MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
Beliefs
· Students are one-of-a kind individuals with unique strengths, weaknesses, aptitudes, interests, and capabilities.
· Well educated students acquire a background in academics, arts, and in critical and creative thinking.
· By knowing who they are and what they can do, students’ love of learning, excitement about life, and self-confidence become bedrock for lifelong growth and success.
What is intelligence?
· The power of knowing.
· The ability to understand and/or deal with new situations.
· The skilled use of reason.
How intelligences develop?
Intelligence:
1. Biological endowment ‘nature’
2. Personal life history ‘nature’
3. Cultural/historic background ‘time/place’
Howard Gardner
· Graduated from Boston School of Medicine in Neurology.
· Harvard Graduate School professor and psychologist in cognition and education.
· He defines intelligence as an ability to solve problems or fashion products that are valued in one or more cultures.
· The question is not ‘How smart I am?’ but rather ‘How am I smart?’
· It is how we learn, process, and understand information.
· Theory of Multiple Intelligence consists of 8 types of intelligence. These are:
1. Verbal/Linguistic
2. Logical/Mathematical
3. Visual/Spatial
4. Musical/Rhythmic
5. Bodily/Kinaesthetic
6. Interpersonal
7. Intrapersonal
8. Naturalist
· According to Howard Gardner:
· Each person is a unique blend of dynamic intelligences which grow, expand and develop throughout life.
· Intelligence is not singular. Multiple Intelligences can be identified and described.
· Rarely do they work alone; rather intelligences are combined in our activities. One can enhance another.
· Teaching students about their intelligence strengths and helps them be self-advocates in their learning.
Verbal/Linguistic Intelligence
· The ability to read, write and communicate with words.
· The ability to use language to express one’s thoughts and to understand other people orally or in writing
Logical/Mathematical Intelligence
· The ability to reason and calculate.
· Enables individuals to use and appreciate abstract relations
· The ability to manipulate numbers, quantities, operations.
Visual/Spatial Intelligence
· The ability to think in pictures and visualize future results.
· The ability to imagine things in your mind’s eye.
· The ability to perceive spatial information.
Musical/Rhythmic Intelligence
· The ability to create, communicate, and understand meanings made out of sounds.
· The ability to compose music, to sing and to keep rhythm.
· The ability to hear music, tones, and larger musical patterns.
Bodily/Kinaesthetic Intelligence
· Allows individuals to use all or part of one’s body to create products, solve problems, or present ideas and emotions.
· Using the body in highly differentiated ways for expressive, recreational, or goal directed purposes.
Interpersonal Intelligence
· Enables individuals to recognize and make distinctions among others’ feelings and intentions.
· The ability to work effectively with others and display empathy.
Intrapersonal Intelligence
· The ability to distinguish among an individual’s own feelings, to accurate mental models of themselves, and use them to make decisions about life.
· The capacity to know one’s self.
Naturalist Intelligence
· Allows one to distinguish among, classify, and use of the environment.
· The ability to discriminate among living things and to see patterns in the natural world.
Qualities of an Effective Teacher
· Positive
· Communicative
· Dependable
· Personable
· Organized
· Committed
· Motivational
· Resourceful
· Compassionate
· Flexible
· Perceptive
· Ethical
· Knowledgeable
· Creative
· Patient
· Sense of humour
Questions to Ponder
· What does it mean to be a multiple intelligences teacher?
· How can I do a better job of teaching to diverse intelligences?
· What are my strongest/weakest intelligences?
· What are my goals? Will this benefit my students?
· There is no syllabus in respect to MI-based language teaching. However, there is a basic developmental sequence that has been proposed as an alternative to syllabus design. The sequence consists of four stages:
1. Stage 1: Awaken the intelligence. Through multisensory experiences such as touching, smelling, tasting, seeing etc., learners can be sensitized to the many faceted properties of objects and events.
2. Stage 2: Amplify the intelligence. Students strengthen and improve the intelligence by volunteering objects and event, and by defining with others the properties and contexts of experience of these objects and events.
3. Stage 3: Teach with/for the intelligence. At this stage the intelligence is linked to the focus of the class.
4. Stage 4: Transfer for the intelligence. Students reflect on the learning experiences of the previous three stages and relate to issues and challenges in the out-of-class world.
Procedure
Christison describes a low-level language lesson dealing with description of physical objects. The lesson plan recapitulates the sequence.
1. Stage 1: Awaken the intelligence. The teacher brings many different objects to the class. Students experience them. Experiences help activate and make learners aware.
2. Stage 2: Amplify the intelligence. Students are asked to bring objects to the class or to use something in their profession.
3. Stage 3: Teaching with/for the intelligence. At this stage, the teacher structures larger sections of lessons so as to reinforce and emphasize sensory experiences.
4. Stage 4: Transfer of the intelligence. This stage is concerned with application of the intelligence to daily living.
