Teachers have to balance demands from various quarters: Howard Gardner
‘Parents should avoid positive and negative narcissism. The challenge is to watch your children very carefully, see what interests them, and find ways to help them.’
After challenging certain conventional notions of education with his ‘ Theory of Multiple Intelligences’, renowned developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has been involved in areas such as design of performance-based assessments, education for understanding and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education over the past two decades.
Speaking on some current trends and contemporary challenges in the sphere of education in an e-mail interview to The Hindu, Prof. Gardner says the best educational systems in the world are the ones that make heroic efforts to provide a quality education for every child...
World over, there seems to be a lot of concern about students’ “learning outcomes”. Findings of the Programme for I n t e r nat i o n a l Student Assessment (PISA) have been evoking varied reactions in different countries. Do you think the emphasis on “learning outcomes” is justified? What, in your opinion, is a useful indicator of quality in teaching and effectiveness in learning?
In this era of global connectedness and competition, I suppose it is inevitable that we will have international comparisons. These comparisons are useful so long as they are not treated as being very important, let alone all- determining. Unfortunately, the comparisons and rankings have become so important that they dominate the thinking of Ministers, and distort what is taught and how it is taught in many countries. (I joke that France would rather be #23 if Germany were #24, than #2 if Germany were #1!) Indeed, I sometimes think that the international comparisons have become so dominant in mainstream educational thinking that we’d be better off without them altogether.
If we are going to have such measures, I think that they should differ significantly from one test administration to another; each year they should use different kinds of problems, prompts, etc; In that way, it will not be possible to ‘teach to the test’ except in the most general way.
I have written a great deal about my own educational goals. If I were the international ‘ czar’ of education, I would focus the assessments on two areas: l) Can the student demonstrate understanding in and across the major disciplines — that is, scientific understanding, Conted on page 7