VIA versatile intelligence and assessment

Embracing instability is like smiling at the darkness and saying it complements the light I stand in....or knowing we are still part of the wilderness, and the endurance of bus rides for picnics...so I have been writing a bit about the light and the dark, the order and chaos, and how this may be better understood at the macro level...

And as some of you know, my theory, an educational theory, has a name: VIA. We are all in a unified-field of experience whereby each human’s progress is unique and common and that the process of teaching and learning should facilitate all humans as having a versatile intelligence that makes meaning and progress through its own assessment of its understanding—from knowing to not knowing to knowing—toward total understanding.

Like the self-organizing network of intelligence, intelligence should no longer be defined by psychologists and measurement people alone, but rather defined by all of us together. There is a place in the universe where contradictions are unified, but I am not sure that i agree with Charlie Simic, who taught my brother at UNH and is a fantastic poet, if that center is in NYC! Perhaps that center is in each one of us?

We need to change our learning strategy from its simplistic method based on standardization of learning to a much more complex method of multiple intelligences, a more versatile use of intelligence backed up by a more accurate measure and assessment of intelligence in order to support and improve our human-system in succeeding to live happily on our host planet. We need a new way of teaching and learning based on better assessments of our student’s versatile intelligence so that we can teach all children how to learn well and be productive citizens. We also need a new structure for a scientific revolution if we are to truly change our current system of teaching and learning and research.

This theory of Versatile Intelligence and Assessment (VIA) is a paradigm shift (Kuhn 1962) in the structure of teaching and learning away from a cognitive snapshot of smart and dumb that relies upon standardized tests as the most accurate measure of humans, and towards a more accurate way of measuring humans by assessing their minds, their potential and their learning powers. Jesus is the beneficiary of a new theory of human development that seeks to unify the field of education by agreeing to acknowledge that all students are much more powerful learners than we know!

Vision
Every person is on their own path of learning. The purpose of this path is to seek the truth of one’s existence through knowing, experiencing, and being in the field: our world. The paths in this field are unique to each learner and are unified in the direction of a personal search for truth. So we are all in a unified field of human progress. The resulting theory of education is the process of organizing successful learning experiences by developing the learner’s ability to learn through their use of versatile intelligence and assessment. Versatile intelligence is using all of the previously identified intelligences—G., IQ, multiple, emotional—and understanding their role in human development as a way of seeing the change and development in the unified field of human progress. The dis-unified approach sees human accomplishment as a snapshot of intelligence—a simple score of who is smart and who is not. Comparison of learners on overly simple numerical scales is to be avoided because it does not explain very much about who we are and where we are headed. The building of a versatile intelligence in every child so that they are able to assess their own learning is the hard work of this educational revolution. Every learner is already equipped to do this work but more accurate ways of measuring their ability to learn and the wisdom of new teachers to guide them are both needed.

VIA Theory
VIA is a new theory for teaching and learning that uses continuous observation (Stiggins 1984) and authentic performance assessment (Wiggins 1989a; Wiggins 1989b) to transform and improve the mind. This paradigm reflects current research that rejects IQ testing as an incredibly narrow way to measure intelligence (Steinberg and Henriques 2001), builds on Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (1983), goes beyond IQ thinking (Sternberg 1985) to reframe intelligence and embraces the radical position that all students, in fact all humans, are robustly intelligent. The reason for the use of observation and assessment to improve the measurement of intelligence is that previous methods (IQ and standardized testing in general) continue to measure 1% or less of what the mind is doing, may be reporting the processing speed of the conscious mind rather than the fuller concept of intelligence , and report their measurements in the statistical form of a Bell-curve (Thorndike,1904) which lead to conclusions that skew important data into generalizations that are non-representative of 99% of the mind’s activity and are mis-leading and non-discriminating.

This new paradigm is in response to the current crisis in the reigning paradigm of standardized educational measurement that stipulates standardized testing measures are the most reliably accurate way to measure student learning. And yet, over the last twenty years, a scientific anomaly in measurement error has been quietly growing into a crisis as researchers discover how much standardized tests don’t measure.

We are all in a unified-field of experience whereby each human’s progress is unique and common and that the process of teaching and learning should facilitate all humans as having a versatile intelligence that makes meaning and progress through its own assessment of its understanding—from knowing to not knowing to knowing—toward total understanding.

The scientific anomaly was first noticed by Dewey (1929) as his colleague Thorndike was pioneering the use of standardized tests. This scientific revolution represents a paradigm shift away from the less than 1% of data we currently collect (standardized testing data) on human learning in a standardized but limited-bell-curve-results paradigm and towards a universal-field paradigm that acknowledges the 99% of the data about human learning that we do not collect will be a more accurate assessment of the most robust perception of the field of education—that every action has meaning—and all interdisciplinary interactions, all of the teaching and learning, researching, policymaking and conversations at all levels in and across all disciplines and amongst all humans are combined in a unified-field of experience called total understanding and we are all making progress toward that together.