Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

intelligences.
    So, the question isn’t ‘How smart are you?’–the singular, convergent, IQ-related, what’s your ‘g’, old-fashioned question. Rather it is, ‘How are you smart?’–the optimistic, divergent, learning democratized, twenty-first century question. If I were to go up to any child in your classroom and ask them that question would they all have an answer? If I pointed out a child in your class and asked you the question, ‘This child, how is she smart?’ would you have an answer?
    One way to think about the concept of multiple intelligences is to think of human intelligence like a cake. We all have a cake and we all have eight slices of cake. Of course, our slices are of different shapes and sizes from each other but, and this should be written up on a wall in your staffroom, we all have the full cake. It is worth remembering too that, if you are working within a department or faculty in a secondary school setting, you and your immediate colleagues will have been pre-selected for your cake slice size by dint of the fact that you are qualified in languages or art or PE or maths or science. If you are sitting in your faculty staffroom reading this then take a look around you at your colleagues. You are as much a cross-section of society as a football team or the London Philharmonic or the cast of
Hi De Hi
. (And beware, because being in a team of like-minded people can make you dumb. In the words of James Surowiecki in
The Wisdom of Crowds
, ‘Homogenous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they tend to become progressively less able to investigate alternatives’ (Surowiecki 2004).) Your students, on the other hand, especially the young ones who have not yet had to make a choice over their GCSE options, are very much a cross-section, thrown together by chance and united only by their age and their postcode.
    So, over the course of a term or a topic, to what extent do you roll that cake? Over, say, a four-week period, do you ensure that at least once, logical mathematical intelligence comes to the top, at least once musical intelligence comes to the top, at least once intrapersonal intelligence comes to the top? That, over that period, everyone has the chance to (a) play to their strengths and (b) work on their weaknesses? And notice, too, that we are talking about
their
strengths and weaknesses, not yours. I once took a maths teacher through an MI planning session, focusing specifically on ‘probability’. Under ‘musical intelligence’ I suggested the idea of a probability rap, something he dismissed because he didn’t think he was able to do such a thing. But, as I pointed out to him, I’m not asking you do to it; I’m asking them to do it. If we prevent them doing something just because we are not able to do it, then we are limiting them by our own limitations. The logical extension of which, by the way, is ‘I don’t want anyone cleverer than me in my classroom’ (more of which in chapter 30 ). But we have to have children cleverer than us or else, as we have seen,the world will end! Are you planning lessons for people like you? Are the children in your class doing things you can’t do? If not, why not, especially if they struggle doing the things you can do? One tip here is to have a month without using the word ‘poster’ when it comes to setting a task for students to do. There are so many alternatives you could offer to this old perennial chestnut. And anyway, children are rubbish at posters. Next time offer them the chance to show they have learned the material by producing a t-shirt or a badge or a web page or a screensaver or an advertising jingle or a press ad or a storyboard or a CD cover or a credit card or a shopping bag or a phone app or a video game or a football hoarding or an online advert or … .
    For me, this is right at the heart of the ‘dumbing up’ process. Giving more people access to – and then the opportunity to use – knowledge, as part of the process of democratizing learning. As Dylan Thomas once said when describing how he didn’t want to ‘write down’ to the workers, ‘The thing to do is to bring the workers up to what one is writing’ (Lycett 2004). If that student doesn’t ‘get it’ by writing an essay (linguistic) then maybe he or she will ‘get it’ by being allowed to build a model (physical-kinesthetic) or representing it as a learning ‘map’ using pictures and colour (visual) or turning it into a rap