From Legends to Legacy 13(Knowles, 1950; 1980). He among all the others I have mentioned has most significantly
influenced my thinking and work in the area of learning.
The optimal “eustress” experiences I ever had, as a professor in Education Administration
was when we had a chance to apply the ideas of all of these thinkers in our own preparation
programs at CU, This occurred during the 1980’s and 1990’s, with colleagues such as Jo
Roberts, Lance Wright, Kent McGuire, Sharon Ford, Rod Muth, Mike Murphy, and our
school district and corporate partners such as Bob Rehm and Phyllis Saltzman, from IBM,
Storage Tech, and Hewlett-Packard. We experimented with many ideas from the research and
practitioner literature on how to enhance student learning: active learning; collaboration;
cooperative curriculum design, planning, selection, assessment and teaching with
administrators; literature-based learning activities from education and corporate sources;
cohort learning, inquiry teams, etc. All of these helped us achieve some degree of national,
state and university recognition for innovative work in the area of learning and “problem-
based education.” We kept cobbling things together to foster greater student learning! Yet we
never were satisfied and were always trying to get it better for the students.
We certainly owed those earlier scholars and intellectuals a big debt of gratitude. I
challenge each of us then to think about how we should put these principles (and others) into
preparation programs which foster greater student learning.
- INTELLIGENCE
“The reason for learning is to nurture intellectual talents for the construction of our
society into a more democratic and just and caring place to live.”
Maxine Greene
Intelligence is another complex topic for our prospective leaders to master, to say the
least, and Maxine put things so well in her comment on nurturing intellectual talent.
Many of us were required to study intelligence in college, taking physiological, behavioral,
cognitive or even adolescent psychology, etc. in our early undergraduate and graduate days. I
studied Guilford, Thorndike, Binet, Skinner, etc. Didn’t help me that much, don’t know about
you, although it was interesting. However it is worth nothing that more than a decade ago the
American Psychological Association released a major statement on intelligence and indicated
some of the startling questions related to it...what is it? Can it be measured? Is it inherited,
acquired, environmental, or a combination of these and other factors? The statement
identified the controversies about intelligence such as the many ways to be intelligent, and the
different conceptualizations of intelligence. The APA concluded that: “many questions remain
unanswered.” No real surprise to any of us I guess given the complexity of the term.
These “controversies” include the role of: family status, inheritance, race, social class,
test scores, nutrition, and gender differences, as correlates of intelligence. The APA report
also indicated that standardized tests did not measure all forms of intelligence (Neisser,
1996)! After all my study of intelligence in college, and reading about it during my career, I
am convinced that folks like Binet, Thorndike, Terman, and Guilford were on the right track,
but their focus now seems too narrow, or singular, to me, and right now I think we can learn
more about intelligence from the work of scholars such as Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman
and Robert Sternberg (1977; 1985; 1990) who are building upon earlier works in their
breakthrough thinking on this topic.
I first ran across Gardner at an AERA meeting in the 1980’s and was stunned by his
thinking and scholarship (1983; 1991; 1995; 1999). The idea that intelligence was a multiple