Kids' World

How Are Your Students Smart?

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How can we use what we know about multiple intelligences to improve our teaching?

We can use our knowledge of the eight types of intelligence as effective tools in planning our lessons. By including activities to reach different intelligences, we can be sure that our lessons are balanced, and that all of our students have an equal chance to master new language. This doesn't mean that every language item needs to be taught seven or eight ways. It's enough to remember that language can be taught in more than one way. There are things that our students need to know in order to be successful speakers and readers and writers and listeners of English, and we have to be imaginative and persistent in helping them understand these things better.

To help you evaluate your own lesson plans, here is a brief breakdown of how some frequently used types of classroom activities fit into a scheme of multiple intelligences. (These activities are all from the Let's Go Teacher's Book.)

Verbal-Linguistic activities
These include activities where children play with words, or respond to words, or do something with language. Examples include Bingo, Concentration, Scramble, Slap, Baseball, and word games like I See Something.

Math-Logic activities
These include activities where children have to find patterns or relationships, or use their reasoning skills to solve a puzzle. Examples include Charades, Guessing games like Guess the Word or Guess What I'm Saying, Living Sentences (or other activities where students put items in order), puzzles, and fill-in-the-blank activities.

Spatial activities
These include activities where children are able to draw, or use their imaginations, or treat letters or words as pictures. Examples include Find the Match, finding and underlining all instances of a specific word (or letter) in some text, Picture Game (or other drawing games), Picasso, and Back-to-Back Picture activities.

Body-Kinesthetic activities
These include activities where children are able to move their bodies. Examples include board races, Charades, Scramble, Slap, Baseball, Do as I Say, Please, Robot Game, Command Chains or Lines, rhythm games, relay races, and team games. This would also include activities where we ask children to attach gestures to verbs and other vocabulary in order to help them remember.

Music activities
These include activities that are musical, or rhythmic, or activities that include music in the background. Examples include Walk and Talk, Hot Potato, songs, chants and rhythm games.

Interpersonal activities
These include activities where students work in pairs or groups. Examples include Walk and Talk, Conversation lines, Step Away lines, Find Your Partner, Command Chains or Lines, and roleplays.

Intrapersonal activities
These include activities where students work alone. Examples include workbook activities, and exercises in which students personalize their answers. This would also include times where we allow students some silent time in class as they internalize new language.

Naturalist activities
These include activities that involve nature as a theme, as in reading passages or thematic units, and also activities that involve classifying and categorizing language. Examples include activities like identifying which object or letter is the same or different, or deciding which item comes next in a series, grouping words in various categories (such as use, or part of speech, or beginning sound, etc.).

Many of the activities mentioned above actually overlap in several different areas of intelligence. Therefore, when you use them in your classes, several types of intelligences can be strengthened through one activity. For example, Find Your Partner activities, where students are using picture cards to make a match and then have a conversation, let students practice language using interpersonal, spatial, body-kinesthetic, and verbal intelligences because they are looking at pictures, moving around the room, and are talking to each other using the language they've learned. Another activity that strengthens several intelligences is a picture game in which students must guess what another student has drawn. This activity emphasizes spatial, interpersonal, math-logic, and verbal intelligences.

Summary

By considering what we know about multiple intelligences when we plan our lessons, we can encourage our students to practice using language in a number of different ways. If we vary the types of activities we use we will be better able to reach all the distinct and different minds in our classes.

Multiple Intelligence Theory is a work in progress and our understanding of it and its applications for the classroom is likely to evolve as the theory matures. Just as there is no one intelligence against which to measure our students, there's no one right way to implement Multiple Intelligence Theory in our lessons. It is however, very important that we take individual differences among our students very seriously. We need to get to know students as individuals, and do our best to design lessons to teach to their different intelligences, and to help them to use and strengthen their other intelligences as well.

Books:
Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. 1993.
This is the primary resource that all other MI books and sites have developed from.

Kristen Nicholson-Nelson. Developing Students Multiple Intelligences. 1998.
A really clear application of MI to elementary school classes.

Web resources:
21st Century Schoolhouse
In addition to useful links, there are a lot of good activity ideas for the different intelligences.

Literacynet
Although most of these literacy ideas are geared toward adult education literacy classes, I found quite a few that would be appropriate for children's literacy in EFL, also.

Scholastic.com - Teachers Professional Resources
This section of the Scholastic site is a treasure box of teacher resources. In particular, an assessment article by Nicholson-Nelson, Let 100 Flowers Bloom, includes some wonderful MI literacy ideas for children classes.

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Barbara Hoskins-Sakamoto came to Japan in 1985 with a teaching certificate in English, a Masters in TESL and an idea that teaching English in Japan for a couple of years would be a fun adventure. Fifteen years later, she is still here, enjoying working with Japanese children and their teachers. Barbara frequently contributes articles to the the JALT Teaching Children SIG Newsletter and the Association for Foreign Wives of Japanese (AFWJ) Journal, and is co-author of Let's Go, the most popular children's course in Asia.

Karen Frazier-Tsai has conducted numerous teacher-training seminars and workshops throughout Asia, and has taught and advised students in both U.S and Taiwan. She is currently working for an American elementary school as the liaison for the Japanese bilingual program. She is a co-author of the new, Let's Go Second Edition.

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