Expertise or Intelligence? How Can Teachers Plan Lessons to Develop Multiple Intelligences?

In thinking about cognitive processing and multiple types of intelligences, consider how personal ways of perceiving are affected at the mechanical level and in the socio-personal level. Researchers study about how students think, and about how they learn, about how they are taught, and how they would like to teach and to be taught.

How can a teacher work with students to develop all their intelligences as well as their personal processing styles so that they learn efficiently and effectively? What does it mean to develop, for example, musical intelligence? Should everyone with a reasonable Music IQ of 90-110 be able to compose music? Play it? Discuss the tempo, rhythm, harmony, melody of a piece? Recognize several genres and enjoy listening to more than one of them? Play a CD in the car?

How much of an intelligence can be expressed without specific learning of content and development of skill?

In Western culture expertise and performance is valued in all intelligences, but some fields are more valued than others, literally by paychecks. Some musicians, athletes, artists, writers, mathematicians, ecologists, salesfolk, and personalities are highly esteemed, and recognized for being able to make a living from their development of skill and talent. Talent is often a combination of two or more intelligences; for example, Paul Simon has deep abilities in musical, linguistic, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. His songs resonate with audiences both musically and verbally, intellectually and emotionally.

Is the economic value of the expert, the genius, the exemplar of any kind of intelligence a stumbling block to the development of that same intelligence in the average classroom by the average student? An average student, one picked at random rather than identified and labeled as gifted or challenged.

If a student is identified as talented, has a high potential for a particular intelligence, she may be encouraged to develop the skills to express it if her local, socio-economic-cultural group sees a possibility for employment and security in that path. How many times has someone been told to be a teacher, not because of talent for teaching or because of a certain personality type or preferred learning channel, but because there was a reasonable expectation of getting a teaching job, while perhaps doing something more "artistic" or "creative" on the side--teaching as "having something to fall back on!"

But if a student is not seen as talented, or if the expression of talent is not valued, the student is less likely to be encouraged or taught enough skills to be an expert who can synthesize new expressions. Many teachers do not consider themselves talented, although some are actors, musicians, athletes, writers or artists. The artists may feel that they do not have enough talent to help a student develop musically, and the writer may feel inadequate to lead a student into the intricacies of math or choreography.

So as teachers develop lesson plans to include as many intelligences as possible, in order to help students develop potentials, how should they confront their feelings of inadequate talent or training?

First, they can think how they use their abilities in their daily lives, rather than focusing on the classroom. Most people can hum a tune or at least recognize one. Most people can do enough math to decide on a food budget this week or plan to have time to do a personal project. Almost everyone is visually aware enough to enjoy a garden scene, spatial enough to get to work on time, kinesthetic enough to navigate a shopping mall, intrapersonal enough to know what art is liked, and interpersonal enough to interact with neighbors and friends at some level.

How can teachers become more aware of the of their own multiple intelligences?

Each one can become more mindful by focusing on a particular intelligence. Choosing music for a lesson could stimulate a different kind of attention to music on the radio. Listening to the arrangements and the instrumentation would change awareness instead of just singing along.

Attempting a new skill helps teachers both appreciate the techniques needed to do the skill, and to remember how it is to learn something unfamiliar. What teachers want for their students is to become more mindful. Modeling mindfulness will help the teachers develop themselves and their students.

According to Mikola (2001, "Kinesthetic"), nearly all kindergarteners and preschoolers are kinesthetic learners, using their bodies and their hands to sort information, especially when they are in the pre-operational stages. As they move into lower elementary, they learn concrete operations, they become more visual, actually developing the ability or intelligence to learn from looking at pictures and deciphering reading codes. (Mikola, 2001, "Visual").

Then as they progress into middle school, they develop more auditory skills (Mikola, 2001, "Auditory") -assuming that they are not stuck in cognitive development or mislabeled as ADHD or remedial or slow.

If this progression is accurate, then the most important time to work on development of multiple intelligences is the early years of pre-school and elementary school while the students are not expected to have expertise, and when the students themselves do not expect expert results.

Lesson plans books and suggestions for multiple intelligence target the preschool to middle-school child in self-contained classrooms. It is easier for a teacher to work out many prescribed learning goals using several intelligences to manage classroom learning. The teacher may teach science by having students keep records of kinds of plants found in the local neighborhood, thus incorporating natural, visual/spatial, linguistic and logical intelligences while covering the science and writing skill sets required for that grade. The self-contained classroom teacher has fewer students and spends much more time with them than a subject area teacher has in junior high school or college. With the amount of recordkeeping required, teachers in self-contained classrooms would be more likely to be able to observe the students and see where their processing styles and intelligences are developing.

But what of secondary or post-secondary teachers? While these teachers have developed expertise or even the intelligence in a given area to model for students, both they and the students have their own ideas of what is an acceptable skill level. Many teachers and students feel that they fail to reach these expectations.

Teachers can model the concept of the beginner mind. They can value all the intelligences, even those feel unfamiliar and difficult. Students are all visual/kinesthetic learners in that they "hear" what teachers do speaks louder than what they say.

Rather than expect ourselves to be experts in all areas, teachers can begin to make small changes that challenge learning. They can "put our own spin on it" (Torloff, 1996), allowing students to hold much of the content rather than giving them the answers.

Structures for information-scaffolding are built by modeling, by giving students worked-out examples to follow, and by accepting partially correct answers ("Scaffolding," 2004).

The "talented" students can be challenged make up a song (linguistic, musical), and then teach it to the class with gestures or dance steps (interpersonal, kinesthetic). A whole class could build a collage to illustrate a concept--valuing the process more than the product.

Such a project would require logic and visual/spatial intelligence to design and interpersonal and kinesthetic intelligence to build. Enliven dull drill and practice by letting students ask a drill question, and then toss a beanbag to select a student to answer. Students could talk to each other for a minute in class to reinforce or clarify what the lesson. Assign alternate forms of homework that use different processing: make a flow chart, draw a cartoon, make up a jingle, write a the story that the math problem illustrates.

What teachers should not try to do is to present every lesson in every mode of thought. Find resources for various ways of learning, but in challenge students to make connections with each kind of intelligence without requiring genius level expertise. Allowing students to learn not only through their preferred channels allows them to develop the other channels and their own levels of each intelligence.

What is most important is for teachers to allow themselves not to be experts, but to be learners with students. Teachers carry an amount of information to be shared with students, but as they share their learning experiences with students, and model how to learn through a modality, students can accept and develop their own styles. Students can be comfortable with their lack of expertise if teachers are comfortable with theirs.

As teachers work from the "beginner's mind," they will become more mindful and more aware of how intelligences interconnect and add depth to experience, in life as well as school.

References

Mikola, J.(2001) Learning To Learn The Kinesthetic/Tactual Way. Learning to learn in order to teach. Retrieved 2-9-06 from http://www.lessontutor.com/jmlearnkinesthetic.html

Mikola, J.(2001) Learning To Learn: The Auditory Way. Learning to learn in order to teach. Retrieved 2-9-06 from http://www.lessontutor.com/ jmlearnauditory.html

Mikola, J.(2001) Learning To Learn: The Visual Way. Learning to learn in order to teach. Retrieved 2-9-06 from http://www.lessontutor.com/jmlearnvisual.html

Scaffolding.(2004) North Central Regional Educational Library. Learning Point Associates. Retrieved 2/13/06 from http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/learning/lr1scaf.htm

Torloff, B. (1996 May) Using the Theories of Multiple Intelligence in the Classroom. ONWEAC an NEA Affiliate. Retrieved 2/12/06 from http://www.weac.org/kids/may96/multipl2.htm