In today’s educational landscape, it is quite common to see students categorized as ‘intelligent’, ‘average’, ‘unintelligent’, ‘underperformers’ and so on. The view that students have a pre-determined, pre-set ‘level’ of intelligence and ability to learn is quite prevalent and this is a widely accepted view as well. Academicians and educators across the country, even the world, really believe that not all students can achieve the same academic goals because of the differential intelligence levels that they are endowed with. This gives credence to the belief that intellect or intelligence is an inborn ‘skill’, with each person being gifted with a specific limit of it. This also means that there are only a select few who can truly excel even when the best teachers are employed and they are leveraging the most modern, most effective teaching techniques to impart knowledge.
This view is flawed in more than
one way because there is reason to believe that the so called ‘underperforming’
student does not have the same intelligence or ability to grasp complex
academic concepts as the so- called ‘intelligent’ student. Further, there is no
scientific basis for the assumption that everyone is born with different
intelligence levels, which cannot be enhanced or drawn out in any way as they
progress through life and through different educational experiences. As Nobel
Prize nominee, clinical, developmental and cognitive psychologist Ruevin
Feurestein explained, ‘intelligence is not fixed but modifiable’. It is the
responsibility of the teacher or academician to devise a teaching system or
strategy that helps every student achieve higher levels of intelligence by
drawing upon his or her own hidden reserves.
An
overview of the Feuerstein Method
After fleeing the Nazi invasion,
Feurestein leveraged his psychology degree to teach young survivors of the
Holocaust in his new home in Palestine. The needs of these children prompted
him to take up a career that would address both psychological and educational
needs of refugee children. In the 1950s, Feurestein was involved in working
with children from Moroccan, Berber and Jewish families and he found that those
who initially scored low on IQ tests showed remarkable improvement when they
were given special psychological and academic attention.
This encouraged him to start
viewing intelligence as a modifiable characteristics rather than a fixed one,
as the traditional view point held. He started researching various ways in
which too ‘teach’ intelligence even as he expounded the theory that the
students who excelled and who were believed to be intelligent were actually
leveraging their ability to learn more effectively than others.
The prevailing means and tools for
measuring intelligence were flawed and inadequate, in his view, because they
failed to indicate that all students could be elevated to the same level of
intelligence provided they were taught how to do it. As a new, more effective
and more accurate method of evaluation, Feurestein came up with the dynamic
assessment method, as it is known today. His focus was on identifying and
evaluating the inherent cognitive flexibility in the child that represents the
ability to learn. Once this evaluation is done, teaching methodologies can be
tweaked so that these abilities are used optimally. This view was dramatically different from
what was commonly accepted then and it transformed the way people looked at
‘intelligence’ and its impact on academic performance.
Taking his study further,
Feurestein began to devise methodologies to help children who were not
performing well academically and work on their weaknesses, putting them on
track for dramatic improvements. ‘Mediated relationship’, he discovered, lay at
the foundation of meaningful teaching strategies. These methodologies have
brought a ray of hope into the lives of not just poorly performing children but
also children with special needs such as those affected by Down’s Syndrome,
palsy, stroke or other conditions.
The
journey from ‘poor performer’ to ‘gifted’ status
Feuerstien’s methods can be used with amazing success in every
academic field to teach and engage urban students most effectively. The success
of the methods hinge on our ability to understand and accept that intelligence
is limitless. Most urban schools tend to look at students as deficits; they
believe that the students can only advance so far. However, this is far from
the truth that Feuerstien has proven beyond doubt. In my personal experience,
wherever I have implemented Feuerstien’s method, the results have been simply
dramatic and uniformly impressive. I
have taught several boys and young men of color with these tools and witnessed
the improved academic performance from close quarters.
One important contributing factor for this impressive change is that
a growth oriented mindset is essential. A tremendous amount of growth is
possible when this correct approach is adopted to take a low performing student
and turn them into a “gifted” student. This growth mind set is often lacking in
academic environments where ‘underachievement’ is the expected outcome. Sadly,
this is true of many schools where children of color are automatically tagged
with the ‘underperformer’ label. The teachers may, inadvertently, believe that
these students are incapable of improving their academic excellence and thus
feel that investing more attention or time on them will not yield results. In
reality, it is the opposite that is true.
The teacher has to actively believe that the students can excel and
this belief should be evident every single day in the teaching strategy,
technique and tools utilized. This
positive mindset, that the underperforming student is no different from their
academically proficient peers, is the foundation block on which the students
builds their new skills to learn more effectively and efficiently.
Another critical understanding for both teacher and student
is that learning and intelligence are not two different aspects. Intelligence is
the knowledge of identifying where knowledge can and should be applied, i.e.: a
meta knowledge of sorts. This knowledge comes when the learner is actively
involved in the learning process- understanding why they are studying something
and where they might apply it. When the students make these connections, they
can apply the knowledge intelligently to various situations. This is not all-
they can also learn more advanced concepts easily because the grounding of
knowing why they need it and how to use it is already present in them. This is
how the transformation from poor performers to exceptional students takes place
with the right teaching methodologies being implemented.
