Articolo: Costa and Jackson: Three Gifts to Educators from the Genius of Reuven Feuerstein

May 30 2014, Volume 1, Issue 5, No. 17
 Art Costa has been writing and consulting about critical thinking for four decades. His writings focus on the theory called "habits of mind."


Yvette Jackson is Vice President, National Urban Alliance and a life-long advocate for Feuerstein’s work and the need for children of color and poverty to have equal access to instruction and programs that provide them with critical thinking and problem solving skills.

" Change the input and the brain changes accordingly." - Reuven Feuerstein

Reuven Feuerstein is an Israeli clinical, developmental, and cognitive psychologist. He is the founder and director of the International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential (ICELP) in Jerusalem, Israel. For more than 50 years Feuerstein's theories and applied systems have been implemented in both clinical and classroom settings internationally, with more than 80 countries around the world. Succinctly described, Reuven Feuerstein is both a diviner of intelligence and a catalyst for changing belief about the intellectual potential of ALL students: belief of teachers who hold the destiny of students in their hands; belief of policymakers who narrate the lives of students (especially students marginalized by race, poverty, and learning differences); and belief of students (and adults) who, due to environmental conditions and genetic dispositions, have been previously led to doubt their vast intellectual capacity for learning and self-actualization (Jackson, 2011).

As Director of Psychological Services in Europe after World War II, Reuven was responsible for assigning prospective Jewish candidates for immigration from the European continent to educational programs in Israel. Upon their arrival, children were subjected to a series of tests, including IQ tests. Their poor results did not surprise Feuerstein. However, he recognized that whenever he guided these children through introspective questioning that created bridges to familiar experiences, the children's performance improved.

The improvement made Feuerstein question the current beliefs regarding the notion of a fixed intelligence. "What if, instead of measuring a child's acquired knowledge and intellectual skills, the process of learning was evaluated first? And what if intelligence was not a fixed attributed, measurable once and for all? What if intelligence can be taught?" To address these questions, he created dynamic assessments and instructional tools capable of both diagnosing and addressing the cause of cognitive impairments that traditional methods were incapable of doing. These tools are diving rods, designed specifically to tap intellectual ability that lay stagnant due to lack of experiences that stimulate academic learning and personal determination (Jackson, 2011, p. 56). While his gifts to psychological and clinical practices are many, this brief article illuminates 3 gifts of particular significance to educators.