The Two Howards: Patron Saints of Squishy Teaching
The two Howards, Howard Moskowitz and Howard Gardner — one working in market research and psychophysics, one in psychology and education — offer a vision of what should be: individualized, personalized and unique instruction for each student, every day.
Howard Moskowitz was made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in a TED Talk about how Moskowitz revolutionized the food industry by giving the world a number of options when it came to spaghetti sauce. Here’s what Gladwell says about why this is so revolutionary:
… people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it’s good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th, was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability … What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying this same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce.
Not only does that revolution need to happen in tomato sauce, but it also needs to happen in education. The other Howard, Howard Gardner, has been saying this for a long time about the way that students are learning. The short Howard Gardner is that we’re all smart in different ways, so it’s stupid to try to teach everyone in the same way. But he was only talking about the methods of learning. He didn’t saying anything about the actual content.
Chart time. Here’s the range of possibilities for making choices about personalization of education.
Gardner essentially said that we need more of this quadrant.
But don’t we probably need more of this quadrant as well?
The vision of squishy teaching, the vision of the Howards, is not just personalized learning… it’s personalized-by-the-student learning. Squishy teaching means movement toward learning that is student-influenced in both content and method.
