Awakening Genius in the Classroom

Thomas Armstrong

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780871203021
• eBook ISBN: 9781416616122
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"Every student is a genius, " declares author Thomas Armstrong, and an educator's most important job is to discover and nurture the "genius qualities" that all students were born with but that may no longer be obvious. Urging readers to look beyond traditional understandings of what constitutes genius, Armstrong describes 12 such qualities: curiosity, playfulness, imagination, creativity, wonder, wisdom, inventiveness, vitality, sensitivity, flexibility, humor, and joy. He cites research in various fields that supports this broader understanding of genius and explains how influences in the home, the popular media, and the school itself "shut down" the genius in students.

Combining thoughtful insights and practical information, Armstrong offers guiding principles to help educators awaken genius in the classroom--beginning with awakening the genius in themselves. Readers will find dozens of suggested activities and helpful resources to provide "genius experiences" and create a "genial climate" in the classroom. In addition, suggestions for further study at the end of each section provide starting points for personal and professional reflection and growth.

As it celebrates the potential brainpower waiting to be unlocked in classrooms everywhere, Awakening Genius in the Classroom inspires educators to look at their students from a different perspective and to reinvigorate their teaching with a new sense of excitement and possibility. The result, Armstrong concludes, could extend far beyond the classroom and transform not only our schools, but the entire world.

Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.

Part 1

Every Student Is a Genius

Every student is a genius. I do not mean this in the psychometric sense of the word, in which an individual must score above the upper 99th percentile on a standardized measure of intelligence to qualify. Nor do I mean it in the sense of every student as a grandmaster chess champion, a virtuoso on the violin, or a world-class artist. These are some of the currently accepted meanings of the word genius in our culture and are not particularly relevant to the topic of this book.

For the meaning of genius used here, I have gone back to the origins of the word itself. According to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary (1991, p. 664), the word genius derives from Greek and Latin words meaning "to beget," "to be born," or "to come into being" (it is closely related to the word genesis). It is also linked to the word genial, which means, among other things, "festive," "conducive to growth," "enlivening," and "jovial." Combining these two sets of definitions comes closest to the meaning of the word genius used in this book: "giving birth to one's joy."

From the standpoint of education, genius means essentially "giving birth to the joy in learning." I'd like to suggest that this is the central task of all educators. It is the genius of the student that is the driving force behind all learning. Before educators take on any of the other important issues in learning, they must first have a thorough understanding of what lies at the core of each student's intrinsic motivation to learn, and that motivation originates in each student's genius.

The word genius has a rich multicultural history. The ancient Romans used it to refer to a guardian spirit that protected all individuals throughout their lives. All persons were born with their own unique genius that looked after them, helped them out of difficulties, and inspired them at crucial moments in their lives. On a person's birthday, the Romans would celebrate the birthday of the genius as well as the individual. The accomplishments of individuals were often attributed to their personal genius (The New Encyclopaedia Britannica 1980). In the Middle East, the term has been linked to the word jinni, or genie, that magical power chronicled in the Arabian Nights that lay dormant in Aladdin's lamp until a few rubs on the side of the vessel "gave birth" to a sometimes jovial and sometimes not so jovial spirit (Zipes 1991).

The genius is a symbol for an individual's potential: all that a person may be that lies locked inside during the early years of development. So, when we say as educators that we want to help students to develop their potential, we're essentially saying that we want to assist them in finding their inner genius and support them in guiding it into pathways that can lead to personal fulfillment and to the benefit of those around them.

The 12 Qualities of Genius

To provide a structure for educators that can make the concept of genius useful, I've expanded its meaning to include 12 basic qualities: curiosity, playfulness, imagination, creativity, wonder, wisdom, inventiveness, vitality, sensitivity, flexibility, humor, and joy. Unlike Gardner's eight intelligences (expanded from his original seven; see Gardner 1983, 1996), these 12 qualities are not based on any established criteria. The concept of genius could just as well be represented by 3 or 15 or 50 different qualities. However, the 12 qualities included here represent a wide selection of qualities that give structure to the somewhat elusive notion of genius. They are aspects of life that every educator has some familiarity with both inside and outside the classroom. And although these qualities may lack the rigorous application of criteria found in the theory of multiple intelligences (see Gardner 1983, pp. 59–70), they are supported, as we will see later, by research in the neurosciences, anthropology, developmental psychology, and other sources as well. Before sharing some of this research, however, I'd like to describe the 12 qualities that constitute the basic building blocks of each student's intrinsic genius.

Curiosity

Children are naturally curious about the world around them from the earliest weeks of life. The squirmy behavior of the infant is actually a manifestation of its sensorium engaged in a full-scale exploration of the world: this is active curiosity at its highest pitch. Once walking, the toddler moves toward whatever arouses curiosity. Once talking, the young child is constantly asking "Whazzat, mommy?" As the child grows into the elementary school years and acquires greater knowledge of the world, that curiosity branches out into hobbies, pastimes, collections, and interests that may change weekly. In adolescence, socially approved curiosity may weaken and be replaced by a more subterranean curiosity given over to the biggest questions about life, death, love, self, and truth.

The most curious thing is that often educators do not see the student's curiosity when it appears. Instead, they may regard it as "off-task" behavior, irrelevancies, silliness, and even rudeness. A teacher may be following a lesson plan on the American colonies when a student asks, "What's that necklace you're wearing made of?" In a behavior modification classroom that may result in a point off. At the very least it may throw a teacher off balance. An experienced teacher, however, knows how to take that question and make it serve the lesson plan's objectives ("It's made of shells. Do you think that some of the colonists might have worn shell necklaces?"). But more than using a child's curiosity to serve the needs of any particular lesson plan, educators need to recognize that these kinds of innocent questions emerge out of students' genius—their often insatiable need to find out everything they can about the world. Educators need to regard this curiosity as a healthy drive and not as an impediment to the smooth operation of their classroom. A major question should be how to take that intrinsic curiosity, in whatever form, and make it available to the curriculum (see Mann 1996).

Playfulness

Nowhere can we see students' genius more clearly demonstrated than when they are at play. When children play they reinvent the world. Kids who build forts and pretend to be kings and queens are internalizing social structures, mirroring historical movements, and playing out mythological themes. Play allows kids to work through emotional conflicts, develop and test hypotheses about the world, investigate complex social roles, prepare for full-fledged participation in the family and community, and develop more appropriate ways of relating to peers (see Singer 1973, Singer and Singer 1981). As the inventor of the kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel (1887), put it:

Play is the highest level of child development. . . . It gives . . . joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world. . . . The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life (pp. 54–55).

Playfulness, however, extends far beyond the kindergarten. It's really an attitude toward life that informs the behavior of the 4th grader who dances his way into the classroom as well as the playful manipulations of an 11th grade "wise guy." Teachers sometimes mistakenly think they're bringing play into the classroom by having kids play "games." Ironically, the formal rules and competitiveness of structured games often force playfulness into hiding. Playfulness is more likely to come up unexpectedly during the classroom day—for example, in the middle of a geometry lesson (the kid who starts walking around the room in a triangle pattern), while lining up to go to the lunchroom (the student who mimics the gruff lunchroom lady), or during sustained silent reading (the kids who create a "burping" symphony). When truly valued as an important component of students' genius, playfulness can find its way into many parts of the school day in an appropriate way (see, for example, Mann 1996).

Imagination

It's almost a cliché that children have vivid imaginations. A Gary Larson cartoon portrays this humorously by showing a mother entering her son's bedroom, with the boy cowering in bed. The mother exclaims, "How can you tell me there's a monster in this room when you can't even describe his face to me!" And in the corner of the room, a monster stands with a bag over his head!

Very young children are often terrified in the middle of the night because their dreams (and nightmares) appear as real as outer perceptions. Scientists call this facility "eidetic imagery," and some research suggests that this capacity exists to a far greater extent in childhood than in adulthood (see McKim 1980, p. 95). Children and adolescents can close their eyes and see all sorts of images: swirls of color, cartoon pictures, video-like images of places they'd rather be, and, in particular, stories and fantasies of wishes and dreams. Children and adolescents are constantly telling themselves stories in their heads, perhaps heroic sagas in which they play the hero or heroine, or space-age odysseys gleaned from Star Wars movies, or monster truck races in which they outpace the field, or turgid romances of loves lost and gained. All this may go on while the teacher is talking about the times tables or the Treaty of Versailles. In terms of sheer entertainment value, the Treaty of Versailles generally loses out against these personalized dramas! The imagination has come to be associated with something negative—daydreaming—rather than being viewed as a potential source of cognitive power that the student might use to write stories (e.g., "My Role in Writing the Treaty of Versailles"), put on plays, create works of art, initiate deep dialogues about significant life issues, or engage in other activities that relate to important school outcomes (see, for example, Samples 1976, Egan 1992, Litterst and Bassey 1993, Greene 1995).

Creativity

The word creativity is closely linked to the word genius, since both words have the root meaning "to give birth." Essentially, creativity designates the capacity to give birth to new ways of looking at things, the ability to make novel connections between disparate things, and the knack for seeing things that might be missed by the typical way of viewing life. Children and adolescents, being relatively new to life, are naturally creative because they haven't been brainwashed, so to speak, by the conventional attitudes of society. Consequently, students are always coming up with novel images, words, and actions that may delight, enlighten, or inspire adults. Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein once declared that all music is derived from a basic melody that children throughout the world use in their own self-created songs and chants (Gardner 1981), and Chernoff (1979) related how Dagomba children from Ghana create social and political songs that have a direct influence on the culture. Russian writer Kornei Chukovskii (1963) once declared that young children were linguistic geniuses because of their ability to come up with creative expressions, and Bickerton (1982) suggested that children had created an entire creole language in Hawaii in the last century through the intermingling of many peoples and languages.

In the classroom, this creativity manifests itself in the poems, drawings, novel observations, and unique expressions that pour out of children at irregular times during the school day. It is apparent, for example, in Maria, a 3rd grader who writes: "I used to have a teacher of meanness/But now I have a teacher of roses" (Koch 1970, p. 14); in Alex, a 1st grade "bad boy" who moves like a flamenco dancer (Gallas 1994, p. 57); or in Don, the 10th grader who, an art teacher once told me, could turn any piece of solid wood into a human face. Creativity has not been the subject of intense focus, extensive research, or high levels of funding in American education. Typically, educators have relegated the topic of creativity to gifted education, and research in creativity has been used to identify children for admittance into gifted programs (see, for example, Getzels and Jackson 1962, Gowan et al. 1967, Torrance 1962, Renzulli 1986). But by limiting creativity to gifted education, educators have effectively isolated it from the mainstream of American education where it could do the most good. Creativity is a part of every student's birthright, and by recognizing it as such, we can make a good start in bringing it to the fore in every classroom (see, for example, Israel 1995, Hunter 1993).

Wonder

Wonder is the natural astonishment that children and adolescents have about the world around them. Most of us, at one time or another in our youth, have lain on our backs looking up at the sky on a starry night wondering how far the universe went on. This kind of experience reveals the dual meaning of wonder: as a verb ("I wonder how far it goes on") and as an emotional experience ("Wow! It just goes on and on . . .!"). It also underlies something particularly profound about the learning process that receives virtually no attention in education: those learning experiences that have the greatest impact on students are often those that involve awe or wonder. Such experiences emerge almost incidentally in the classroom when, for example, a student first encounters a blossom opening up in a classroom biology experiment, or sees a prism breaking light up into the colors of the rainbow, or experiences a particularly moving play or musical piece.

Wonder doesn't show up as a "skill" on any competency checklist—and thank goodness it doesn't; for by measuring some things we destroy them. But wonder nevertheless is a component of genius that both reveals the depths of our students' minds and deepens the learning process whenever it occurs. To reduce wonder to an "experience of affect" puts it on a level with those momentary cheap thrills that popular culture seems to thrive on. The experience of wonder is an encounter with the mysteries of life, and our students are particularly well equipped as natural geniuses to revel in this way of encountering the world (see Harwood 1958, Lorie 1989).

Wisdom

Out of wonder may come wisdom. The student who is able to experience the wonder of the world directly, without the blinders of preconceptions and clichés, has access to a certain precocious wisdom different from that of elders who have acquired their wisdom from years of experience; but this strong and silent knowledge nevertheless can have the force of deeper truth behind it.

Wisdom expresses itself in many ways. The 1st grader who draws a globe and a rainbow image during art class and says quietly that it stands for world peace is revealing a certain kind of wisdom. So too is the high school junior who writes an impassioned philosophical treatise on the nature of human goodness as a civics assignment. Wisdom may come across in a simple comment made during recess to help a younger child feel better or in a child's particularly sensitive intervention to help resolve a classroom conflict.

Robert Coles (1967, 1986a, 1986b, 1990) has done a particularly good job of revealing wisdom in children by documenting their struggles with poverty and discrimination as well as by revealing their deeper thoughts about religion, politics, morality, and other basic life issues (see also Armstrong 1984, Silverstein 1980, Wickes 1966). Like so many other qualities of genius described in this book, wisdom has not been given much credence by educators as a trait worth studying in the classroom (though a teacher may give it value by saying about a particular student, "That child is wise beyond his years"). However, along with Coles's work, there is a body of research (Matthews 1980, 1984, 1994; Lipman et al. 1980) suggesting that real wisdom and philosophical understanding exist in children and adolescents and are worth paying attention to as an educational resource.

Inventiveness

Though closely allied to the concept of creativity, inventiveness is included here as a separate dimension of genius because it implies a certain "hands-on" quality that might be neglected when people think about creativity. Children and adolescents are naturally inventive, coming up with often bizarre and funny uses for common things. I'm reminded of the 1st grade student who drew an image of a boy with peanuts pouring into his head (the top half of which was conveniently hinged to allow for this); the peanuts were ground together inside of his brain and blended with butter in a tube to make peanut butter, which he then sold door to door on his skateboard (Armstrong 1987a). Kids are always having these kinds of zany thoughts, which we're likely to dismiss out of hand without marveling at their truly geniuslike nature. It takes something rather extraordinary to turn an empty milk carton into an "owl car wash," or to design a Rube Goldberg—type device that moves ping-pong balls into sockets, causing bells to ring and a miniature pig to spin around, thus moving an alligator's head that functions as a pencil sharpener (Houston 1982). But students generally have little time to exercise their "inventive" muscles because educators may fear such amusing side trips of the mind take valuable time away fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1. Every Student Is a Genius
• Part 2. The Genius Shuts Down
• Part 3. How to Awaken Genius in the Classroom
• Study Guide
• Selected Resources
• References
• About the Author
• Copyright Page