Primary / Elementary School

The Evidence Process: A Collaborative Approach to Understanding and Improving Teaching...

The Evidence Process: A Collaborative Approach to Understanding and Improving Teaching and Learning, 2001. A handbook for administrators, staff developers, and teachers interested in, or already involved in, looking at student work collaboratively with colleagues. It describes and provides resources for an inquiry process developed by Project Zero working with public elementary and middle schools in Massachusetts.

Examples of documentation to aid teachers' own reflections

Documentation collected for this purpose helps teachers stay close to students' learning and interests by enabling them to revisit a learning experience. It leads teachers to compare what they thought would happen to what really went on and informs decisions about where to go next. Sharing this kind of documentation with others reduces the subjectivity of a single person's analysis and interpretation and can deepen understanding. This form of documentation is the least shaped (or the most "raw") of the three types described here. Reviewing this type of documentation often influences the amount of time a group spends on a topic and the level of student involvement in shaping the learning experience.

Below are examples of the documentation and practices with varying age groups. 

Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century

In this book, Howard Gardner describes how the theory of multiple intelligences has evolved and been revised since its introduction in 1983. He introduces here the possibility of three new intelligences and argues that the concept of intelligence should be broadened, but not so much that it includes every human faculty or encompasses specific value systems. As well as responding to some of the critiques of the theory, he offers practical guidance on its educational uses in schools and museums and speculates about the relationship between multiple intelligences and the future world of work. ISBN-13: 978-0465026111

Schools Need to Pay More Attention to "Intelligence in the Wild"

Traditional schools usually emphasize the kind of intelligence students need to solve clearly defined problems. By stressing this kind of "laboratory intelligence," schools typically ask students to engage in focused, systematic tasks that have unambiguous goals and a clear choice of answers: learn this list of words and how to spell them, learn who the presidents were. The tasks may be challenging, but they are challenging in a predictable way. The attention paid to standards and assessments often works to increase the emphasis on this laboratory intelligence.

Intelligence in the Wild: A Dispositional View of Intellectual Traits

Most accounts of intelligence are "abilities-centric." They aim to explain intelligent behavior in terms of IQ or other measures of intellectual aptitude. However, several investigators have proposed that intelligent behavior in the wild--in everyday circumstances in which carefully framed tests do not tell people exactly what intellectual task to attempt--depends in considerable part on thinking dispositions. Definitionally, dispositions concern not what abilities people have, but how people are disposed to use those abilities. Everyday language includes a number of dispositional terms such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and skepticism. We review several dispositional constructs that researchers have investigated, sometimes under the label dispositions. The findings in trend show that dispositions are stable traits that help to explain intellectual performance over and above measures of intellectual aptitude. It is argued that a dispositional view of intelligence is warranted, and that it is an important area for continued research.