When Howard Gardner got married to a developmental psychologist, they decided to begin their honeymoon by going to Geneva where they met Piaget and shook hands with him. He had no idea that one day he would have so much to say about developmental psychology. Since then he has challenged Piaget on several issues because he felt he was very central to his work and he admired him.

Gardner's Three Arguments with Piaget

First, was that Piaget believed that if you studied children you had to know what they were going to become—what the end state of development would be and he believed that it was to be a scientist.

However, in Gardner's own training he had spent a much time working in the arts. He felt that there was something wrong with a theory that only talked about the mind of the scientist as being the endall of a child's development.

So he began to explore what development would be like if one thought of participation in the arts as an artist, or a critic, or a performer or a connoisseur as being a viable end state for human development.

This was not to say that human beings should develop to become artists any more than they should develop to become scientists but rather that they could develop many different kinds of human beings.

The second argument with Piaget, and the one that Gardner became infamous for, was his disagreement with the notion that there was a single thing called intelligence, which could be measured by an intelligence test.

Gardner did an elaborate analysis of intelligence that is described in his book called Frames of Mind, and eventually argued that there are seven different kinds of intelligence. (See page 18 ) He added an eighth in the 80s.

Gardner remarks that Piaget thought he was studying all of intelligence, he believed it was actually logical, mathematical intelligence whereas Gardner was talking about intelligence that artists have as well as others that are in the human sphere—something that concerned with global issues, moral issues, issues of value and the like.

Gardner's third argument with Piaget—the deepest one—had to do with the most interesting claim that Piaget made, that children pass through stages of cognitive development. Which basically posited that infants know the world in one way, five-year-olds in another way, ten-year-olds in another way, and fifteen-year-olds in still another way. Part of this developmental sequence is that when you go from nine to eleven or from thirteen to sixteen years not only do you see the world in a very different way, you can't even remember how you used to see the world.

So at age seven you don't believe that you ever thought that if a ball of clay was squished, there was less clay there; or that if water were poured into a different kind of vessel, there will be more or less water depending on the shape of the vessel. Even though every four-year-old in the world believes that.

Where Gardner feels Piaget was wrong was in his argument that when people get older they see the world in a different way and they no longer have access to earlier ways of knowing.

Gardner argues that most of us, except in areas where we are expert, continue to think the way we did when we were five years of age. We continue to think the way we did before we went to school, which is a pretty radical thing to say. But to figure out what is understanding and how can we determine whether understanding has been achieved is a much more difficult proposition.

Gardner defines understanding as the capacity (knowledge, skills, concepts, facts) learned in one context, usually the school context, and used in a new context in a place where you haven't been forewarned that you should make use of that knowledge.

If you were only asked to use knowledge in the same situation in which it was introduced, you might understand, but you might not; we can't tell. But if something new happened out in the street or in the sky or in the newspaper, and you can draw on your earlier knowings, then you understand.

In his book, The Unschooled Mind, there is a section on the 1991 Gulf War that provided brilliant examples in America of not understanding at the highest levels. In history, in political science, in economics and in physics, there were rampant examples of misunderstanding.

Gardner introduces his approach with three common-sense examples.

Example 1. In the first five years of life, children all over the world, with very little formal schooling, learn to speak, to understand, to tell stories, to tell jokes, to draw, to sing, to invent new tunes, to engage in pretend play—all the things that Piaget and other psychologists demonstrated. Even though nobody knows how to teach these things, kids learn them all.

Then they go to school, to the very place where we are supposed to know how to teach them, and suddenly learning becomes very hard and many of them do not do well. That is a paradox and an enigma.

Example 2. Students at the best universities in the United States (like MIT and Johns Hopkins), with very high grades in physics, leave their class and are given a problem to solve on the street, or a game to play, that involves various physical principles. Not only do they fail to use what they learned in school but they actually answer in the same way that five-year-olds do, or for that matter in the way pre-Aristotelians and Aristotelians did.

Example 3. Gardner's daughter, an otherwise excellent student, once called him up when she was a sophomore in college. She was crying on the telephone. She said it was because she could not understand physics,."It's my physics; I don't understand it," she said. Gardner treid to pacify her by telling her he really respected her for taking physics because it's difficult and he himself wouldn't have taken it in college. He told her that he didn't care what grade she got get, but that it was really important that she understand physics.

He told her to go to her instructor and have him explain to her what it is that she couldn't understand. Exasperated, she exclaimed, "dad, you don't get it! I've never understood." This had a profound impact on Gardner. His daughter was not saying that she was a faker or a "poseur". What she was saying is something most of us experience–we know the moves to make in school, to get good grades and even to be successful, but we also know that if people put the questions to us in another way, if they push to see how much we have really understood, the whole house of cards might fall.

Obstacles to Understanding

n Short-answer assessments or Gardner calls a "text test context". The test is based on a textbook and the textbook tells you the answers you have to give.
n The correct answer compromise is an "entente" between the teacher and the student. If you respond this way, nobody should ask any further question. No one is made uncomfortable, but deeper understanding is avoided.
n The pressure for coverage: there are 37 chapters in the book and you must get through all 37 chapters.

So, we have three vignettes. The young child learns so easily; the school child has difficulty. The students who get "A"s at the best universities in the world are still Aristotelians in their models of the physical world. What is going on here? Gardner calls it cognitive Freudianism.

Freud convinced people that, as adults, we continue to have the same personality traits as when we were children. We fight the same battles we fought with our parents and our siblings. Gardner says, "Most people who live in a modern western society believe this. "If you don't believe it and you pay me US$100 an hour, I will convince you that it is true," he adds. "That is what psychoanalysis is all about. I'm making the claim that Freud was correct in an area that he wasn't expert in, but Piaget was." Gardner claims most of us continue to think the way we did when we were five years of age, except in areas where we are experts.

Gardner analysis of why it is so difficult to go beyond the five-year-old mind has three focuses, first the young natural learner: the 3, 4 or 5-year-old who speaks so much about the world without any formal schooling. Then there is the student who basically masters everything the school requires so he or she can get to the next level but he doesn't really understand. Then there is the person who can use knowledge in new situations, the expert.

There is a form of knowing (theory of knowledge) that goes with each of these three focuses. The expert is a person who can use the skills that are valued in his or her culture in context. So when a historical example comes up, he can draw on history; when a physical example comes up he can draw from physics, and so on. That is what we want; that is why we go to school. If people are not going to be able to use the knowledge we may as well close schools down. Scholastic knowledge is what we are very good at doing in school; but unless that scholastic knowledge can be activated in new circumstances it remains inert and essentially useless.

We teach people notations, squiggles on paper, formal concepts like what is gravity, what is density, what is force... People who have no sense of what it is like in the world can give you a formula and a definition if that's what is called for in class.

Then, there are epistemic forms. Epistemic forms relates to how the people think in the different disciplines because to think like a historian is not the same as to think like a literary critic or a biologist.

This is what school is supposed to do. But in the first years of life a natural learner benefits from what Piaget so brilliantly described: sensory motor knowledge, learning about the world, using your hands and your eyes, exploring the world of objects, the world of liquids poured from one container to another what Gardner calls first-order symbolic competence. People use words, pictures and gestures, to communicate meanings. That is what every five-year-old can do.

That is the good part. However, five-year-olds do one thing that is troublesome: they form intuitive conceptions or theories—theory of matter, theories of mind, theories of life. Every normal five year-old develops these theories. And it is very good for getting along in the world. However, the theories are wrong. School is supposed to replace the erroneous theories with better theories.

So what is a theory of matter? A theory of matter is: if I have a heavy object in this hand, a light object in this hand and I release them at the same time, the heavier one will fall more quickly. That is what you learn intuitively. Heavy things fall more quickly. However, Galileo went to the tower of Pisa, dropped two objects, and since then we understand that that is not in fact what happens. We understand that the laws of acceleration are independent of weight. But as children we develop a very powerful theory of matter and that is very hard to shake.

Here is a theory of life: every five-year-old believes that if it is moving, it is alive; if it is not moving, it is dead. This is a very useful theory. However sleeping dogs, and computers are a real problem. Are computers that display moving images alive or dead? It is very hard to say.

A theory of mind is very relevant, I've got a mind; you've got a mind. If we look alike then our minds are the same. If we don't look alike, our minds are different. If you look like me, you've got a good mind; if you don't look like me, you've got a bad mind. This is a very powerful theory that is very well entrenched in our minds. It shows up in all kinds of places. Just turn on the television for evidence. It is this that education is supposed to deal with, and it is this, Gardner maintains, that education has, by and large, failed to deal with. These are again just the scholastic acquisitions.

Why does this happen? Gardner claims it happens because there are different kinds of constraints operating on us.

Constraints Operating on Us

The first constraint has to do with the kind of species we are. We learn certain things very easily. We develop certain theories very readily, and other ones are extremely hard for us to develop. Why this should be the case is a whole interesting evolutionary question.

Then there are institutional constraints. If you put 50 people in a room like this and one person in front of them, it is very hard to explain things so that all 50 people can understand; for every person who is nodding, three are nodding off.

There are also disciplinary constraints. The moves that have been developed over the centuries for analysis in one discipline are very different from the moves in other disciplines. Physical causality is not like historical causality or literary causality.

These constraints contribute to the problem being described.

Gardner, however, feels there's hope. The hope lies in two institutions.

One of them, the apprenticeship, is very old. There are many powerful clues about how to educate for understanding offered in the apprenticeship. The second is a new institution, more familiar in the United States than in most other countries, though it is spreading rapidly: the children's museum, or the science museum, or the discovery museum, or, for those of you who have been to San Francisco, the Exploratorium. There are very powerful education implications in those two institutions.

The natural learner displays intuitive understanding. He or she is very promiscuous with the theories already developed in the young mind. Whenever anything happens, the young child draws on the theories of mind, matter and life, to explain them, whether or not those theories are appropriate at all.

The scholastic learner never tries to apply the theory anywhere, except where he or she is told to. It is exactly the opposite of the natural learner. So the scholastic learner gives a ritualized performance. The teacher asks the question, the student gives the prescribed answer or they are told that they are wrong, and you go on to the next student.

The disciplined learner, the expert, on the other hand produces a discipline of understanding: not only can he or she draw on knowledge when it is appropriate but, equally important, does not draw on that knowledge when it is not appropriate.
The five-year-old is too promiscuous and uses the knowledge all the time. The ten-year-old is repressed (the opposite of being promiscuous) and almost never uses it. But the person with disciplined understanding has good taste and uses the knowledge just when it is appropriate. This comes about because there are constraints, also gaps.
According to Gardner there are some deep and epistemological reasons why it is very difficult to teach for understanding.

If we take "Cook's Tour" of the different disciplines we will see that this is not a problem just for somebody else's discipline; it is a problem for every discipline.

Problem with Physics. Most people remain five-year-olds or Aristotelians even though they studied physics. There is a wonderful example, twenty-five Harvard students have just graduated, all wearing their gowns and their mortar boards. An interviewer says to the students: "Tell me, why is the earth warmer in the summer than it is in the winter?" Twenty-three out of the 25 students immediately came up with the same answer, the answer that you would come up with if you did not know what I was lecturing about: namely that the earth is closer to the sun in the summer than it is in the winter. Now if we think about it, that does not make any sense because it would not account for the seasons in different parts of the world. The right explanation has to do with the angle of the earth on its axis as it makes its rotations. But 23 out of 25 students forget to apply what they have learned in their astronomy classes and give the same five-year-old kind of answer.

Problem with Biology

Research shows that students, who have as many as two or three courses in biology focusing on the topic of evolution, still do not understand the basics of evolution. They still believe that something in one generation can be passed on to the next, even if it was acquired in that generation. They are also still perfectionists. They think that each organism is trying to get more perfect and there is an unseen hand that is guiding that perfection rather than simply variation and selection within a particular ecological niche. So problems in physics extend to biology and to the other sciences as well.

Problem with Mathematics

Mathematics is all abstract. It has nothing to do with the real world. So maybe people do not have misconceptions in the area of mathematics. What they have instead is what Gardner call rigid algorithms. They learn to fill in numbers into a formula.
This is the problem. There are six times as many students as professors. If there are ten professors, how many students are there? The answer is 60. But if you were asked to capture the above information in a written equation where S stands for students and P stands for professors, most people will write the following equation: 6S=P. This is because if you analyze the sentence it says there are six times as many students as there are professors. However what they are actually writing is "six times sixty equals ten" which is clearly an absurd result.

What happens in mathematics is that students learn how to plug numbers into formulas, how to solve equations. As long as the information is presented to them in a certain canonical order, they will get the answer right. If, however, the problem is presented in a new way, in a way that actually describes understanding of the formalism, most people will not get it right because they will not understand the formalism.

"I can think back to my own education. I studied the quadratic equation and I must have solved 500 problems with the quadratic equation. I'm sure by the time I finished school, I could do the quadratic equation in my sleep. Never did anybody give me any education of what a quadratic equation stood for. Nowadays if I ran into a problem I wouldn't have a clue that it involved the quadratic equation, even though I might, on a dark and stormy night, remember what a quadratic equation was. But I got very good grades in mathematics because I wasn't expected to know where to use this kind of formalism," rues Gardner.

So, the problem in science is misconceptions. The problem in mathematics is rigidly applied algorithms.

Problem in the Arts, in the Humanities

In the arts and the humanities the problem is different. Gardner calls it scripts or stereotypes. Early on in life children develop very powerful theories about the world. A favourite script is the restaurant script. Every four-year-old knows that if you go to a restaurant, somebody comes and seats you. You are given the menu; you order. Food comes. You eat it and then you call for the cheque, and you leave.

If you go to McDonald's you pay first but that is an exception to the script. Every four-year-old also knows about birthday parties: who comes, what you serve, that kind of thing. The rules are different in different cultures but everybody knows about birthday parties.

Actually, the best example of the unschooled mind in the arts comes from the university of Cambridge in the UK. In the 1920s a literary critic and poet named IA Richards did a study of Cambridge undergraduates. He published it in a book titled Practical Criticism. He took Cambridge undergraduates who were the best and brightest literary students. He gave them twelve poems and he asked them two questions about the poems. What do they mean? Are they any good?

What did he find? He found that the students did not have a clue about which poems were good (according to the critics) and which were bad. They rejected John Donne. They rejected Gerald Manley Hopkins. They embraced a Sunday poet who couldn't get into the "Cambridge Chronicle" and, when they were asked what accounted for the quality, they replied: if a poem rhymed, scanned, dealt with a pleasant subject, but was not too sentimental, it was good. But if it dealt with philosophy or anything tragic or anything abstract, it was bad. So, here you have very, very good students who have studied literature, who, when the book or poem credit is removed display the same kind of taste that someone with no education in literature would exhibit.

So, essentially what Gardner is to doing is arguing that in every area of the curriculum we have real problems that reveal how difficult it is to educate for understanding. We have misconceptions in the sciences, rigidly applied algorithms in mathematics and scripts and stereotypes in social studies, humanities and the arts.

For Gardner one source of hope is intaking some lessons from the old institution of apprenticeships and the new institution of children's museums.

People usually misunderstand Gardner and think he's taking about instituting practices like seven-year agreements between the apprentice and the master where the apprentice is indentured and has to sweep the floor and that kind of thing, or that we should close schools down in an Ivan Illich sense and put everybody in children's museums. That is definitely not what he means.

That there are very powerful educational messages in these two institutions that can help educate for understanding. In the case of the apprenticeship, a young person works for someone who is the master of his or her discipline or craft, and who uses that discipline or craft every day in the course of genuine problem solving. The master poses the problems and requires products from the apprentice at his or her level of competence; when the apprentice becomes more competent then the standards are raised.

The master never has to take kids and test them at the end of the week, or the end of the year because, essentially he and the student are assessing every day. Moreover the master embodies the learning that he or she wants the child to have.

In the United States, every teacher can read and write but very few of our elementary school teachers actually do read and write. In fact, in a very alarming statistic, the average American school teacher reads one book a year. People who live in a literate world who read and write and talk about what they are reading and writing will have youngsters who do the same. People who simply say you should read but turn on the TV for seven hours give a very different message.

As far as the children's museum is concerned this is a very new invention. Basically, until 25 years ago, there were almost no children's museums. But these are places that contain very lively demonstrations of many of the principles that students learn about in school, across the curriculum.

They allow children to explore those principles, those ideas, at their own pace and in ways that are comfortable for that child. Frank Oppenheimer, who founded the Exploratorium in San Francisco, said: "Nobody flunks museum." It is a very powerful idea.

Garner remarks, "I became a devotee of children's museums because when I took kids to children's museums I often found that kids who were called bright in school could not find their way around. They were very unschooled. But kids who were not considered bright in school could often learn very well in those contexts. I will explain later why that is very important."

In the case of misconceptions, if you believe the world is flat, but every day or every year you travel around the world and you come back to where you started before, that tends to belie the notion that the world is flat. In a Christopherian encounter you expose your theories to disconfirmation. If your theories are consistently disconfirmed, you will slowly abandon them, and hopefully construct a better one.

Most school kids believe that the reason that you are warm when you put on a sweater, is because that sweater has warmth in it. If every year, in school during the winter, you put a sweater outside and you come in the morning and find it is freezing cold, that tends to disconfirm the notion that there is warmth inherent in the sweater.
Christopherian encounters have to happen over and over again.

To use an analogy: think about the brain with a mind as a surface that, earlier in life, becomes very much engraved with these primitive theories. What school usually does is simply put some powder over that engraving so you can't see it. And as long as you are in school, it is the powder that you notice. When you leave school, and you slam the door, the powder puffs up and the engraving is still there, the early theory. What happens in the Christopherian encounter is that you slowly upgrade that early engraving and you etch a new and better one.

"But you can see that it doesn't happen in one time. Let me tell you what is wrong with the "one time" thing. If you ask my son Benjamin, who is now all of seven years old, what's the shape of the world, he will tell you it is round. This makes you think he is very smart. But if you asked Benjamin where he is standing he will say: 'That's easy. I'm on the flat part underneath.' His theory has been totally unaffected but he has learned the powder that is required, basically if you want to shut up your father, you say that the world is round because that's what grownups say, but who could believe it?" Says Gardner.

Thus Christopherian encounters challenge those notions every day. In mathematics, the cure for a rigidly applied algorithm is what Gardner calls rich exploration of the relevant semantic domain. What that means in English is that you must know what the equation stands for.

You have to understand the formalism. So if you are going to do distance, rate and time problems—a common algebra exercise—you do a lot of experimenting. You try to predict how long it will take for something to get from one point to the other. You develop an intuition for the formalism so that when you learn the formalism it actually refers to something that you already have an intuition for, that you already have an understanding for.

This has been done quite brilliantly with calculus where, before any of the formalism is introduced, kids learn to make predictions about their bodies moving at various speeds and what kind of graphs would be produced over the course of time, and things like that.

A mathematician is not somebody who remembers all the formalisms. A mathematician is somebody who doesn't care if he remembers because, if necessary, he/she can derive it again because he/she understands what it stands for. That is why most of us are not mathematicians.

In the case of the humanities, the cure for stereotypes is the regular adoption of multiple stances. If it becomes a regular habit of mind to look at things from many different points of view, you will gradually abandon stereotypical thinking.

During the Gulf war, my older son went to school where there were kids from many different countries. The teacher had a very good idea. Rather than everybody just giving what the cable news network reported, he had a student from Iran, and a student from Kuwait, and a student from Israel etc, give their understanding of what was happening every day. Then, a few weeks after that, the teacher asked the kids in the school: "What do you think Moshe will think about this and what do you think Omar will think about this?" That is giving students the opportunity to put themselves into other people's minds.

If you study any revolution, from the point of view of the vanquished as well as the victors, you get a very different story. If you study the American revolution from the point of view of the British, where it was a colonial uprising, and from the point of view of the French, where it was a good opportunity to get at the British, it is a very different story than if you just read the average American text book. That is how you break down stereotypical thinking, but it has to be a regular habit of mind, otherwise it won't work at all.

Gardner is involved in a project, which is actually designed to educate for understanding. It is based upon three core ideas that he has worked out in conjunction with some colleagues at Harvard:

The identification of rich, generative ideas; nutritious topics on which it is worth spending a lot of time;
The development of different kinds of teaching languages—multiple ways to approach those topics, so we can be sure that students have maximum access to those ideas; and
What he calls "ongoing assessment". Ongoing assessment (or "assessment in context") means assessment is taking place all the time by students and by peers as well as by the teacher.

Gardner believes that if one can identify rich ideas, explore them in multiple ways and give students much opportunity to assess their own learning, that there then is a chance for education for understanding.

Fleshing Out Abstract Ideas

According to Gardner the greatest enemy of understanding is coverage. If you are determined to cover everything in the book, you virtually guarantee that very few students will understand. So, if you want to educate for understanding you have got to make tough choices about what to focus on.

And obviously you should focus on those things that have the biggest mileage. If you are teaching a course in history or social studies and you decide, say, to focus on democracy, or if you are teaching a course in biology and you choose to focus on evolution, you can cover a lot of the important material in those subjects by focusing on those topics. It will mean, however, that if you are doing history you are not going to get through every decade. If you are doing biology, you are not going to get through every cycle or through every part of the cell, or every part of the tree. It's a hard choice, but we think it is a choice worth making. If you have rich concepts and you spend time on them, you can approach them in different ways.

"Growing out of my theory of multiple intelligences, I claim that almost any topic that is worth spending time on can be approached from at least five different "windows" into the same room.

1. Narrational—or the story mode.

2. Quantitative, logical rational way of dealing with numbers, principles, causality.

3. Foundational way, asking very basic kinds of questions such as: Why is this important? How does it relate to what came before? How is it related to today?

4. Aesthetic—What does it look like? What does it sound like? What appearance does it make? What patterns and configurations? How does it impress you?

5. Hands On—What is it actually like to be this thing, to do this thing? If you are studying evolution, what is it like to breed drosophila? If you are studying democracy, what is it like to be in a group that decides by consensus as opposed to one that decides by autocracy, oligarchy or some other political principle?

There are two advantages of using these multiple entry points

First of all, you are more likely to reach every child, because not every child learns most easily in the same way. That is one of the burdens of the theory of multiple intelligences, which you've been spared today, but I believe that kids have different ways of learning.

Second of all, and equally important, if you approach a topic from many different vantage points you are modelling for a student what it is like to be an expert. Because an expert is always somebody who can represent knowledge in more than one way. No expert can think about his or her topic in only one way. Experts have very flexible ways of thinking about their topics and that is what you are modelling as a master to your apprentices if you approach a topic in a number of different ways.

Assessment

In what we call authentic assessments, we get very far away from short-answer examinations, which are particularly a plague of the USA, to what I call performance-based exams where you actually demonstrate what it is that you are supposed to be able to do. Only in the USA would there be a conviction that, if you want to know how somebody can write, rather than ask him to write, you ask him to fill in the blanks. But other things that you have heard of—projects, exhibitions, portfolios and what Gardner calls "process folio" which is not just your finished work, but actually your drafts and your thinking en route to fashioning a product—are good ways of assessing whether the students are really understanding.

In the work that Gardner and his team are doing on this project on understanding they work with teachers in local schools and we ask them first to define what we call "understanding goals"—these are the broad things that we want to achieve in a course. They will be very familiar things to you, like having a sense of the scientific method or understanding something about the nature of revolution.

What they then do, which may not be so familiar, is define a whole family of "understanding performances"—these are performances that, if a student can carry them out, will count as evidence for understanding.

This is a play with language, but it is an important play, because people tend to think of understanding as something that happens in the head. We say, maybe it does but we don't know whether you understand unless you can perform your understanding publicly. So, your performance involves analyses, critiques, debates, projects that you create, exhibitions that you put on, things like that.

Finally, given the "understanding goals" and the "understanding performances", how are those performances going to be assessed? You have to make the assessment criteria absolutely clear. People know exactly what they are going to have to be able to do in order to perform an understanding. There are no surprises, no mysteries, no key to the answers, but rather examples all around of what a good performance is and what are not such good performances, from apprentice level all the way to that of a master.

Gardner says he has talked about this stuff for a while and has researched it for a long time, but, like many other professors, never actually used it in my his teaching. Last year, he decided to do an experiment with his students who, as Harvard graduate students, are even more privileged than IA Richard's Cambridge undergraduates.

He took his them in the basic course in cognitive development where they study Piaget, Bruner, Vygotsky and people like that, and tested them three times during the course of the year: in the beginning, in the middle and at the end. He tested them for two things: their mastery of content and their understanding in the terms that he defined that day. Could they use what they were learning in the course to explain new situations, things in the newspapers, vignettes that I brought in, and so on? The results were quite shocking!

Imagine a graph in your mind—this is good, this is bad, this is over the course of the year; you can reverse them. In content, the students went steadily up. They knew very little content in the beginning, a fair amount in the middle and were very good at the end. They were good students. They are Harvard students. But you know what happened to the understanding? Absolutely flat—and not a ceiling effect, but a floor effect. They were not very good in the beginning, they were not very good in the middle, they were not very good at the end. There were a few exceptions, just like there are few exceptions everywhere, but even at Harvard, students do not necessarily understand what their professors are teaching!

Thoughts Gardner's had during the past year–little epigrams that summarize the things that are important to him.

After working for 25 years in the area of psychology he realized that he have been interested primarily in two things. One is how to observe students carefully, and multiple intelligence theory is a way to look at students more carefully. The other is how to observe student work more carefully, and this is done by having assessment that looks at student performances very carefully.

Gardner feels not much time is spent watching the students and developing a model of how particular students learn; not nearly enough time is spent looking at student work. He gives a few examples:

Teacher's Fallacy. "I succumbed to it for 20 years. I taug­­­ht a great class, therefore the students understood. It is rather Cartesian isn't it? I teach, therefore you understand. The only way you can find out if students are understanding is to actually have them do some work."

One thing that has become very popular in the United States is the minute paper. At the end of the course, and every session, you ask the student to write down one thing that he or she learned in the period and one question that they have. It's a revelation! Gardner says he never ceases to learn when he does the minute paper. He feels it is the misconceptions that are what is beautiful. They are wonderful misconceptions but unless misconceptions get out in the open they sit there underneath that powder.

He feels that one must look at students' work, and if you cannot, the unfortunate conclusion is that you shouldn't teach. Because, if you don't look at your student's work, you have no idea whether they are learning anything. He used to think that, if they simply changed the assessment, everything else would be fine.
Even if you have wonderful assessment, if the curriculum isn't good, the assessment is worthless. You can have wonderful examining boards sitting in Geneva but if the curriculum is not adhered to or has not been made up yet, it is worthless. You can have wonderful assessment and curriculum but if the staff is not developed, teachers are not educated even before or during the experience, the assessment and curriculums are worthless.

"School doesn't have to be the way you remember it."

Unfortunately, the unschooled mind even applies to parents and teachers; they have a stereotype formed by the age of five about what school is like. Namely, somebody in front of the room talking like me, and they are sitting in their seat, trying to be quiet and all the knowledge is in my head and the purpose is to put it into your head.

That is a very powerful idea. Whether people love school or hate school, they all have that stereotype. The opportunity for education for understanding is not going to be seized unless we help people think differently about what school can be like, what can be studied, how it can be taught, how it can be learned.

Adapted from an article based on Peterson Lecture that Dr Howard Gardner presented informally in Geneva on 1 December 1992 and further edited in 2003