Multiple Intelligences 1 Reflections on an ASCD Multiple Intelligences Online Course Bo Green Plymouth State University ED 5500 Multiple Intelligences: Strengthening Your Teaching July 2010
Multiple Intelligences 2 Multiple Intelligences: Strengthening Your Teaching This is a reflection paper on my learning experience taking the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) online course titled Multiple Intelligences: Strengthening Your Teaching. As a culminating activity I herein focus on reviewing the learning experience, discussing important dimensions of multiple intelligences (MI), and delineating how I will apply my learnings to my professional practice. I chose to include this ASCD course in my Plymouth State University (PSU) master s degree program of study because a core course, Theories of Cognitive Development and Learning, was replaced by Arts and Learning, and while I derived terrific benefits from the replacement course I wanted to improve my understanding of the cognitive processes of learning in my master s program. Upon evaluating ASCD s courses I felt Multiple Intelligences: Strengthening Your Teaching would satisfy that desire. Another reason I chose this course is it supports two of the areas I am passionate about in my teaching practice, methods of authentic learning and reflection. As documented in my graduate work (Green, 2010) I coined the acronym SMART (Standards, Methods, Assessment, Reflection and Technology) to represent the five pillars of effective education, and this ASCD course supports my passions. Review of the Learning Experience My PSU coursework thus far has been an outstanding learning experience. Of my seven prior courses two were with PSU professors teaching onsite at our international school, one was online via Blackboard, three were taught by adjunct PSU professors at our school and I took one ASCD course online. Since I felt the ASCD course, Technology in Schools: Teaching Better, was very beneficial to my development I looked forward to taking a second ASCD course.
Multiple Intelligences 3 I again found the registration process user-friendly. The pre- and post-assessments were appropriate and helped to ensure my full attention. The readings, journal entries, and interactive modules, including audio/video clips, definitely deepened my understanding of MI. ASCD clearly recognizes the needs of working professionals as their course design platform allows saving completed work and returning to continue study at a later time. Upon course completion I appreciated the opportunity to provide feedback via the course survey and I again found that printing out the completion certificate was easy. I found it helpful that Bloom s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives is included early in this course. The six levels of cognitive complexity, in ascending levels of complexity, are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Building the course from a Bloom s Taxonomy perspective provided a useful educational perspective. Aside from the books I read on multiple intelligences perhaps the most beneficial component of this course for me was being prompted to reflect on my learning and develop three takeaway ideas, discussed later in this paper, to improve my teaching. As I have written about in my PSU coursework (Green, 2010), and may focus my Graduate Capstone Project on, I firmly believe in the process of reflection, especially when accompanied by action planning. I piloted an action oriented reflection process last year with my students so I value this course encouraging us to identify specifically what we will do to improve our teaching. Dimensions of Multiple Intelligences Considered a pioneer in the field, Howard Gardner (1983, 2004) challenged the classical notion of singular intelligence and popularized the theory that humans have many competencies. He argued that there is persuasive evidence for the existence of several relatively autonomous human intellectual competencies, abbreviated hereafter as human intelligences (p. 8) and he
Multiple Intelligences 4 stated the major assignment in this book, then, is to make the case for the existence of multiple intelligences (later abbreviated as M.I. ) (p. 9). Gardner originally identified seven multiple intelligences (linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic and personal, which is comprised of intrapersonal and interpersonal). Later, Gardner (1999) sought to address growing sentiment that his original list needed to be expanded and he put forth three additional intelligences for consideration: naturalist, spiritual, and existential, and he discussed the possibility of a moral intelligence. He recognized the inherent difficulty in neatly packaging the complexities of the human mind, saying, In the first edition of Frames of Mind, I listed seven intelligences largely because these intelligences best met my eight criteria, but I conceded that the decision to enumerate seven entailed neither logical nor scientific necessity (p. 47). Again revealing realism in the arduous task of defining intellectual capacities, Gardner states, Nonetheless, knowledge is accruing and will I hope continue to accrue about what human beings are like, when considered in relative isolation and as members of a functioning cultural entity (p. 393). For the purposes of this paper I will reference ASCD s list of eight multiple intelligences as captured in the online course (linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, naturalist, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal and interpersonal). More recently, Gardner (2006) sought to address contemporary applications of MI theory including discussion relevant to educational practice. One section of the book handles frequently asked questions about MI theory and practice, including the following: Q. How can I teach multiple intelligences theory in an innovative way to a group of teachers? A. See the writings of Tom Hoerr (2000), principal of the New City School in St. Louis (p. 85). I will return to the MI efforts at New City School later in this paper.
Multiple Intelligences 5 One other area of inquiry that I studied while taking this course was the relationship between learning styles and MI. Since this paper focuses on MI I will keep my learning style thoughts brief but a few observations are in order. Silver, Strong and Perini (2000) remind us of Jung s four dimensions of personality that serve to connect consciousness with experience (sensing, thinking, feeling and intuition). They believe that taken individually neither MI nor learning styles adequately accounts for the breadth of cognitive functions. They argue, Multiple-intelligence theory is centered around the content of learning and the relationship between learning and eight distinct fields of knowledge or disciplines. By focusing on content and disciplines of study, however, multiple-intelligence theory pays little attention to how people perceive and process information. The converse is true of learning styles: The style model revolves specifically around the individualized process of learning, but does not directly address the content of that learning. Clearly, learning styles and multiple-intelligences need one another (p. 41). I leave it to the experts to further develop this complex relationship, but I believe both perspectives have merit. Specifically, my experience has taught me that having students conduct a learning styles inventory, accompanied by reflection and discussion, can help them derive greater self-understanding and success. Application to my Professional Practice Teaching with a cognizance of MI can improve student achievement because students have different dominant learning styles and different learning engagements reach students on different cognitive levels. Designing learning engagements with MI in mind serves to reach the range of learners in the class as well as deepen student understanding. Armstrong (2009) argues, 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 linguistic and
Multiple Intelligences 6 logical ones predominantly used in American classrooms (p. 54). He also argues, MI theory opens the door to a wide range of teaching strategies that can be easily implemented in the classroom. In many cases, they are strategies that have been used for decades by good teachers. In other cases, the theory of multiple intelligences offers teachers an opportunity to develop innovative teaching strategies that are relatively new to the educational scene (p. 72). The three takeaways I identified to improve student achievement are: implement Action Oriented Reflection (AOR) improvements, habitually reference both Bloom s Taxonomy and the Multiple Intelligences during lesson planning and teaching, and involve specialist teachers to enrich relevant mathematics learning engagements. It has been my experience over the past 11 years of teaching at both the middle and high school levels that developing student intrapersonal intelligence is largely absent in curriculum and learning engagements. Typically, reflection occurs in a language arts or social studies context where students contemplate reading passages or historical events, followed by the teacher judging the academic quality of their summary. However, these engagements do not encourage meaningful introspection on the part of the student where the focus is on selfevaluation of understanding, goal setting and action planning for improvement. This is where AOR offers the tremendous potential to benefit student learning. AOR is a technique I piloted last year as a component of PSU s Classroom Assessment graduate course, the results of which are included in my Green (2010) wiki. The basic idea is for students to reflect and document, on a daily basis, the concepts they understand and the concepts they need additional reinforcement on. AOR serves multiple purposes: it acts as an ongoing formative assessment technique, helps students take greater accountability for their own learning, deepens student self-awareness of effective learning strategies and develops their repertoire of
Multiple Intelligences 7 multiple intelligences, particularly intrapersonal intelligence. I have already begun to design AOR improvements that I will implement next school year and taking this course has helped hone my thinking and planning. Hoerr (2000) documented New City School s evolution toward a multiple intelligences learning community and argues, The intrapersonal intelligence is the key intelligence. More than any other intelligence, a strong intrapersonal intelligence positions us for success (p. 43). He continues, Knowing our strengths allows us to find situations in which what we do well is valued and where we can succeed. Knowing our weaknesses allows us to avoid situations where we are likely to fail (at least we ll be aware of our weakness so that we can do what is necessary to succeed (p. 43). I suggest Hoerr s statements, backed up by the educational experiences at New City School, strongly support my assertions about the benefits AOR can yield in student learning and success. As I mentioned earlier in this paper I believe so passionately in the power of reflection that it will likely be the focus on my Graduate Capstone Project. The second takeaway from this ASCD course is the habitual use of Bloom s Taxonomy and the eight multiple intelligences during lesson planning and teaching. I will print out and laminate both Bloom s Taxonomy and the eight multiple intelligences and post them prominently near my SmartBoard, along side the problem-solving laminated flow chart I already reference frequently. These three documents are wonderfully self-supportive. Since my subject partner and I meet very near this location to collaboratively lesson plan, and since he has completed his PSU M.Ed. and also values this line of thinking, we can glance up and reference these documents to help balance our planning for maximum student benefit. Likewise, as I am teaching at the SmartBoard both my students and I will naturally and conveniently integrate
Multiple Intelligences 8 these powerful concepts in our learning engagements, helping to ensure that students higherorder thinking skills and spectrum of intelligences are developed over time. My third course takeaway is I want to further involve specialist teachers to enrich relevant mathematics learning engagements. For example, in years past as we studied quadratic functions and learned the quadratic formula I had students orally match the formula to the rhyme Pop Goes the Weasel. Former students report this has greatly improved their retention and recall. Last year with our MacBook one-to-one laptop implementation I expanded this engagement and provided more student choice in using digital tools such as Photo Booth and Garage Band. My subject partner and I collaborated on this and designed teams of three or four students in every class to devise songs and/or skits and had them record their productions using their MacBooks, after which we held a fun, low-stakes competition between our classes. The students were highly engaged and based on summative assessment results they had no trouble recalling the formula! This learning engagement involved musical, linguistic, spatial, bodilykinesthetic, logical-mathematical and both intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. My improvement idea is to build upon this success and involve our music teacher who is highly creative and talented. I am confident he can help design student learning engagements that even more effectively incorporate MI on this quadratics unit and I would like to team teach this lesson with him. In addition to the above three takeaways I offer one final piece of evidence of the application of this course to my professional practice. Traditionally, mathematics textbooks introduce a concept with a short reading assignment followed by several example problems. Generally, these involve lower-order thinking skills and perhaps two MIs, linguistic and logical-
Multiple Intelligences 9 mathematical. After taking this ASCD course I will introduce the concept of slope, or rate of change, by having students do the following, incorporating all of MIs as noted parenthetically: extend their arms at varying angles to the horizon, modeling both positive and negative slope, and describe rate of change, or slope, and rise over run (bodily-kinesthetic) read the assignment and prepare to share their understanding with a partner and/or the class (intrapersonal) share their understanding with a classmate and/or the class (interpersonal) write a paragraph in their own words describing what rate of change is (linguistic) write the basic equations that quantify slope, rate of change and rise over run (logical-mathematical) describe and hum or sing how two melodic pitches model low rate of change and high rate of change (musical) identify four examples found in the real world, one each for zero, low, high, and undefined slope, such as with mountains, ski slopes, and aircraft takeoff (naturalist) draw pictures representing varying rates of change (spatial) Conclusion I am pleased I took the ASCD course Multiple Intelligences: Strengthening Your Teaching because it provided concrete ideas to help me continue improving as an educator and the additional reading I did provided important insights into the MI-learning styles relationship. Furthermore, the heightened understanding I gained of intrapersonal intelligence greatly informs the direction I will take toward my Graduate Capstone Project next year. I am confident my final ASCD online course will be beneficial to me and my students as well. I continue to appreciate PSU s flexible approach to program of study design by including independent study options such as ASCD coursework, allowing graduate students to pursue areas of passion.
Multiple Intelligences 10 References Armstrong, T. (2009). In Multiple intelligences in the classroom. (3 rd ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Gardner, H. (1983, 2004). In Frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences. New York, NY: Basic Books. Gardner, H. (1999). In Intelligence reframed: multiple intelligences for the 21 st century. New York, NY: Basic Books. Gardner, H. (2006). In Multiple intelligences: new horizons. New York, NY: Basic Books. Green, E. (2010). The Effective Educator. Retrieved July 6, 2010, from http:// theeffectiveeducator.wikispaces.com/. Hoerr, T. (2000). In Becoming a multiple intelligences school. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Silver, H., Strong, R., and Perini, M. (2000). In So each may learn: integrating learning styles and multiple intelligences. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.