Curriculum and instruction frameworks

Howard Gardner and Evelyn Sowell on the Perfect Student

Will our educational system ever produce the "perfect student" graduate of a "perfect school?" If we follow theories of Howard Gardner and Evelyn Sowell, there is a strong possibility. But we must also re-evaluate our testing and evaluation procedures.

The ideal student coming out of the perfect school would not necessarily be the person who has performed the best on multiple choice tests or has had the best attendance record. My ideal student is someone who has learned how to enhance and develop his or her innate intelligences and the perfect school is an institution that helps the student achieve that goal.

Since everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, I believe Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences is an excellent approach to learning. Gardner believes intelligence is "the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural settings." (1.) Using his background in biology and psychology, Gardner tapped into his research to devise his list of seven intelligences: 1., Visual-Spatial Intelligence; 2., Musical Intelligence; 3., Verbal Intelligence; 4., Logical-Mathematical Intelligence; 5., Interpersonal Intelligence; 6., Intrapersonal Intelligence; and 7., Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence.

Gardner believes we are all born with these intelligences, but some are more developed than others by the time we enter the classroom. The challenge is to get educators to implement curriculum that can be adapted to those in the class who are more developed in certain areas, but also not lose those whose intelligences aren't quite as refined. Therefore, curriculum must be engaging on several different levels if learning can be achieved. An educator can use different methodologies in presenting lessons, but the student must be willing to work through difficult areas, or areas where he or she needs to refine one of the innate intelligences.

In my opinion, the perfect student would have made an attempt to learn difficult material and also has made the effort to fully master his natural talents. This is all we can ask of students. There are going to be subjects students will not like and success in these areas must be adapted to each student. Often subjects that are not "liked" are those that are not taught in succinct or tangible terms. The challenge for educators is to bring each individual child to a successful level but also to achieve success with the whole class. Unfortunately, success is often measured by standardized tests and assessments to which we must adhere. While I may not agree with standardized testing, this realm of evaluation is a reality.

Educators face a daunting task and our ever-changing and diverse demographics continue to make teaching more challenging to the educational system as well as to individual educators. In order to give more individualized attention, which is the key to the perfect student's success, we need to depend on the administration of the perfect school to be there for support, including assigning certain teachers to tutoring duties where needed, possibly including assigning teachers with specialty areas to children who need work in those subjects.

Gardner says in order to succeed, our approach to learning should be more of a historical nature. Gardner says learning should encompass the questions we ask as children, such as "Where do we come from?" And "Why do I look like I do?" (2.) He says it is not necessarily success in performing mathematical equations that makes one successful at mathematics. Gardner says it is the duty of educators to get students to think of the underlying language or basis for mathematics, or where mathematics came from.

A am) not to be against disciplines, but to think of disciplines not as subject matters, which are convenient ways of providing catalogs and classrooms, but rather as ways of thinking about the world that human beings have developed," he told an interviewer. "How we think scientifically: what it means to have a hypothesis and to test it, how we disconfirm notions that people have, what does it mean to read a text and go beyond the literal, to ask probing questions of a text, to understand things like irony, things like the framing of a text, and these are disciplined ways of thinking that actually allow us to give better answers to these essential questions. In the end, I think people want to give personal answers, answers that have meaning to themselves, but those answers should be, as it were, "passed through" the disciplines of the world, because we have learned to think about things in quite different ways in the past few hundred and the past thousand years."

In this manner, says Gardner, a child learns to learn about himself rather than scientific, mathematic or language formulas that represent relatively little if anything to him and his world.

Gardner favors: "...A curriculum that's focused on questions and which sees literacies and disciplines as means rather than as ends and also a curriculum in which projects and other kinds of rich experiences are really grounded, not because projects are good or bad in themselves, but because they're the best ways of giving answers and of making use of disciplines." (3.)

My conception of curriculum encompasses several theories but is best summed up by Evelyn Sowell's integrative theory in that she claims students make the most of learning when there is an integration of learning materials, making use of a student's different abilities to work at different levels. (4.)

There really is no one most important source for content, and according to Sowell, if the educator makes adjustments to curriculum based on different materials at hand, students have a better chance at success.

For example, she says it is important for the educator to scan as many instructional materials as possible, including textbooks, teacher resources, computer programs, manipulative materials and games. Teachers who reflect on their curriculum and test it by asking and interviewing as well as checking how well the curriculum is supported by local standardized tests is vital.

In this manner, the role of the teacher contributes a great deal to the success of the perfect student and the success of the perfect school. Teachers must constantly re-evaluate and change curriculum to keep up with the times and keep up with the changing student body, a student body that has many diverse talents and gifts. The role of the student is to assess what he is understanding and what he is not understanding and this must be voiced so that the teacher can enable the student to learn.

Sowell says: Curriculum is developed by people whose beliefs on what students should be learning and that processes involve decision making by people who are guided by their beliefs and values about what students should learn curriculum will evolve and change only if educators make internal transitions.

As for judging whether the ideal student has achieved his or her goals, authentic assessment given at year's end would be the ideal way to evaluate a student's peformance. I believe there is a great deal of room for improvement in the evaluation methods used at most schools. Most schools formally determine if the student has succeeded in achieving the goals for his schooling through standardized tests and essays, which only measure verbal and math skills that have been developed.