FOURTEEN THINGS YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW TO INCORPORATE

MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCS INTO YOUR DAILY TEACHING

(without asking anyone’s permission and without endangering your job!)

1. Teach students ABOUT multiple intelligences. Design a series of mini-lessons or activities whose purpose is to help students get to know themselves intellectually. Regularly expose them to the concept of “eight ways of knowing and learning”, and help them get increasingly better at using all eight ways. Refer to the book Pathways of Learning: Teaching Students and Parents about Multiple Intelligences (Lazear, 2000) for ideas.

2. Vary your instruction by teaching WITH multiple intelligences. Within the course of a week, make sure you teach lessons that give students opportunities to use all eight intelligences to gain the knowledge and understanding you are trying to impart and to process the information in a lesson. Refer to the book The Intelligent Curriculum: Using Multiple Intelligences to Develop Your Students’ Full Potential (Lazear, 2000) for ideas.

3. Provide homework assignments that require students to work in the various intelligence areas. Create fun, unusual, and interesting homework assignments that will stretch students to use all eight intelligences. Steer away from drill assignments and move into the realms of higher-order thinking and creativity. Be sure that you inform parents in advance that you will be assigning such work, and tell them why and how it benefits their child.

4. Give unit tests or daily quizzes that are multiperceptual. Use Multiple Intelligences concepts to design exciting, challenging, and enjoyable activities through which students can “prove” their knowledge. Be sure that you have spent time teaching them about the eight intelligences and that they have had a chance to use all eight ways of knowing in your classroom before you spring these kinds of tests or quizzes on them. Refer to the book Multiple Intelligence Approaches to Assessment: Solving the Assessment Conundrum (Lazear, 1999) for ideas.

5. Have conferences or inservices with parents about multiple intelligences. Create a special awareness display for parents that will help them understand the theory of multiple intelligences and how you are using it in your teaching and classroom. At parent-teacher conferences, report on the full intellectual development of their child. You might want to get their input on things they know about their child that can help you reach and teach him or her more effectively.

6. Have students create portfolios, process-folios, and journals and logs. What you are after is helping students create a holistic picture of their learning journey. Let them decide what to include as long as it gives an accurate picture of what they have done, what they have learned, and how they have progressed.

7. Create student intelligence profiles. Using student observation techniques, practice carefully observing your students as they are involved in a variety of activities and learning tasks, including when they are relating to each other and when they have “free time”. Watch for manifestations of the eight intelligences. Keep a record of your observations to help you more effectively teach and reach your students.

8. Integrate teaching the core capacities of the eight intelligences into your curriculum. Every day, give students opportunities to awaken their intelligences and to practice using them in daily lessons. This will help them strengthen, enhance, and expand their full intellectual potential. Refer to the book Intelligence Builders for Every Student: 44 Exercises to Expand Multiple Intelligences in Your Classroom (Lazear, 1998) for ideas.

9. Set up “intelligence stations” or make sure the “media” of all the intelligences are available to students. Allow students to do their daily classroom work in these stations, utilizing the tools of each station.

10. Initiate the practice of “anecdotal reporting” on your students. In some way that is comfortable and easy for you, regularly record what you are observing and learning about your students as you work with them in your class. You do not have to make an anecdotal entry for every student every day, but you should probably make at least one per student per week.

11. Send home intelligence development reports along with regular report cards. In addition to the required periodic report cards that are sent home for parents, include an additional report that tells about students’ intelligence capacity development. Steer away from deficit-based reporting (that is, using language that suggests learning deficiencies, problems or weaknesses). Instead, focus on the developmental aspects of students’ learning (that is, using language that reveals students’ interest levels, their strengths, and their comfort zones).

12. Invite students’ input on designing examinations. Prior to a formal examination period, ask students to tell you what would help them show you what they know. Then using this information, create a test, with options, that takes into account their input. Your goal should be to maximize the possibility of all students succeeding on the test; therefore, the test should contain multiple ways for them to prove their knowledge and understanding. Remember that not all students must (or will) prove themselves in the same way.

13. Experiment with domain projects, displays, exhibits, and performances. As a culminating activity for a unit, have students create a major presentation that integrates the knowledge base of the unit and that uses all eight intelligences (for example, specify that their project, display, exhibit, or performance must include each of the intelligences). The criteria for the presentations should go beyond mere factual recall to include implications, applications, and the transfer of learning; in other words, they must demonstrate genuine understanding of the material.

14. Share with a trusted colleague something new you have tried. Candidly discuss both the pluses and the minuses with this person and reflect with him or her on what you have learned about the art of teaching from your experiment. Invite feedback. Don’t ask the other person to buy the whole ball of wax of multiple intelligences; rather, take it a step at a time and ask that person to share what he or she might be willing to try based on what you have shared.