Reflection

Multiple Intelligences Reflection

Week 1 and 2

July 6, 2003 - July 19, 2003

Date of the Work: Thursday, July 17, 2003

Description of the Task

To discover what my personal Multiple Intelligences, and how that knowledge can be used to further my teaching performance. I completed the following online MI questionnaire and survey.

• LDRC (Learning Disabilities Resource Community) Multiple Intelligence Inventory
• Felder & Solomon’s Learning Styles Questionnaire

What Happened/ Reflection
What did you discover?

My LDRC Profile

• Linguistic 25
• Mathematics 29
• Visual/Spatial 35
• Body/Kinesthetic 39
• Naturalistic 36
• Music 26
• Interpersonal 32
• Intrapersonal 43

Using Felder’s Learning Styles and Strategies to interpret my results,
I found that I am balanced across the eight multiple Intelligences with linguistic and music being the lowest at 25, 26 while Intrapersonal was the highest at 43.

Are you surprised at your findings?

I took one of these MI several years ago. At that time my Intrapersonal and Body /Kinesthetic scores were much lower. However I was not surprised by these findings because I have been attempting to increase my range of Intelligences over the last several years by pursuing modalities that I was weak in. The results I obtained in this survey indicate I have been having some success in this. Though I should point out that a true profile of MI would require a wider range of questions in that many of the questions I had to answer no or yes too I knew were inaccurately portraying that particular Intelligence, while another related activity would have allowed an answer indicating strength in that area.

Would you be surprised at your student's answers?

I have over the last several years attempted to introduce as many MI modalities as possible into my teaching and have developed a better understanding of their use and preference by my students. That being said a survey like this would be useful in that sometimes I find my own MI preferences sometimes “cloud’ my perception of my student’s MI. As indicated above, the narrow limit of questions in the Inventory affected our results, so we should keep in mind the questions or activities that we base our assumptions of our student’s MI on.

Reflection on Christine Doody’s MI Lesson Plan

Christine’s posting was an excellent example of her personal MI preference. She said “I will also confess that I do have a silly song that I sing when creating letters! While it is silly, it does reemphasis the main points of a letter and I have actually heard students singing it while trying to creating a letter!!

I love your letter song idea and it’s just that way teachers creatively use MI! Here are a few thoughts to extend this Lesson Plan to other modalities. Interpersonal: you could have the students do individual letters and then form a group to discuss the various letter criteria you have shown them or they could initially brainstorm their own criteria that they could then develop themselves into a rubric for evaluating their letter? As an assignment they could act out a letter (Body/Kinesthetic) they wrote or develop a scenario to act out where one of the components of the letter was missing and the complications that might arise?

Summary of Learning

Would this impact on your choices for teaching and technology? How?

It would and has impacted on my choices for teaching and technology. I have for several years adopted a constructivist teaching philosophy that attempts to engage as many MI modalities as possible and whenever I find a student with particular difficulties in learning any given assignment I will search for and engage other MI modalities to find one the student is more successful in using. I also have found that integrating technology into the curriculum more naturally engages more modalities given the multi-media requirements of the cooperative project centered lesson plans that I use in my classroom.

One example from the course where I incorporated my new knowledge of MI was my Intelplay QX3 Digital Microscope – Magnification & Seed Lesson Plan. I thought the MI component would extend student learning so I decided to make a full lesson plan that could eventually be added to NS Learning Interchange Site so others could use it.