New Kinds of Smart

Would using the idea of ‘dispositions’ help me when talking about these ideas with colleagues? Could I use the idea of helping students to become more ready and more willing, as well as more able, to use different aspects of their intelligence? What would that look like in my classroom?

Being able to escape from what Karl Duncker,13 in his series of experiments in the 1940s, famously referred to as ‘functional fixedness’ – the inability to see more than the most obvious or habitual affordances – has to become a key educational aim for a teacher who takes the idea of distributed intelligence seriously. As Luis Moll has put it, ‘A g

Some of the most powerful thinking in the area of strategic intelligence has come from David Perkins.14 His work is particularly helpful in two crucial areas: defining what strategic (or reflective) intelligence actually is, and seeking to understand the mechanisms of ‘transfer’ that is, how something that had been learned in one context becomes av

Has your ability to make sensible ‘guesstimates’ of the kind of answer you are looking for got better or worse? These are the effects of technology, and it is with these that education has, presumably, to be concerned. As teachers, we cannot know what tools will be available to our students throughout their lifetimes. So we have to think about the

curiosity, determination, resourcefulness, sociability and reflectiveness.

‘intelligence’ is a

Haidt identifies five important moral senses or concerns that he claims run deep in all human societies. They are: 1 Aversion to and protection from harm. 2 Fairness. 3 Loyalty to the group. 4 Respect for authority. 5 Not defiling one’s ‘spiritual purity’.

education at the heart of both personal and community development; its mission is to enable everyone, without exception, to develop all their talents to the full and to realize their creative potential, including responsibility for their own lives and achievement of their personal aims.

We use our intelligence to figure things out, and then we build tools that embody this intelligence, so we don’t have to do it all over again, every time we want to achieve the same goal.