Howard Gardner on Learning for Understanding - educator - Interview

School Administrator, Jan, 1994 by Elizabeth Donohoe Steinberger

Howard Gardner has challenged not only the ways in which we see ourselves and our children, but also the ways in which we teach and learn. His book Frames of Mind, published in 1983, forwarded his theory of multiple intelligences, which shook the bedrock of traditional cognitive psychology by advocating that each individual is smart in many more ways than can be measured by conventional IQ tests.

In 1991, Gardner attracted national attention in The Unschooled Mind by arguing that even the best students in the best schools leave the classroom with flawed theories about how the world works and why people do what they do. Gardner, a professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, believes that schools have substituted various proxies, such as Carnegie units and other credentials, for genuine knowledge, understanding, and achievement.

An author of a dozen books, Gardner has worked with victims of brain disease at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Boston as well as with highly artistic children at Harvard. Most recently he has directed his efforts toward ATLAS (Authentic Teaching, Learning, and Assessment for all Students), a collaborative project supported by the New American Schools Development Project.

How are teaching and learning being reshaped in ATLAS' communities? Gardner describes the reforms he believes are needed for genuine student understanding and achievement in an interview with The School Administrator.

You have suggested that one of the most striking aspects of educational reform has been the silence about educational purpose. What do you see as being the purpose of schooling in today's world?

Gardner: We managed to go through several years of reform by focusing on things where there probably wasn't going to be a huge amount of disagreement. One point of agreement was that we need to have kids who have basic skills and who work hard--that was not very controversial.

A second was that if we want teachers to be professional, they have to have more control over their lives and what happens in schools. That was not terribly controversial either.

My analysis suggests, however, that ultimately we have to bite the bullet and say what schooling is for and ask how we know whether we are achieving that. So a couple of years ago, I bit the bullet and said the purpose of education is to enhance students' understanding.

This, in itself, is not controversial, either. But when you ask what is understanding and how do you know whether you have achieved it, these questions become very controversial.

What do you mean by "understanding"?

Gardner: Let's say, for example, you have 16 Carnegie units or that you get a certain score on a standardized test. Can I assume then that you understand something? You might say, "Sure, because those tests test for understanding." But here's where things get really interesting.

Research indicates that most students in most schools, including our best students in our best schools, do not really understand. And you say, "What? The students who get A's, who get good scores on the College Boards, and who go to Ivy League schools don't understand?"

Let me give an example from the sciences. When you ask students who get very high grades and go to very good colleges to explain a physical phenomenon, not only can they not explain it but they actually give the same sort of explanations that four-and five-year-olds give.

In mathematics, kids learn how to plug numbers into a formula, but when you give them a problem they have not seen before, most students do not know how to use the formula to solve the problem. In the social sciences, arts, and humanities, a student mat well be able to express a complex phenomenon they have encountered in school or a text, but when something complex happens in the real world, they give very simplistic explanations.

This is where my definition of understanding comes in. I consider an individual to have understood when he or she can take knowledge, concepts, skills, and facts and apply them in new situations where they are appropriate. If students simply parrot back what they have been told or what they have read in a textbook, then we do not really know whether they understand.

We can only really determine whether a student understands when we give the student something new and they can draw upon what they have learned to help answer a question, illuminate a problem, or explain a phenomenon to someone else.

Where do students get these simplistic notions about their world?

Gardner: They get them pretty much on their own by being human beings, by having brains, and by trying, during their early years, to make sense of the world. Kids develop very powerful theories about the world when they are young--theories about matter, mind, and life. A theory about matter, for example, is that sweaters keep you warm so they must have warmth in them. But when you leave a sweater outside, it stays cold.

Many of a child's theories are totally intuitive and totally wrong. They are developed without a lot of help, without a lot of teaching. And that is what I call the "unschooled mind," the mind that is developed without any formal education. It is a wonderful mind. However, if all of these ideas were correct, we would never have had to develop disciplines or teach children new things because they would come to school entirely equipped.