Individuals in communities

Although this week's reading was about Individuals in Communities, it also featured a module about Intelligence that seemed pertinent, so I'll discuss that.

I have many intellectual problems with Gardner's multiple intelligences (mostly anecdotal evidence, no clear application of model, variability and generality of terms, etc.), but gifts in the classroom can certainly manifest in different ways. One thing that becomes clear as I read the literature surrounding intelligence and gifted students is that the number of learning styles is as vast as the number of students. Convergent vs. divergent thinkers, for instance, can take a problem and come up with totally different solutions, and I found myself wondering how to help bring out those different modalities of cognitive thought in the classroom.

One step was to try to address the tendency towards impulsivity among the students. As deferred gratification research shows (see Mischel marshmallow experiment, 1990 and others), children who demonstrate delayed gratification are able to plan better for their lives. This seems to corroborate findings that impulsivity damages the reflective process necessary for true intelligence, or at the very least, well-applied intelligence. One step that helped was looking for more open-ended problem-based questions that forced students to take a longer time to think about it. For example, I might give students a bonus question on a quiz such as "What is the difference between good and evil? Justify your answer." For students who responded, I left another prompt, pushing that student farther and challenging his or her response, with the possibility for extra credit if a journal response was written. Many of my gifted students love to be right immediately, rushing for an answer, but such a process often demonstrated to them the value of taking it slow. When students responded impulsively, I often paused for up to a minute, waiting for students to write out or think about their answers before blurting them out.

Trying to short-circuit this impulsive process is often difficult, particularly with precocious gifted students who like to be right and like to be right right away. By affording them the occasional pause, however, I was more able to corral their thinking, but I often wonder whether this kind of support does any good. Mischel himself notes that it is next to impossible to know how well these tricks and forced reflections work, because of many other factors such as home life. At least in the academic setting, however, these pauses and reflective moments not only forced gifted students to reconsider their answers, but also allowed non-gifted students who might otherwise not raise their hands or give a response some time to formulate a better one. Again, I'm unsure as to how well this worked to curb impulsivity, but it was an experiment.