Providing For Your Students' Multiple Intelligences
Imagine the mind of your student as a room. Multiple intelligences theory describes what you might find in that room: various kinds of intelligence, various ways of looking at the world, making sense of it, and interacting with it. Learning Styles theory provides the keys that could open each learner's unique room. IQ theory cannot explain Albert Einstein, Bill Gates and other academic failures who have made huge, visible impacts on human society. MI theory does.
There are at least 8 kinds of genius in every child. As with LS, MI is not a matter of strict categorizations, but rather a matter of adequate matching of teaching style to learner's uniqueness. A learner may exhibit more than one kind of genius.
The challenge for teachers is how to recognize and effectively nurture such innate geniuses.
Students with strong verbal-linguistic intelligence can read for hours at a time. They also tend to have highly developed auditory skills and learn best when they can speak, listen, read or write. They:
- Think in words
- Use language and words in many different forms to express complex meanings.
- Love reading, writing, telling stories, playing word games.
- Speak simple, eloquently or passionately at appropriate times.
- Exhibit the capacity to write effectively.
- Exhibit the ability to learn and speak other languages.
- Show a capacity to tell jokes, puns and riddles.
- Have a good memory for names, places, dates, or trivia.
- Enjoy word games and spell words accurately.
- Enjoy reading books.
- Appreciate nonsense rhymes, puns, tongue twisters.
- Learn easily through listening, reading and writing.
- Are interested in poetry, public speaking, storytelling, journalism and writing.
- Demonstrate skill in the use of figures of speech like metaphors, similes, hyperboles, etc.
- Participate in debates
- Join poetry and prose writing contests.
- Have a regular supply of paper and writing implements.
- Keep a personal diary.
- Join a book club.
- Teach others to read.
- Mark unfamiliar words encountered while reading and look them up in the dictionary.
- Use one new word in conversation every day.
- Play word games.
- Regularly visit the library or bookstores.
- Have a regular storytelling time with friends or loved ones.
- Join or create a speaker's club.
- Listen to audio recordings of literary pieces by great speakers.
- Read aloud in front of a mirror and act like a TV or radio announcer.
- Record their speech, whether casual or formal into a tape recorder and listen to the playback.
