Markham
Commentary

Monthly thoughts on partnering with the millennial generation

Web: http://www.thommarkham.com/
Email: thom@thomarkham.com

In this issue:

Intelligence: The Great Mystery
Part 1: The story of Cody
 

Resources Listed in this issue:

Mindset, by Carol Dweck

Models of Intelligence, by Sternberg, Lautrey and Lubart (Ed.)

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Dear Colleague:

In my view it’s time to forward a worldwide conversation about education that has not yet taken place much in public, but which has begun to rumble through every country like a mega earthquake. I label the conversation ‘educating from within.’ At the core of the conversation is a basic fact: 50% of the world’s population is under age 25 and they will come to adulthood in a technological, globally linked world that the current generation of adults can barely foresee. Mostly, we respond to this millennial wave of youth using outdated assumptions, including the beliefs that children won’t learn unless subjected to a set of rigid standards, that schools exist to teach students to compete in a global economy, and that harnessing children to an ever-improved curriculum will finally, at last, force them to learn what they need to know.

None of this will work, or is working. I’m not the first to note this, but I do sense a new storyline emerging. First, we have learned that love, respect, and communication are better motivators than fear, meaning that educators must find ways to engage youth through personalized appeals to their dreams and aspirations. Second, youth want to cooperate, not compete. Hammering them with grim statistics about “losing the competitive edge” will yield little in the way of performance; if we want high achievement, we need to help them become skillful, knowledgeable, and passionate collaborators. And third, given the swirl of forces surrounding their lives, the children themselves—their very nature and being—is changing in ways we do not understand, meaning we had better inquire within about their state of mind and heart.

I invite you to join me in some occasional thinking about the millennial generation and how adults respond to a worldwide shift that requires us to customize learning for a global, transforming world.

-- Thom Markham, Ph.D.

Intelligence: The Great Mystery

Part One: The story of Cody

My earliest years of high school teaching were spent in a student support class working with what I called the artists, rebels, and misfits. Included in this group, as a sort of flag bearer, was a boy named Cody, a big, tough 15-year-old with a keen look in his eye. I liked him immediately, but he had a reputation that was probably deserved. If there was a fight in the hallway, Cody was usually there—and he seemed to have something to do with it. The assistant principal never could gain a conviction, though. Back in elementary school, Cody had mastered plausible denial.

In his first year of high school, Cody failed nearly every class, and by his sophomore year, he was completely disengaged. However, in the middle of tenth grade, something caught my eye: Cody always carried a wad of cash in his pocket, usually amounting to more than a hundred dollars. The assistant principal said it was drug money. But I asked Cody about it one day, and he had a surprising explanation: He was the acclaimed master mechanic in his neighborhood. He fixed cars and motorcycles for friends and neighbors—and they paid him in cash. 

As the year went on and I gained his trust, Cody also confided to me the reason for his academic failures: he couldn’t read. This was a source of embarrassment to him, a secret from his parents, and the reason he did poorly in school. He and I took on the challenge, embarking on a program to help him pass his GED. Ultimately, he didn’t pass the test. But, in the end, he went on to achieve great success—and he taught me a vital lesson: to question my assumptions about intelligence. 

Here’s what happened. Discouraged and angry, in his junior year Cody quit high school and enrolled in a race car mechanics course at a nationally known speedway. It was a big leap—at 17 he became the youngest member of a contingent of aspiring mechanics whose average age was 30. But Cody finished first in his class. Along the way he appeared regularly on ESPN with several of the winning drivers of his cars. Upon completing the 18-week course, he received an offer to join a pit crew at the Indianapolis 500 Motor Speedway—the ultimate accolade.  

Cody returned to visit me every so often after that, grateful for the GED help, even calling me the best teacher he’d ever had. Of course, all I had done was to listen respectfully and allow him to share his well-kept secret. His visits gave me the opportunity to probe the reasons for his success and his ability to perform as a really terrific mechanic. He told me, “In my mind, I can see how the engine comes apart and goes back together. It’s like I have a picture to work from—it’s easy.”

Most educators have similar stories to tell. There are countless tales of kids who don’t fit the mold of school, who demonstrate unusual talents, and who often succeed in spite of expectations. But Cody has stuck with me. I realized that what Cody found easy would leave most valedictorians at a loss. That understanding led me to ask: Who is smarter? Who is more intelligent? 

These kinds of questions are at the forefront of education today. Kids are exhibiting a vast array of talents—some related to school, many not. They build Web pages in the second grade and multitask effectively as teens. They share intimacies more freely than any other generation in history, usually on a worldwide network of buddies. They invent, solve, and create at a dizzying pace (just look at the growth of Content sites on the Web). The millennial generation is intelligent, productive, resourceful—and not necessarily easy to work with in the classroom.               

On the other side of the coin, many students “do” school quite well. For instance, nearly one in five students in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area claims a weighted GPA of 4.6 or better, according to reports by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. But GPAs hardly reflect the real nature of intelligence. The prevailing reward system favors a certain type of student—the note-takers, textbook readers, and writers. In fact, some educators remarked that the Pittsburgh scores can be attributed to teacher-pleasing behavior—anything done on time and in the right format.  

So it’s important to know a bit more about intelligence. Let’s consider a few findings:

•  Most people, kids included, believe intelligence is a genetic trait—that is, IQ is ”fixed” at birth. But it’s not. To the surprise of psychologists and researchers, IQ scores have been on the rise with each decade. Moreover, recent research shows that students who are told their achievement depends on believing in their ability to get smarter actually do better, while students who leave intelligence to fate and count on their genes do less well.  

• No agreement exists on the varying forms of intelligence, or how to measure IQ. Particularly, we don’t know enough about the brain and mind to settle the dispute between the cognitive scientists (intelligence is “all in brain function”) and social intelligence practitioners (“environment influences intelligence,” a`la Vygotsky).

• The advent of neuroscience makes the intelligence debate even fuzzier. Neurologist Antonio Damasio has shown how the brain and emotions intertwine, giving intelligence a clear emotional component. In fact, Robert Sternberg, a leading authority on intelligence from Harvard, believes that adding wisdom, creativity, personality, and emotional processing to the intelligence picture scrambles the conventional concept of intelligence to the extent that it may simply fall apart. Intelligence may be too multifaceted to reduce to one number or one cause.

Where does this leave us as educators? In the next Commentary, I’ll outline some specifics for the classroom. But for now, as another school year ends and next year’s plans go forward, I think it’s essential to keep students like Cody in mind. Some summer pondering points:

•  Just as intelligence isn’t narrowly focused or fixed, neither should education be anchored solely to traditional academic outcomes. To capture intelligent behavior, outcomes must be focused on a triad of performance indicators:   1) academic and content mastery; 2) skills for life, work, and citizenship; and 3) habits of mind or emotional competencies.

• In previous Commentaries, I have questioned the current concept of rigor, arguing that rigor needs to be defined in terms of individual skills and strengths, not by the number of problems assigned for homework or the amount of reading crammed into an AP class. Cody‘s work as a mechanic qualified as ‘rigorous,’ but he failed traditional classes. That increasingly commonplace story describes children who are distractible, don’t read well, and can’t harness themselves to school—but who are highly creative, with great visual skills. It’s likely that in the future, we will need to find ways to measure competency as a blend of creativity, problem-solving, innovation, and self-reliance.

• The fact that intelligent behavior also includes character virtues such as empathy, integrity, collaborative ability, and unbiased communication complicates the picture further. How do we activate these more subtle aspects of intelligence? And, again, how do we measure them?

• In a chaotic global world, the idea that intelligence and environment are related takes on special significance. Will our world make children smarter or less so? And, more to the point, if intelligence is a function of beliefs about one’s abilities, how do we convince every student they can be a genius? 

Next month: Intelligence, The Great Mystery, Part Two: Designing education to make students more intelligent