Customer Reviews

Multiple Intelligences and Personality Type : Tools and Strategies for Developing Human Potential (Understanding yourself and others series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dario Nardi's "Multiple Intelligences and Personality Type" represents a comprehensive look at the concept of intelligence through three sections and provides great "workbook-style" exercises for personal reflection. The first, personality and intelligence explores eight styles of personality type (Keirsey Four Temperaments taken a step further) and gives real-life character descriptions to provide concrete examples of those types. The second sectionon Multiple Intelligences, explores Howard Gardner's eight intelligences and gives you two different exercises to find out your strength in that intelligence---these are worth the price of the book. The third section, Intelligence and Conciousness, Dr. Nardi explores intelligence from a unique perspective--through the understanding of the different concious and unconcious perspectives people go to for analysis and learning. This section is complex, but is accompanied by exercises that put the learning to use and makes the information easier to grasp. I would say that anyone interested in personality and personal development should purchase this book. It seems like a great book for counselors, coaches--or the like--that need material to help people build interpersonal and intrapersonal skills for furthering their growth and development. I would like to see what others thought about this book---so if you have read it, let everyone know what you think--Thanks!

Dr. Dario Nardi is a very deep thinker, and if you're dealing with his material on personality type I highly recommend you go to Dr. Linda Berens' workbooks first and get the background on temperament, interactive styles and cognitive dynamics that she's developed (in some cases with Dr. Nardi's help and that of others). And so it is with this workbook. Here Dr. Nardi integrates the work of Howard Gardner of Harvard on "multiple intelligences" with the work of the personality type students, giving examples of how different people of different Myers-Briggs types would employ the same kinds of intelligences.

Now this work (like Dr. Gardner's) is an invaluable tool toward breaking the fallacy (imposed on us thanks to the Stanford-Binet IQ test and the like) that there's such a realistic thing as "general intelligence". We do have various kinds of intelligence, and just like all the other facets of human personality, they can exhibit synergy in different personalities. Yes, in general problem-solving different people do have different levels of ability, but two watchwords by Dr. Gardner are brought out by Dr. Nardi in this workbook and drive its agenda: "Ask not how smart you are; ask how you are smart" and "Ask not whether you're motivated; ask what motivates you." Those are words of deep wisdom. In that light, I'm mystified as to why this edition was allowed to go out of print. It is a highly valuable reference work in addition to being a very helpful workbook.

For anyone who is currently a teacher or training to become one this book offers a variety of insights into how to effectively engage students.
The reason why I did not give it five stars is because it endeavours to convey too many complex ideas in too little detail in some areas. It would have been better to simply make the book longer and explain these sections more clearly.
Nonetheless I'm still going to buy a second one for somebody else.
Thank you for this book of useful strategies.