Interpersonal Intelligence

"They ignored me. They were busy promoting the fight that would kill time and divert from any lesson I might be planning. I moved toward Petey and made my first teacher statement, “Stop throwing sandwiches.” Petey and the class looked startled. This teacher, new teacher, just stopped a good fight. New teachers are supposed to mind their own business or send for the principal or a dean and everyone knows it's years before they come. Besides, what are you gonna do with a teacher who tells you to stop throwing sandwiches when you already threw the sandwich?

Benny called out from the back of the room, “Hey, teach, he awredy frew the sangwidge. No use tellin' him now don't throw the sangdwidge. They's sangwidge there on the floor.”

The class laughed. There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it. One boy covered his mouth and said, “Stoopid”, and I knew he was referring to me. I wanted to knock him out of his seat, but that would have been the end of my teaching career. Besides, the hand that covered his mouth was huge, and his desk was too small for his body." (1)

How did we teachers handle our first day in front of a class? Did we succeed or fail in the attempt of having the whole group of pupils under control? What went wrong and why? What would we have done if pupils had started throwing their sandwiches at each other? Or if they did ... how would we have responded to the attack?

It was in 1983 when Dr Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University, published his theory of multiple intelligences. This theory suggested that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, was far too limited. In a nutshell, what Dr Gardner proposed was eight different intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults: linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, spatial intelligence, bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence, musical intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence, naturalist intelligence and last but not least, interpersonal intelligence.

No doubt, interpersonal intelligence plays a substantial role in success because it allows us to affect others by understanding others; without it, we lose the ability to exist socially.

It is this kind of intelligence that makes a person an excellent politician, a leader and, why not, a teacher capable of being adored and respected at the same time and succeeding when it comes to mediating in a conflict.

However, the main problem with intelligence, never mind which type it may be, could be that it is not acquired, that is to say you either have it or you don’t. Any teacher can learn how to cope with certain situations, no matter how difficult they may be, as long as they are predictable and follow certain behavioural patterns. The acid test comes when something unpredictable, something you've never remotely thought might happen, really takes place.

Why do certain people make excellent leaders, politicians and... teachers, while others fail. And when I say teachers I don’t mean the person who stands with his/her back to a blackboard (never mind if it’s the latest digital version on the market) and in front of a group of wild teenagers to try to teach them Maths ,Social Sciences or English! When I say teacher I mean the person who is expected to and should be looking forward to helping all those teenagers grow up while making the most of their schooldays.

According to Gardner, Armstrong and Coleman, among others, it is this interpersonal intelligence, this ability to interact well with others, that helps us to act and respond satisfactorily in front of a class.

I suppose the question is whether this intelligence is somehow intuitive, or if it can be learned. We all know that you can give sound advice to someone failing in a teaching situation, but if they don’t have that innate awareness of what is going on, both within themselves and with their pupils, there’s not much result.

Maybe it is a thing not learned from books and theory, but by trail and error, through experience. Even the very best teachers often begin as hopeless rookies. The question is whether one learns from mistakes, no matter how disastrous, or one gives oneself up to failure. When I look back on my own teaching in secondary schools, the beginning was almost all failure, and the successes seemed to come with age and the years of trial and error… as if by some magic gradually seeping in. Suddenly there came a day when I walked into a class and they all looked up, attentively with expectation (enthusiasm even), as if it was the most natural thing in the world that they should give up their natural individuality to the common good. There’s something also about simply expecting them to pay attention, and because your expectation is so convincing, they seem to have no option. Certainly children and adolescents behave in some ways like animals, and know in their bones whether you expect to be obeyed or not, and on any sign of weakness go in for the kill. Not that it’s much consolation to a fragile beginner teacher flailing about, trying to apply what he/she learned on the best-known training course.

By the way, let me tell you how the sandwich story ended: the teacher picked up the sandwich from the floor, he unwrapped it and ate it. It was his first act of classroom management.

Smart of him, wasn’t it?

(1) Frank McCourt, Teacher Man, Harper Perennial, 2006