Multiple Intelligences- A Different World!

I think that teaching with and similarly being in a classroom that incorporates multiple intelligences truly is a different world when compared to the traditional learning environment. I had heard of multiple intelligences before today, but I was not really sure of what they were. I now realize that it is just a different method of teaching that covers not only the subjects such as math, science, and reading, which are most often what children are tested on, but it also covers skills such as being people smart, self smart, and music smart. Although these subjects are not tested quite as often, they are important because they can be tools to help children learn the more "core" subjects such as math, science, and reading. Since every child learns differently, I believe that multiple intelligences help each student to be able to use the tools and skills that will help them to grasp the information. This is important because if a student only learns by doing hands on activities and a teacher feels that providing these would take away too much from book learning then that child will suffer as a result.

The in-class activity that we participated in today helped me to get an idea of what my strengths and weaknesses are in the different intelligences. I think the assessment we took today may be good for future use if you would like to incorporate multiple intelligences in your own classroom. At the beginning of the year the students could take the same test I took today and report their scores anonymously back to the teacher. This would just be to help the teacher get a good idea of maybe what students should spend more time focused in on an area of learning that incorporates music or whatever "smart" he or she is best at.

At first I found it challenging to organize the data into a chart. I was having some trouble getting the labels on the side to be words instead of numbers. I then just decided to narrow down my table to a comparison of music smart and math/logic smart. I found this comparison really interesting because in the areas where students seem stronger in music they seem to be less focused in the math/logic area. Also where there is a spike in the math/logic area, the music area went down significantly. This was an overall interesting assignment for me to assess myself as well as to get a better idea about the fascinating world of multiple intelligences.