Education for Intelligence: A dream lost?
The books, textbooks, and more books in today’s P-12 schools are filled with content that is aligned with “standards-based education”, “common core standards”, “achievement tests”, and math and literacy outcomes. In our frantic search for “academic excellence” in the last 20 some years since No Child Left Behind policies were implemented, we gained some measurable outcomes in math and literacy achievement. What did we lose?
We lost our sense completely.
We lost what it means to develop the “human”, with the complex abilities, endless possibilities and bursting energy. The likelihood of producing Einsteins, Hawkings, Chomskys, Lynn Nottages, Laura Demings of our time is dwindling after each teaching to the test era. We lost our passion for growing young children’s intellectual potential.
As a researcher, teacher educator, mother, and professional trainer, a passion of mine is to look into how to grow the “intellectual mind” in the child, despite the narrow focus on academic only. Long inspired by Lillian Katz’s famous dichotomy of narrow academics versus intellectual goals (https://deyproject.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/dey-lively-minds-4-8-15.pdf) for young children, I have led research studies where we would present higher level intellectual challenges to first and second graders, and particularly those living in low-income settings, and explore “with the right tools and implementing best practices, what happens when we demand a lot intellectually, and we give children opportunities to be motivated, creative, collaborative, and to lead?” As gifted education programs are reserved for mostly “Whitest and Brightest”, identified by achievement data and cognitive tests already conquered by parent-trained and resourced children, I wondered what would happen if we equipped young children from low-income settings with resources and pedagogical support and then push them to engage in tasks requiring intellectual rigor?
The results of one study were amazing, with the majority of two classrooms full of second graders understanding fourth grade concepts such as how day and night works, why moon’s shape appears to change, and how seasons occur after an inquiry-based learning model which includes 3-D modules, experiments, and lots of reading and writing in a play context.
Another study with first graders and dinosaurs presented them with a make-believe role of paleontologists (with personalized name tags) and explore dinosaurs through 3-D technologies, coding, digital stories, reading, writing, digging fossils, and constructing their own dinosaurs using engineering concepts.
Results from the teachers’ perspectives were amazing, in four-weeks, teachers rated most children to be more motivated, more creative, more knowledgeable and more collaborative. One teacher said: “I am back to my element!” after participating in these project-based learning.
The whole motivation for our young intellectuals was: “As a paleontologist, you will present your knowledge, your finds from dinosaur dig, and your dinosaur structure to Kindergartners in our Dinosaur Museum”, which fired up young minds to challenge themselves, take risks, make decisions, create, produce, and learn with an authentic purpose. Longest stories were written, and longest minutes spent on tables, lying on floor and negotiating with peers, learning, as they tacked the challenges of the project.
If these practices such as inquiry and project based learning exist successfully, why are we having increasing amounts of low motivation, boredom, and lack of initiative in our young children as they move up the grades? I explored this question in the largest research conference for educational sciences. I commented in a session with a panel of experts: “The only two bodies of knowledge we test and value are math and literacy outcomes in schools, especially for young children, beginning as early as age 3. Unless we test and tie consequences for schools for developmental outcomes, such as social emotional skills and intellectual abilities, we will not have the Einsteins of our time growing up within our Pre-K through 5th grade classrooms, when it is the critical period for their talents to grow. Instead, we will produce young minds with untapped potential, all with the same cookie cutter expectations and outcomes as measured by narrow academic goals”.
I do not feel I did my service to our children until we demand for education for intelligence, do you?
