MI Oasis: The Pendulum of Progress
September 19, 2025
Last year, Tom contributed a guest post “The Pendulum of Progress” to Howard Gardener’s Official Authoritative Site of Multiple Intelligences. Here’s an excerpt:
Progress is rarely smooth on important and complex issues. Steps forward are followed by steps backwards, and we can hope (we must hope!) that the forward steps are longer than those in retreat. This is certainly the case when considering an incredibly complex and very relevant issue, the definition of intelligence. Despite resistance to change, new understandings about child development, growth, and intellect must push against decades of traditional thinking and comfortable practices.
We saw this tension in the 1980s when Frames Of Mind: the theory of Multiple Intelligences was first published. Multiple intelligences (MI) redefined–expanded–the traditional view of intelligence as a single entity that could be determined by a score on a test. Although Howard Gardner wrote about MI with psychologists in mind, it was elementary and secondary educators who embraced this new way of understanding students’ abilities and potential. Instead of assessing students to determine a hierarchy of intelligence by asking, “Who’s the smartest?” the question became “How is each child smart?” This expanded definition of intelligence valued problem solving skills and abilities in art, music, athletics, nature, working with others, and knowing oneself. A pragmatic approach to intelligence, MI captured the range of abilities that can lead to success in life.
The impact of MI in a school was powerful. I know this from working in an MI school. Recognizing MI, educators began to reconsider curriculum and pedagogy in ways which enabled students to use all of their intelligences in solving problems; students learned and they learned with joy.