attention over the past forty years. Even psychomotor tasks can be observed and measured in concrete instructional tasks. But how do you get your hands around the personal aspect of learning? Gardner’s model of human cognition does just that.

In an age that espouses the notion that all children can learn, the tests and teaching strategies we use in education continue to neglect the personal component of learning. If we are truly going to leave no learner behind, we have to expand our skill set as teachers to include this personal knowing. If learners truly take ownership of their learning and identify how and why what they learn is important, they will achieve at levels far beyond rote memorization of content. If they can internalize what they see and imagine what is not readily evident, and if they can make connections from what they experience personally to larger truths, then all learners can be successful not only in school but throughout their lives.

Recognize the ways you were taught as a student. Embrace them and appreciate them for the time in which they served you well. Then let them go and move on. Honor your learner experience. Think of the greatest teachers you ever had. Do you think they would still be using chalk on slate if they had access to the kinds of tools we have at our disposal today? Great teachers adapt and learn throughout their lives. Great teachers are never satisfied with yesterday’s success. Rather than holding fast to an old paradigm, they help explore and define the new shift in thinking. Honor those innovative teachers who instilled in you a love for learning and a desire to be a teacher yourself; carry on their legacy as a pioneer and innovator in your own time.

Intelligence Quest: Project-Based Learning and Multiple Intelligences

by Walter McKenzie (ISTE, 2012)

Immerse yourself in the possibilities for using multiple intelligences across the curriculum