More than can be measured

Hi There,

I'm writing this today to start to synthesize a very large pool of knowledge. If there is one thing I hope you can take away from reading this article it is that our own realization of our potential has only begun. I hope that reading this article will help you start see yourself and those around you as individuals with limitless potential if you haven't already begun to do so.

Want to get higher test scores? Let's start by looking a little at tests as goals!

IQ is not of a set quantity. The IQ test is just a vague measuring tool that is over 100 years old and is used to measure intelligence.

This is what Alfred Binet the creator of the IQ test back in 1905 said "...[it] does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured." He also said that a persons IQ is not of a fixed quantity.

This leads us to the question, if the creator of the IQ test said it couldn't measure intelligence why did he create it in the first place?

The answer is of course he didn't create it to measure intelligence, he created it as a diagnostic tool.

Yet many still use it as a measuring tool! I saw one we known school in Jakarta that even had an Elite Class and the sole determiner of whether or not a student received entry into that Elite Class was IQ.

Want to raise your IQ test score? Just buy this book http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Book-Intelligence-Tests/dp/0470017732/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1367321632&sr=8-3&keywords=IQ+test or any book full of exercises similar to the exercises used in the IQ test. You'll raise your IQ! Simple! This is nothing new, my father did it back in his college years. He wasn't happy with his IQ test score so he bought a similar book, worked hard on understanding and training for the test and yes got a much better score.

Does this mean he was smarter or more intelligent after getting a better score? Of course not! It just meant he could better sit the test.

The IQ test is a good example of tests in general in the sense that we are diagnosing the amount of knowledge or ability obtained by the individual in certain areas. Teaching for tests is then akin to a doctor receiving  a patient and after "testing" him gives him a score (kudos to Ken Robinson for this example). Does this cure the illness? No! Does it benefit the patient? Of course not! So if it's ridiculous for you to go to a doctor for a 'score' it should be equally ridiculous for us to make scoring well in tests the goal of education.

Ridiculous as it may be, this is the habit we have fallen into in our educational institutions. We should really keep reminding ourselves what the goals of education are in the first place. It certainly isn't to arm our future citizens with a bunch of numbers to wave around.

Here's a list of goals to ponder about (taken from 'Big Picture' by Dennis Littky and Samantha Grabelle):

• be lifelong learners
• be passionate
• be ready to take risks
• be able to problem-solve and think critically
• be able to look at things differently
• be able to work independently and with others
• be creative
• care and want to give back to their community
• persevere
• have integrity and self-respect
• have moral courage
• be able to use the world around them well
• speak well, write well, read well, and work well with numbers
• truly enjoy their life and their work.

 
None of these goals include "getting good scores" because scores are only something we should use to help diagnose how well the individual is travelling towards goals like those listed above.

So how does this all relate to limitless potential?

If we only teach what we can test, we are limiting our students potential. If we only study what we can recall on demand, we are limiting our own potential. The mind is a far superior tool than we give it credit for. I will give you a few examples.

In a university workshop on memory tactics a group of students were asked to memorize some pictures flashing onto the screen. The issue here wasn't only the number of the pictures but the speed. Approximately 100 pictures were flashed in a period of only 30 seconds or so. Of course the students laughed and proclaimed that this was a impossible task. Yet when shown pairs of pictures at slower speeds (one being of the pictures they saw before along side a new picture) they had little problem getting a high success rate in picking out the one they had seen before. This shows the huge power of the subconscious. Even though they couldn't consciously recall the pictures when asked, their subconscious had still registered them.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, through recent developments in neuroscience we are starting to realize the true learning potential of our minds. We are starting to pick up at why so many alternative learning methods 'felt so right' it's because most of them were in so many more ways than we ever realized.

If we can start to consider more the whole human being and the whole human experience in learning then we can start to truly realize the vast possibilities of human potential.

Looking forward to exploring this more with you soon!

Kindest regards,

-Hugh

The Development of a Human Being

Hi there it's nice to be writing again,

Sorry I haven't written for a while a few things have changed for me recently.  For one I have taken a trip to Australia for a few months.  Here I have had the opportunity to meet with some excellent educators.  One subject that has come up a lot  since I have been here has been the development of the students character in school.

Although the development of character in schools is not a new subject it is one that is fraught with difficulties, differences of opinion and problems with measuring success. Overall with character, although it's something that everybody agrees is important, nobody has really devised a system to 'teach' it and achieve a great amount of success from it.

This is perhaps because the acquisition of character similar to acquiring a language cannot be achieved through 'teaching' but it must be discovered by the students themselves, assisted by the masterly facilitation of a skilled teacher or mentor.

With the learning of facts, one may choose to teach by giving the information or facilitate by providing the environment in which it can be learned. With the acquisition of character strengths however, the choice of telling somebody what they should think or feel is not there, it must be discovered.

Of course in talking about 'character strengths' we mustn't forget that what is strong or weak is a matter of perception and our perceptions are defined by the environment we come from (culture, DNA, upbringing etc.) and our own experiences. This being taken into consideration there are still many universal character strengths in which we can base our model of development on. Luckily a lot of work of researching the universal traits of character which are important in living a successful, happy and productive life has already been done.

Chris Peterson the co-author of 'Character Strengths and Virtues' adjusted a fairly long list of character strengths (as mentioned in Paul Tough's book 'How Children Succeed') and listed seven which he thought were particularly likely to predict life satisfaction and achievement. They were:

1. Grit
2. Self-Control
3. Zest
4. Social Intelligence
5. Optimism
6. Curiosity 

These were set out so teachers and curriculum developers in particular could use them as a model to base the competencies on for character development programs. Although they are obviously not the be all to end all they are never the less a good guide and a starting point in our quest to instill our students with strong, well rounded and beneficial character.

For a full list of character traits analysed by a research study of 117,676 adults from 54 nations by the university of Pennsylvania you can find the research report in the July 2006 Journal of Positive Psychology.

So all this leads us to the question, How can we transfer these character traits to our students in school? What the team at Geelong Grammar School has done is made sure to put all the teachers that come into their school through a two week intensive Positive Education course, not only to impart the skills of a facilitator but also to impart the skills of positive psychology onto the teachers themselves. This is because it is of course quite possible to imagine a student positively affected by a positive education program (excuse the pun) if the teacher themselves are living, breathing examples of positive psychology.

Positive Psychology as explained in Wikipedia is a branch of psychology which "...complements, with no intention to replace or ignore, the traditional areas of psychology. By adding an important emphasis to use the scientific method to study and determine positive human development." 

In short it is a branch of psychology immensely important and relevant for the teachers of today. Many say we are currently in a time of character crisis, where the instilled tried and tested values of tradition have been replaced by consumerism and the leadership of desire. Further more many concerned educators in Indonesia  have mentioned, the traditional values of the village have started to disintegrate, as the above influences and the influx of the population from rural areas to the city, have combined to make less and less room for the contemplation and implementation of character strengths.

What many fail to recognize is that in this time more than ever with all the turmoil our children are experiencing, that character strengths are really what are going to pull them through and give them the best chance in life. Studies have shown that it is not so much IQ or one-on-one tuition that determines a student's academic success, but it is character strengths. The same rings true in perhaps all areas of an individuals life.

If education is the preparation for life and we are educating our children for a future that we have no way of predicting, surely one of the greatest things we can help them achieve is strength of character!

I intend to write more articles on Positive Psychology in the coming months as I will be staying at Geelong Grammar School until the end of May. Hopefully I'll be able to participate in the implementation of more positive education programs in Indonesian schools after my return.

Until next time, keep shining sharing and succeeding.

Kindest regards,

-Hugh