Multiple Intelligences

    How do we elicit  a passion for learning in children?  The way we learn, our interests, and the desire for intelligence, inspire us to seek knowledge.   Knowing what a child relates best to and how they learn can give us insight into creating an environment where students want to be involved in the learning process.  This is where Multiple Intelligences come in to play.  Every student is unique and has both strengths and weaknesses.  Our job as teachers is to encourage those strengths and shore up the weaknesses.  Denying an understanding of Multiple Intelligence sets up an environment somewhat like the cartoon below.

The interests and natural abilities of students play a vital role in their understanding of new concepts.  When students believe they are not capable of learning they stop trying. When students know that they are all intelligent in different ways and they have the opportunity to see other avenues of using what they enjoy to strengthen weak areas, it helps them to feel valuable.  Then they are empowered to work toward better understanding.  

   In class this week we looked a Multiple Intelligences.  We discussed how this can apply to the classroom.  We took an inventory of our own intelligences and plotted them on a chart with the rest of the class.  There was a wide variety of strengths and weaknesses. No two people had the same results.  We then created a graph which provided some interesting insight into the relationships between some of the intelligences. All of the intelligences are interconnected.   I discovered that there is a distinct correlation between music and language.  It will be interesting to see what the rest of the class discovered when we return next week.