Monday, 16 September 2013

Multiple Intelligence and the learning styles

Howard Gardner developed the Theory of Multiple Intelligence to document the fact that human beings have very different kinds of intellectual strengths and these strengths forms the basis of their learning style. According to him the different intelligences are 
linguistic, logical, kinesthetic, musical, visual, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.
Theory of Multiple Intelligence

To be simple, not everyone learns best by reading and writing, some learn better through actually doing, some finds easy to understand the concept when given as pictures. It is very important to know how kids learn and represent things in their minds, and then how they use them in order to show what it is that they've understood.

In a class of thirty kids it is highly difficult to address individual child's learning style in a forty minute period. It is possible for a teacher to ensure at the end of the unit at least one or two activities match each child's learning style.


Take for an instance, 
Grade I, Environmental Science,
Topic - Plants and Trees
Subtopic - Common plants in neighbourhood

Suggested activities: 

  • Take the children to the school garden            
  • Allow them to observe the different kinds of plants and trees - Kinesthtic, Interpersonal, Visual
  • Back to classroom and ask the kids to list the observed plants and trees - Linguistic
  • Tabulate the list under plants and trees - Logical
  • End the class with a song about trees or plants - Musical ( I would suggest Karadi Rhymes - Neem, Peepal, Banyan )
Activities for children with Interpersonal and Intrapersonal like roleplay and drawing can be given in the following classes.

Though millions of people live on this earth, we are physically unique; there's an intellectual uniqueness too. Lets explore the child's uniqueness instead of grading and comparing :)





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