I would like to invite you to watch this video of Howard Gardner,an American developmental psychologist and Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University, speaking about his theory of Multiple Intelligences. Some years ago, intelligence was considered to be a single general ability we were born with, and which apparently didn’t develop or change a lot throughout our life.
Howard Gardner differentiates intelligence into specific “modalities”, and according to him, we have to speak about eight different intelligences, of which each individual possesses “a unique blend”.
Fortunately, this theory has not only changed the way we understand intelligence, but also education. When I was my pupils’ age, we were regarded as “knowledge holes” teachers had to fill with information. They were the instructors, the decision-makers, the controllers of the “learning environment”, the ones who “knew”. Nowadays however, most of us feel we accompany our pupils in their learning process, we work with them and feel rewarded with their enthusiasm and interest in discovering and learning. Thanks to them, we have become more creative, we have got used to including technology in our lessons to make them more attractive and we have understood that we don’t have to know everything because they may know what we don’t ….
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