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Multiple Intelligences in Teacher Training
Rosie Tanner
"Spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count " Rabbit. The World of Pooh. A. A. Milne.
Puzzle
My nearly two-year-old son plays a lot with puzzles and building blocks, working out for himself where the pieces fit together. His second favourite activity at the moment is clambering about the furniture (the sofa, the bed, the steps) and jumping off, though he hasn't quite yet got the idea of bending his knees at the right moment when he lands. He also likes "reading" picture books and naming objects, animals or actions that he sees: "moon", "elephant", "sleeping". When he meets a special friend they run up and down and shriek in delight because they are together; five minutes later, she pushes him over because he stole her toy - and then he cries in utter despair. Which of his Multiple Intelligences is he developing in each situation?
MI Theory
I started reading about Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence (MI) theory' (Gardner 1993) about a year ago. Gardner believes that we each possess eight or more intelligences which function together as a whole - he has named Musical, Bodily- Kinaesthetic, Logical-Mathematical, Linguistic, Spatial, Interpersonal, Intrapemnal, Naturalistic "intelligences" - and I find this theory very appealing and convincing; I wanted to do something practical with it in my own work. Last year, I was teaching on a four-year initial teacher training course for secondary school teachers; in this article, I shall introduce you to how I tried to put MI theory into practice when evaluating trainees on two Methodology courses and share some of those trainees' reactions.
What I did
I decided to work with MI theory when assessing two of my teacher trainees' Methodology courses: they are evaluated for these courses by a series of assignments in a file. At the start of the courses, when I gave out their assignments, I introduced Multiple Intelligence theory by explaining it briefly to them and giving them a handout (from Jack, Hopper and Chamberlain 1996). I provided them with seven assignments; each trainee was required to do four out of the seven.
I tried to devise each of the seven assignments so that it would basically appeal to one of the seven intelligences. This in itself was difficult, for two reasons. Firstly, my ability to create reasonable assignments seemed to depend on my own stronger and weaker intelligences. And secondly, the intelligences are, of course, not discrete, but are linked and function together, so I now realise that an effort to design separate assignments for each intelligence is probably fruitless!
THREE MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCE ASSIGNMENTS
Assignment A: Intrapersonal
(i) Obtain and photocopy two pieces of student writing i.e. original work from real pupils at school. Explain briefly what the students' writing tasks were.
(ii) On each piece of writing, give some feedback as if you were the pupil's teacher. Include both feedback about the content of the writing and the language and be as specific as possible (Example of specific feedback on content: Your little brother sounds awful; mine is too. What else does he do?')
(iii) Write a few paragraphs on what kind of feedback you find most useful on your own writing as a student and relate this to your work as a teacher: what is the ideal sort of feedback for written work?
(iv) Look back at your feedback to your two students and write a few paragraphs explaining why you responded the way you did. These hints might help you:
o What colour did you use? Why?
o How did you indicate language errors?
o Why did you choose that way of indicating them? (etc.)
Assignment B. Interpersonal
Do this assignment in pairs, but each include a copy of your assignment in your file and state who you worked with.
(i) Together, write two realistic (but different) case studies about problems in teaching speaking. Your case studies should be based on your own teaching experience and should each be about 200 words.
(ii) Discuss with your partner and then write down possible ways to help solve these problems; provide at least FOUR alternative possible solutions and reasons for your solutions.
Assignment C: Spatial
(i) Make a collage on A3 size paper or cardboard that summarise your ideas about teaching speaking. Include anything you like about teaching speaking on your collage (pictures, statements, quotes, ideas, cartoons) - use your imagination.
(ii) Write a few paragraphs explaining the elements of your collage: why did you include what you did?
Why I did it
The reasons that I gave my trainees seven MI assignments were:
1 . To offer trainees the choice of assignments; in this way I felt I was letting trainees work in their own way, using their own learning styles. Students could choose an assignment based on a strong intelligence of theirs in order to perform well, or based on a weaker one in order to strengthen that intelligence.
2. To model how to put the theory into practice; I hoped it might rub off on them a bit in their own teaching, i.e. that they would try to appeal to the seven intelligences in their own classrooms.
3. To introduce MI theory to my trainees.
4. To help trainees become aware of how
they best learn and how they might further develop their own intelligences.
To illustrate, in the box you can find three of the assignments that I gave to my trainees. They are, I now feel, far from optimal, but I want to share with you my initial ideas of how I tried to put MI Theory into practice. Some detail has been omitted to save space.
Assignment A: Intrapersonal Assignment B: Interpersonal Assignment C: Spatial
Musical X X X
Bodily-Kinesthetic Yes X Yes
Logical-Mathematica X X ?
Linguistic Yes X Yes
Spatial X Yes Yes
Interpersonal Yes Yes X
Intrapersonal Yes ? X
Figure 1. Which intelligences are included in each assignment?
Afterthoughts
Although I designed these tasks with the idea of each one being based on one particular intelligence, I realise now that this is an impossible task, since "All of these intelligences work together in an integrated whole" (Jack et al 1996). I have now examined the three assignments in terms of how many of the intelligences are included in each one, as in the matrix in Figure 1. A tick (3) means that the intelligence seems
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to be included in the assignment, a cross (X) that it isn't and a question mark (?) that I'm not sure.
I can now see that "Assignment A: lntrapersonal", as well as covering intrapersonal intelligence (reflecting on what type of feedback I give), includes three other intelligences: bodily- kinaesthetic intelligence (students had to physically go and find school pupils' work to give feedback on); linguistic intelligence (writing the feedback, writing up the answers to my questions); and perhaps interpersonal intelligence, since the trainees might have had to ask another teacher for pupils' writing, or for
permission to use that writing. A similar analysis can be made of the other assignments.
Trainee reactions
In general, the trainees reacted quite enthusiastically to the assignments. One wrote, "The assignments ware OK because there were assignments for everyone. It doesn't matter what you like doing best, you could pick the ones that appealed to you most. I liked the assignments I did and the fact that you could choose from different ones so that everybody could find a assignment that matched his or her Multiple Intelligences, although another trainee thought "the file assignments were an awful lot of work."
I was personally most gratified by the creative results of the assignments based on Spatial Intelligence. Some trainees appeared at my office door with huge colourful posters that they had brought in by train and bike, and included not only pictures and photos on their collages but also pieces of old cassette tape, trainee work, quotes from poems or from themselves. And their comments on this particular assignment also seemed to be the most enthusiastic, viz. 'I have always been a bit of a creative type, Some of the pictures in the collage might seem a bit strange to you... but once you have read my paragraphs you might understand it better.
and 'I always liked making collages and really liked making one that had to summarise my ideas about teaching speaking" and "I always need to see and visualise things, otherwise I
do not understand what is said or what people mean. When I read a book or a text I can imagine what it looks like and have some picture or film in my head. "
Here are some more trainee comments on the MI assignments, which reveal why they chose the assignments that they did, as well as some of their beliefs about teaching:
Musical
'I'm a real lover of music. The first thing I do in the morning is get my remote control and turn on my radio. "
"This way the students learn something in a nice way and might remember more that way because the way to learn is much nicer. "
Bodily-Kinaesthetic
"The reason I chose the BK assignment is probably because I hate to sit still during classes as well. I need to move around, I need to organise and I need some challenge. "
'I like activities where my students are active in whatever they learn in whatever way. I like the idea of my students walling around in my classroom and asking for information. "
linguistic
'I chose [the linguistic assignment] because I wanted to know what my teaching practice teacher was thinking about the students learning to speak English. I wondered if the teacher would think the same way as I did and I thought I might learn a lot from his experience. "
Interpersonal
"I decided against the interpersonal
assignment because I felt it would be a big hassle to get to work with somebody else... " 'I also did the assignment because I like working together with Martin and I enjoy group and pair work. "
Logical-Mathematical
"learners like problem solving elements or to order information and make predictions. That is the reason I chose this task. "
lntrapersonal
'The intrapersonal assignment was something of a challenge to me ... on reflecting I find that I've been able to squeeze in some speaking activities [into my teaching]. "
Initial conclusions
What intrigues me is how many of my trainees chose the musical, spatial and bodily-kinaesthetic assignments: sixty-five out of the hundred assignments returned. What fascinates me even more is that the trainees, themselves successful students from a basically linguistical-logical- mathematical education system, studying to be English teachers, rarely chose those assignments (two logical-mathematical, eleven linguistic). There might be several reasons for this:
i) It could just be that the assignments which were not selected were too long or difficult compared with the others;
ii) My own logical-mathematical intelligence is definitely my weakest, which could be reflected in the assignments I created, thus making them somehow less attractive;
iii) The trainees themselves actually do have stronger intelligences in the areas that they chose;
iv) The trainees were bored by doing more of the same old thing so chose the more creative assignments;
v) The more popular assignments were actually more of a mixture of several intelligences combined, so appealed to more students.
Conclusion
I am pretty new to Multiple Intelligence Theory and its practical applications to teaching and teacher education, but thinking through these assignments and especially reading my trainees' reactions to them prompts me to want to learn and apply these ideas some more. At least now my students are reflecting on and talking about multiple intelligences. And I have learnt to think about designing assignments in a broader, more creative way.
P.S.
Is there anyone else in the TD SIG who is experimenting with MI Theory and who would like to share their ideas?
References
Jack, Barbara, Brenda Hopper and Val Chamberlain. 1996. Moving on MI Way: A guide to multiple intelligences in the secondary school. Centre for the Promotion of Holistic Education, Edge Hill University College, St Helen's Road, Ormskirk, Lanes. L39 4QP. UK.
Gardner, Howard. 1993. Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. New York: BasieBooks. ISBN 0-465- 01821-1. This is Gardner's book on the applications of MI the" to education.
Thanks to ...
... Catherine Green, Dubravka Knezie, Brenda Hopper and especially Julian Edge for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Rosie Tanner is the TD SIG Newsletter Co-ordinator and a teacher trainer at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.
From IATEFL issues of the Teacher Development SIG Newsletter
Newsletter 34, 1997 pages 16-21
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