Unit 1 Discussion Activity

First of all I will apologize for not being able to find the short Multiple Intelligences Self-Inventory on the ThirteenEdOnline site. However I did complete a similar inventory on the BGfl Multiple Intelligence website at http://www.bgfl.org/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/questions/questions.cfm

When I completed the Online MI test for myself I discovered my intelligence strengths to be logical, linguistic, intrapersonal, and visual/spatial … and by far my greatest area of weakness to be musical.

I am not really surprised at the result … and I guess that I shouldn’t be since I scored relatively high in the area of intrapersonal which focuses a lot on self-awareness. I will admit though that I was a little surprised that verbal/linguistics intelligence was almost as strong as my mathematical/logical intelligence.

If I completed the same assessment on each of my students I think I would find more than a few surprises. Why? The mandated curriculum is laid out in a way that favors verbal/linguistics, with mathematical/logical coming in second. With such a heavy curriculum emphasis on this area we tend to over focus on these types of intelligence. Yes, I could pick out the students who are good drawers, however NOT being a good drawer does not preclude your from having high visual/special intelligence. Also, we normally only get to see students in only the school environment where the focus is on academics. There may be students who are very naturalist (nature smart), however the opportunity may not arise in the school environment to allow a student to demonstrate this type of intelligence meaningfully.

My understanding of multiple intelligence has influenced my choice of teaching and technology in many ways. As I have said already, our curriculums are very linguistically centered. I have found that by capitalizing on other areas of intelligence students can more easily and enjoyably achieve linguistically based outcomes. For example, I saw a big improvement in students’ motivation and writing skills when I started having them complete a writing process piece using Google Drive. Each student completed their own piece of writing but helped others revise and edit their work through the ‘share’ collaboration feature (ie. pairing word smart with people smart). A big success story for one student this past year was with Moodle and Science. The student, who was highly visual, would nearly always include a graphic from the Internet that related to the topic we were studying with her Moodle forum postings (ie. pairing word smart, visual smart, people smart). She frequently said to me throughout the year, “I usually don’t do so well for Science, but this year I feel like I’m learning a lot.” For her, when she paired Science concepts and activities with a visual representation she was much more likely to achieve the intended learning outcome.