Every Head of the Seven Headed Dragon Matters: Tom Hoerr Talks About Multiple Intelligences and the Instance He May Have Omitted One

An Imperfect Leader

Book Update!

Imperfect Leaders! You can now order my book, An Imperfect Leader: Leadership in (After) Action. Click on the link here. Or if there is no hyperlink, go to peterstiepleman.com, you can order it there.

AND if you liked it, would you please leave a positive review? I’m hoping to get 35 positive reviews on Amazon. Thanks!

My Guest: This week, Dr. Thomas Hoerr is my guest. If you’re in education, you likely remember the first out-of-town conference you ever attended. Not because, as a superintendent told me recently, they went to a conference and found themselves being dared to ride a mechanical bull. I think he said something like, “It would have to have been a weekend at Bernie’s kind of thing (where I was actually dead) to get me on one of those things!” Weekend at Bernie’s – ah, a classic. And it does conjure an image of sorts.

Well my first out of town trip was to Albuquerque, NM. I was teacher in Oakland, and I saved my money to fly to Albuquerque to attend a 2-day training with Tom Hoerr from St. Louis. Tom had become a sought-after expert on Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), and I was really interested to learn more and see how it might provide me with some approaches to teaching bi/multilingual learners.

What if we found ways to attend to the strengths of a child to teach them English as opposed to a drill and kill method? That was my wondering and I was considering writing my dissertation using Gardner’s research. In the end, I found a school in Indonesia who was using MI to teach English as a second language, and well, I was living in California making $29,000 a year, so..... So I settled on the question of why children learn (or don’t learn) English. Drawing on Guadalupe Valdes’s research. The quick answer is it has to do with systems and their design – systems will create exactly what they are meant to create.

But back to Tom Hoerr! I reached out to him recently to tell him he was my first professional learning conference, and that I spent a career using what I learned from him, and how I’d love to have him as a guest on the podcast. And in a lovely display of his interpersonal intelligence, he agreed! Thanks for listening!

Bio: Tom Hoerr led schools for 37 years and is now a Scholar In Residence at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he teaches prospective principals. Tom was a public-school principal in University City in the St. Louis area before becoming the head of the New City School in St. Louis, a school founded on a commitment to progressive learning and respect for human diversity. Under his leadership, New City began implementing the theory of multiple intelligences (MI) in 1988 and created the world’s first MI Library in 2006.

Tom Hoerr’s new book, The Principal as Chief Empathy Officer, stems from his premise that leadership is based on relationships, and he uses empathy as the tool to help everyone grow. He shows how we can each grow our empathy. Hoerr devotes chapters to empathy and personnel, instructional leadership, DEI, and so on. The book is filled with specific examples, tables, and strategies to help everyone lead in an empathic manner. He also relates leading by empathy to the other Formative Five success skills – self-control, integrity, embracing diversity, and grit – and offers many interesting anecdotes.

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An Imperfect Leader: Leadership in (After) Action is supported by ILAA, LLC, a firm dedicated to supporting aspiring, new, and established leaders. For more information, please find them at www.human-centeredleaders.com.

Music for An Imperfect Leader was written and arranged by Ian Varley.

Sam Falbo created our artwork, a wood-print inspired daruma doll butterfly.

www.peterstiepleman.com

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