A sneak preview of our soon-to-launch online Brain Lab program!

Last week Charlotte and I attended the annual National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) Convention in St. Louis, met many enthusiastic educators, and shared lots of great ideas. One of the highlights of the conference was the keynote speech by Howard Gardner, famous for his theory of multiple intelligences.

I suspect many of you resonate with Gardner's ideas, particularly the notion that each of us has different strengths and weaknesses and that it is important to recognize and value children for more than just their math and language abilities. The issue of how to measure or value a child is very important. Coming out of Gardner's talk, I found myself reflecting on the importance of ideas, and of the structural framework of ideas as a general matter.

Those of you who have tested our Brain Lab programs or talked with us about our philosophy know that we have based our Super Solver System on the ideas of the original problem solving theorist, George Polya. Polya was a brilliant mathematician who, in the middle of the 20th century, presented a general four step program for problem solving.

The Brain Lab programs we developed and tested last spring and summer were an attempt to bring these ideas to life. We carefully selected challenges and exercises to help students engage in this four step process of: 1. Understand the Problem, 2. Choose a Strategy, 3. Execute that strategy, and 4. Reflect and try a new strategy if needed.

What we found — surprise! — is that children are not supremely rational little creatures. They can solve Rush Hour challenges with gusto, that's not an issue, but their thinking process is elusive, and their ability to articulate how they did their thinking, for the most part, is not a strong suit. Our conclusion: your average school child does not think the same way as a brilliant mathematician. This discovery matches up with what the big-name math education research community has also discovered... teaching problem solving is very complicated stuff!

So where are we headed next? We're jumping into an idea called "Executive Function." Recently, brain researchers have lit up on this concept, which essentially describes the higher order thinking patterns and processes that distinguish us as human beings. Executive functions include things like planning and sequencing, short term memory, focus, and the ability to set a goal and do what's needed to accomplish it.

Rather than promote a specific system of evaluation, these ideas are leading us to think about play exercises that focus on different parts of your brain, specifically the parts identified by top brain researchers as being essential to higher order thinking skills. As we settle into this new thinking, we are discovering something remarkable... all the good ideas we have been formulating and drawing from are still valid, we're just accessing them through an exciting new lens!

Ultimately, I believe these ideas may loop back to what Howard Gardner described in his talk... that each of us has a unique distribution of natural abilities, and the job of a great teacher or great program is to draw forth the strengths, and help bolster the weaknesses, of each child.

Having received enthusiastic responses from many teachers with whom we've shared this thinking, we are excited to push forward with new ideas and new direction. Our new online Brain Lab program, currently in beta testing, is based around these ideas and designed to help children become more self aware about their thinking process and better able to describe the way they reason and problem solve. This is fun! Viva new ideas!