Thomas Armstrong > Quotes

“The word creativity is closely linked to the word genius, since both words have the root meaning 'to give birth.' Essentially, creativity designates the capacity to give birth to new ways of looking at things, the ability to make novel connections between disparate things, and the knack for seeing things that might be missed by the typical way of viewing life.”
― Thomas Armstrong, Awakening Genius in the Classroom

“Children and adolescents, being relatively new to life, are naturally creative because they haven't been brainwashed, so to speak, by the conventional attitudes of society. Consequently, students are always coming up with novel images, words, and actions that my delight, enlighten, or inspire adults....Creativity has not been the subject of intense focus, extensive research, or high levels of funding in American education.”
― Thomas Armstrong, Awakening Genius in the Classroom

“From the standpoint of education, genius means essentially 'giving birth to the joy in learning.' I'd like to suggest that this is the central task of all educators. It is the genius of the student that is the driving force behind all learning. Before educators take on any of the other important issues in learning, they must first have a thorough understanding of what lies at the core of each student's intrinsic motivation to learn, and that motivation originates in each student's genius.”
― Thomas Armstrong, Awakening Genius in the Classroom

“We want to assist [students] in finding their inner genius and support them in guiding it into pathways that can lead to personal fulfillment and to the benefit of those around them.”
― Thomas Armstrong, Awakening Genius in the Classroom

“I believe that all genial classrooms share at least five characteristics that guide their instruction regardless of content or grade level. These characteristics are (1) freedom to choose, (2) open-ended exploration, (3) freedom from judgment, (4) honoring every student's experience, and (5) belief in every student's genius.”
― Thomas Armstrong, Awakening Genius in the Classroom

“A professor of creative studies at the University of Georgia, Bonnie Cramond, compared the traits of creative people with the warning signs of ADHD and found that, except for the terms used (positive for creative people, negative for people diagnosed as ADHD), they were practically identical.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the ADHD Child: 101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion

“A person walking into a genial classroom knows almost at once that it is a place dedicated to the celebration of learning and young minds; a cognitive greenhouse, so to speak, that honors and celebrates the capacities of each and every student. In a genial classroom, there are frequent outbursts of energy representing students' exuberance in discovering something new, in making novel connections, in confronting and overcoming challenges, in being surprised or delighted, intrigued or mystified, and indignant or outspoken about the ideas and materials being presented.”
― Thomas Armstrong, Awakening Genius in the Classroom

“Children exposed to early violence display altered responses to confrontation and conflict; in essence they are ‘hard-wired’ to be anxious, distractible, highly aroused, and impulsively aggressive in situations of conflict.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the ADHD Child: 101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion

“One study taken from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, for example, revealed associations between ADHD Inattentive Type and self-reported parental or guardian neglect, physical abuse, and even sexual abuse.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the ADHD Child: 101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion

“The familial and emotional components may be most relevant for a child who is traumatized by physical abuse or other forms of stress at home.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the ADHD Child: 101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion

“The term “niche construction,” first used widely by biologist Richard Lewontin, the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, represents the process by which an organism alters its own (or another species’) environment to help increase its chances of survival. A beaver building a dam and a spider spinning a web are examples of niche construction. So is a bird building its nest or a rabbit burrowing a hole. When animals migrate, they are seeking a favorable niche within which to flourish. Each of these activities assists the organism in achieving its basic needs—gathering food, protecting offspring, keeping clear of prey, seeking shelter from inclement weather—and thus raising the likelihood that it will pass its genes on to the next generation. Scientists are just beginning to appreciate that niche construction may be as important to evolution as natural selection. In the book Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution, Oxford lecturer F. John Odling-Smee and his colleagues write, “Niche construction should be regarded, after natural selection, as a second major participant in evolution. Rather than acting as an ‘enforcer’ of natural selection through the standard physically static elements of, for example, temperature, humidity, or salinity, because of the actions of organisms, the environment will be viewed here as changing and coevolving with the organisms on which it acts selectively.”17 What this can mean for neurodiverse individuals is that instead of always having to adapt to a static, fixed, or “normal” environment, it’s possible for them (and their caregivers) to alter the environment to match the needs of their own unique brains. In this way, they can be more of who they really are.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Power of Neurodiversity: Unleashing the Advantages of Your Differently Wired Brain

“active learning (writing, reading aloud, talking with a teacher or student about the topic at hand).”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the ADHD Child: 101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion

“Refuting the simplistic statement that “ADHD is caused by bad parenting” avoids a more complex argument (given in chapter 7) that adverse factors such as physical abuse or trauma in a child’s home environment can impair neurological development and be linked to ADHD symptoms.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the ADHD Child: 101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion

“MI theory makes its greatest contribution to education by suggesting that teachers need to expand their repertoire of techniques, tools, and strategies beyond the typical Word Smart and Number/Logic Smart abilities predominantly tapped in U.S. classrooms.”
― Thomas Armstrong, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom

“However brain functioning is measured, these studies tell us nothing about whether the observed anomalies were present at birth or whether they resulted from trauma, chronic stress or other early-childhood experiences.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the ADHD Child: 101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion

“A key component of the ADHD myth is that it’s a neurobiological disorder. This “fact” is convenient because it isolates the disorder from any taint of association with family problems, suboptimal parenting, child abuse, poverty, and other social ills.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the ADHD Child: 101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion

“These are difficult times for educators who believe that learning is worth pursuing for its own sake and that the chief purpose of school is the nurturing of students as whole human beings.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Best Schools: How Human Development Research Should Inform Educational Practice

“It's probably true that schools are the most conservative of all cultural institutions, relentlessly seeking to pass on the rules of a damaged society to the next generation.”
― Thomas Armstrong, The Human Odyssey: Navigating the Twelve Stages of Life