Podcast Interview with Sheila Halasz

Sheila Halasz  has college degrees in Elementary Education and Early Childhood/Special Needs Preschool, She has master's classes in curriculum development and a Ministry and Theology Certificate from Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, NJ.  She has coauthored 15 books through Group Publishing involving children's activities as well as four curriculum lines. She has a current column in Children's Ministry Magazine called Discipline Q and A.  She founded and is currently Director of St. Paul's Christian Preschool in Crystal Lake, IL.  Sheila has founded a Christian Preschool in Illinois that uses a multiple intelligence curriculum that helps evaluate how smart children are in different areas, and I thought we could learn a little from what she has experienced and how we can use that with all the children we encounter.

Sheila, How do you assess if a child is smart in your school?

Sheila:  My biggest belief is that God has created all children to be loved and valued, and he gives everyone gifts so that we are not like anyone else. These gifts he gives us, is what makes us smart so you we start from day one in knowing all the children are smart. We just have to figure out what areas they are smartest in and what are their weaknesses to work on.

All parents want they children to be smart, and I love that through multiple intelligences we can help parents fall more in love with their children and see the true value in how smart they are.  When we assess our children, we are able to use a multiple intelligence overlay to all their learning areas so that the parents can see where they fall and what they may want to work on.

Mark:  When you say all children are smart, what do you mean? Aren’t some children smarter than others?

Sheila: You have fallen into the common parent trap. We all want our children to be “the smartest”. When we think of smart, we think of it from our 20th century brain.

In the twentieth century we have grown accustomed to associating intelligence with reading, writing and mathematical concepts in school. This is certainly no surprise since our intelligence tests are all fill in the dots dealing with these concepts. However, the real definition of intelligence is the ability to respond successfully to new situations and the capacity to learn from our past experiences--- the ability to respond successfully to new situations and the capacity to learn from our past experience.

Let’s all imagine you were driving here today and your car broke down. Who would be the smartest person you could call? Would it be someone with a Ph.D. from a university or a mechanic with a junior high school education? Intelligence depends on the context and the demands that life presents us. It has nothing to do with tests in school. In fact, one study of highly successful professional people indicated that fully a third of them had low IQ scores.

When we look at intelligence at my preschool, we look at children being smart in 8 different ways instead of just the typical two that most public schools value. We look at all the children being smart so there is never one that is smarter than the other just as there is not one that God loves more than the another. There are certainly children gifted in areas more than others, but everyone has some degree of smart in all the areas.

Mark: When you talk about these 8 areas, what areas you are looking at?

Sheila: The first area we look at is the linguistic intelligence. A person who is high in Linguistic intelligence loves words. Memorizing scripture is easy for them. They enjoy tongue twisters, trivia and plays on words. They also like to argue, persuade and entertain through the spoken word. They want to raise their hand and tell you everything that happened to them from the past week. Most teachers are very high in the linguistic area and tend to use this in their teaching.