This paper introduces the educational theory most useful within my setting for work, which is an elementary school special education class, the aims, goals and objectives and how this theory supports my teaching. The theory most useful to my teaching is Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences.
Howard Gardner has postulated multiple intelligences. He contends that there are different mental operations associated with intelligence, and there are many different types of intelligence. Too often our society overem¬phasizes verbal ability. Gardner outlines eight types of intelligence: (1) verbal/ linguistic, (2) logical/mathematic, (3) visual/spatial, (4) bodily/kinesthetic, (5) mu¬sical/rhythmic, (6) interpersonal, (7) intrapersonal, and (8) naturalistic (as sited in Ornstein and Hunkins, 2009, p. 129).
AIM
The aim of instituting multiple intelligence teaching is to encourage critical thinking skills. The importance in such an educational theory is upon learning rather than teaching. The students’ attentions and learning styles dictate the path of the curriculum being taught. This model acclimates to students, rather than expecting students to adjust to it. As with my particular classroom practices, I believe that coaching and learning through the multiple intelligences helps solve many collective school problems and elevates the learning experience for students and teachers alike. Students begin to appreciate how they are intelligent. Learning is both a social and psychological aspect of the curriculum. Once students comprehend the equilibrium of their own multiple intelligences they start to manage their own learning and to value their specific assets.
GOALS The goal of using multiple intelligences educational theory is for students to become well-adjusted persons who can function as providers of their culture. Teachers can recognize how students are perceptive as well as how intelligent the teachers themselves are. By distinguishing students with the prospective for solid kinesthetic intelligence, for example, allow teachers to create occasions where that strength can be nurtured in others. Students advance comprehension from diverse perspectives. The multiple intelligences theory inspires teachers to respect intellectual capacity more generally. Administrators and curricularists are able to see that visual arts, music and dance can be just as appreciated to students' perception of the world they live in as conventional academic subjects. Assembling assets gives a student the inspiration to be an expert. This can become a guide to improved self-esteem for some students. Academic merit is not the only avenue for social and economic mobility. Highly important in a democratic society is fostering excellence in many endeavors and providing multiple chances for people to succeed (Ornstein and Hunkins, 2009). By teaching for comprehending, students amass constructive educational proficiencies and the aptitude for generating resolutions to complications in life. Parental and community participation in apathetic schools may rise. This occurs as students exhibit work before groups and spectators. Such activities have increased the output of parental involvement in my school, where it barely existed before a wholesale implementation of multiple intelligence theory, amongst other curriculum measures.
OBJECTIVES Multiple intelligences theory can be used for curriculum design improvement, instruction planning, creation and choice of course endeavors, and related evaluation stratagems. Teaching which is intended to help students improve their strengths can also activate their assurance to progress in capacities in which they are not as sturdy. Students’ multiple culture inclinations can be spoken to when teaching includes an array of expressive and applicable systems, undertakings, and evaluations. The teacher’s function also alters in this type of system. The theory can add to education by proposing that teachers need to increase their catalog of methods, tools, and approaches beyond the classic verbal and analytical ones principally used in American classrooms. The theory can be applied in a wide variety of instructional settings, from very customary settings where teachers spend much of their time precisely teaching students to open settings where students control most of their own learning. Multiple intelligence teaching basically incorporates what sound teachers have always done in their teaching: getting beyond the text and the blackboard to awaken students' minds. This affords a way for all teachers to ruminate upon their finest teaching techniques and to comprehend why these methods work, or why they work well for some students but not for others. It also helps teachers expand their current teaching repertoire to include a broader range of methods, materials, and techniques for reaching an ever wider and more diverse range of learners.
SUPPORT MY WORK My place of work, Rigdon Road Elementary School teachers and administrators has applied aspects of multiple intelligence theory in their classrooms and schools. Students will be able to demonstrate and share their strengths. I established skills altered from those I would develop by standing in front of a class talking each day. I perceive my students from seven new viewpoints. In scheduling the classroom centers, I find I am figuratively pushing my students from behind rather than pulling them from the front, in reference to teaching style. Also I am functioning with them, rather than for them. I find my gratification in their eagerness for learning and independence, rather than in their test scores and ability to sit quietly. Because I am scheduling for such a mixture of activities, I have become more resourceful in my own philosophy and my own knowledge. Multiple Intelligences theory related to the curriculum might best be characterized by an unattached and miscellaneous assemblage of teaching approaches such as aforementioned. In this wisdom, multiple intelligence theory embodies an ideal of instruction that has no distinctive rules other than the requirements obligatory to the cognitive modules of the intelligences themselves and the explicit needs of the sphere in which they are teaching (e.g., science, biology, history, etc.). Educators can choose and select accomplishments, employing the theory in ways suitable to their own distinctive teaching pattern and consistent with their educational philosophy. The teaching philosophy should not pronounce that all children learn in the precise same way. I teach Special Education and for my diverse learners however, multiple intelligence theory can be implemented by a set of constraints within which educationalists can create new curricula. The theory offers me a milieu within which teachers at my school can direct any skill, subject area, theme, or instructional objective and cultivate at least seven ways to impart it. Principally, implementing multiple intelligence theory offers a means for me to build daily lesson plans, weekly units, year-long themes, and programs in such a way that all students can have their strongest intelligences addressed at least some of the time. This works in the inclusion setting, as well as, the pullout or self-contained models. We must nurture all types of intelligence and all types of excellence that contribute to the worth of the individ¬ual and society. We must consider the versatility of children and youth, their mul¬tiple abilities and ways of thinking and learning ( Ornstein and Hunkins, 2009).
References
Ornstein, A. and Hunkins, F. (2009). Curriculum: Foundations, Principles, and Issues. 5th ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Gardner, A. (1983). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
