Richard Wilson

I have been very busy engaged in school and home business over the holidays. I had to advertise and appoint an Admin Asst, Janitor and playground supervisor over the vacation period and am glad to say the process, which can be protracted, is nearing its conclusion. I am always gratified by the level of interest in any jobs we have on offer here, it allows for a great level of choice and lets us choose the best possible candidate for each post.

On return I had a look about to see what was on offer for my own development as a Head Teacher and decided to sign up for the
Five Minds for the Future launch in Glasgow. The speaker is the famous
Howard Gardener who is credited with developing the notion of multiple intelligences. I remember reading about this some years ago now and was very excited by the idea as it seemed to make a few of my observations as a class teacher a bit clearer in considering the way my pupils learned and what influenced the teaching and learning process. The launch will consider the 5 minds necessary for the future of education. I look forward to hearing how a tie between A Curriculum for Excelllence and Gardener’s ideas will become apparant. His notion is that there are 5 minds:

1. disciplined
2. synthesizing
3. creating
4. respectful
5. ethical

It’s easy to see how
ACE and Gardener’s idea might be a close match. I will report on the conference after I attend. I will also tie in these ideas with my own Collaborative Writing Project which I will be piloting with a P5 class in my school. I will match the outcomes of the project with the ideas of successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors and keep a log of how I can prove this. At the same time I will be interested to see if the Five Minds of Gardener can be moulded to fit within the same framework and provide empirical evidence to prove any or all of the ideas. You can visit my
wiki pages and see our progress over the year. If you wish to participate please e-mail me with you details as you must be a member to edit the pages. Drop me a line and your ideas at
rwilson@eastlinton.elcschool.org.uk

After reading the literature I recalled similar talk about this from my college days and remembered that the Greek philosopher
Galen proposed that there were four areas that explained personality, they were:

• melancholia
• irratibility
• optimism
• phlegmatism

This influenced thought on the subject for many years.

More recently modern theorists came up with:

• extroversion
• neuroticism
• agreeableness
• conscientiousness
• openness to experience

Many personality test in recent times included these as measures and plotted out grids to see what sort of personality you had. The range included respectable journals to less respectable magazines and papers. Many people used it as a bit of fun and some establishments used them as part of the recruitment and selection process. There’s a plethora of examples on the internet for you to try if you wish.

Modern geneticists are now establishing a growing body of evidence that it is our old friends genes that in fact play a much greater part in determining personality than has been previously thought and that although nature and nurture modulate each other genetic influences run deep.

If you have any interest in this check out
Dan Jones blog.

If you are really keen to see more of your personality
Steve Quartz at Caltech will do a brain scan for you for $1,000 and see what’s on your mind!