Multiple Intelligences
During my education program at USF, Dr. Barry Morris introduced me to Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. At the time, there were only seven, but we were required to think of activities for all seven intelligences for every storybook we reviewed (50 during the semester). That experience taught me that I should think about incorporating lots of different kinds of activities as often as possible.
The problem with using Multiple Intelligences in practice is that to cater to students with a variety of the now nine defined intelligences, a teacher must do an incredible amount of planning. Along with that, varying the assessment to fit the activity will cause parents to wonder why and how students earn their grades.
The best application for MI in my opinion is to remind us that students have widely differing aptitudes. Learning activities should be chosen with this in mind. A teacher should offer as much choice as possible for skills practice and independent exploration of a subject.
Here are some links for a Multiple Intelligences study of the Space and the Solar System.
Verbal/Linguistic: Students make candy “meteorites” and describe them in geological terms. Edible Rocks Lesson
Logical/Mathematical: Find out when the sun and moon rise and set from the Old Farmer's Almanac
Visual/Spatial: Take a virtual tour of what a human base on Mars could look like. Interactive Mars Base
Bodily/Kinesthetic: A field trip near Mt. St. Helens in Washington state reveals terrain similar to Mars. Field Trip to Mars Also, students can print out and build paper models of Pathfinder Paper Pathfinder model
Musical: Listen to musical pieces created for the planets. Music for the planets
Intrapersonal: Students explore NASA’s space projects in detail National Space Science Data Center.
Interpersonal: This site gives a phone number to call for a daily three-minute recorded report about what’s up in the sky. Griffith Observatory
Naturalistic: Scientists have identified a new planet. Students find out what criteria are used to classify a body a planet. Article about a new planet
Existential: Find out how scientists are searching for signs of life and other habitable planets. Terrestrial Planet Finder
This was a lot of fun to compile. I hope you enjoy exploring it!
posted by Shelly D @ 11:09 AM
2 Comments:
Shelly,
I concur with your statement regarding planning time, but I think you hit the nail on the head when you indicated that thinking about MI alone helps us to provide varying activities - sometimes even with choices. As Angela W. also suggested, we don't necessarily always want to cater to students' strengths, but help them to improve their less intelligent preferences.
Marie
Even Martin Gardner said that he never meant there were seven intelligences. He only meant to expand the idea of intelligence so teachers would offer mutliple entry points to the material. As you say, "A teacher should offer as much choice as possible for skills practice and independent exploration of a subject."
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