MI+B1+Chapter+6

Abstract and Synthesis
Roger Abstract: Chapter 6 of MI discusses different teaching styles involving MI. Armstrong discusses different [|strategies] for each different intelligence. Most of the examples are fairly logical, like linguistic learners enjoying literature. The same ideas were applied to forming questions and assessment. Beyond that, there is not much other substance in the chapter. Synthesis: Most people agreed that there were several good points made throughout the chapter. One topic that most people seemed to enjoy was the kinesthetic aspect of teaching styles. Beyond that, most people agreed with the importance of the facts provided and the relation of the intelligences to [|teaching styles] and assessment. Some people are getting frustrated with the repetitive nature of the book. The book carries the common theme throughout each chapter of reintroducing the multiple intelligences to each new topic. Admittedly it is frustrating that there is so much repetition. There is some valuable information, yes, but it could be integrated and summarized much more effectively. Most of the ideas regarding MI seem to be common sense as well, which further limits the effectiveness of the book.

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Jake
Chapter 6 of MI discusses some different teaching strategies that can be used in the classroom in order to build on the differing intelligences. Similar to chapter 5, in this chapter Armstrong unpacks each intelligence, and how teachers can bring those intelligences into the classroom. The first two intelligences that he talks about are Linguistic and logic mathematical. He points out that these are the two strategies that are most commonly addressed in the traditional classroom and are usually very easy to incorporate. I agree with this as the few examples he gave, such as journal writing and Socratic questioning, are very common in the modern day classroom. He then went on to unpack spatial intelligence and that one could incorporate metaphors, sketching, color cues, and many other things in order to help students learn in this area. This seems like a reasonable idea as such things are easily incorporated and I’m not so sure there is a lack of such representations in the traditional classroom. Next was Bodily-Kinesthetic, which is by far my favorite. Armstrong says that you can use things like class theater and hands-on building projects in the classroom. I think this is a phenomenal idea, and prior to reading this chapter such things had been very powerful in my learning experience. Armstrong’s classification of such activities has reinforced my desire to use such tools in the classroom. Musical intelligence is the next piece, and who does not love a good hamlet rap in the middle of class. Such activities would certainly be well received. The next two intelligences seemed a bit more abstract, interpersonal and intrapersonal, and I wasn’t sure where Armstrong intended to go. However, he provided some very good insight suggesting ideas like peer sharing and reflection periods, which both seemed like dynamite ideas. The final intelligence was naturalist. This one again seems quite difficult to incorporate within the confines of a classroom, but simply enough Armstrong suggests nature walks and even things like class pets as good sources through which to one can feed his or her students. I think the bulk of these ideas are phenomenal and the ease with which Armstrong seems to incorporate this different aspects into a teachers lessons really challenges me to begin thinking outside the box.

Caleb
This chapter describes the various examples on how to specifically address each individual learning style. Linguistic learners might enjoy a story; where as visual learners would prefer if a teacher used a graphic organizer. I have a feeling that I am preaching to the choir when I write half of my posts, because usually by know I am explaining the importance or at least the need to know that students are different. Which, I hope, is almost an instinctive knowledge for most the educators out there. Still we continue to talk about the differences between students and how we can address them. I enjoy that this chapter has shown me a few examples of what I can use to teach my students. But at the same time, I don’t know why I am writing about it. Yes, the information they give me is extremely helpful. Learning what lesson techniques could best suit a kinesthetic learning makes me smile. That’s always been an area of learning that I struggle with. For one, I am a small kinesthetic learning, and two I’ve never been truly taught this method when I was in the schools. When I am out there in the fields, I can get as many examples as I can about how to teach every type of learning. But it’s not going to matter if I don’t recognize what sort of students are in my classroom. When I get back to looking through this chapter I think I might a bit to harsh on what’s going on. But, in the end as long as I keep an eye it seems like I’ll be fine. I need to learn how to have that all seeing eye though.

Tyler
Chapter 6 goes over teaching strategies for each of the eight intelligences. In order to keep this short, only three will be talked about: linguistic, mathematical, and interpersonal. For linguistically intelligent students, storytelling and journal writing are very effect tactics that teachers can use to teach their students. Storytelling has been used since the dawn of time to communicate ideas and stories with other people, and this makes it a powerful tool to use in the classroom. Stories, when told right, can be remembered by children for years. If teachers can weave relevant knowledge, such as multiplication or government structure, then students will reflect on the story and remember the vital facts. Journals are also great for linguistic students because it can be applied to any class and it allows the student to reflect on their learning. The journals can be private or read aloud; it is up to the student. For logical/mathematical students, Socratic questioning and classifications click best with these types of students. Socratic questioning is when a students has an hypothesis and the teacher questions the student's idea. This is meant to make the student think critically and either prove the student is right or wrong by his own rationale. Classifications are a bit simpler. A teacher asks the class to brainstorm a list of geographical features. The teacher could then organize them by climate, height, age, or any other type of classification. For interpersonal, cooperative groups and simulations are great ways to teach these types of students. Cooperative groups allows the student to combine their ideas and come up with something that no single one of them could by themselves. Plus, groups can attain multiple types of intelligences at the same time. Simulations are when groups come together and create a “what if” moment. Basically, give the group a scenario. For example, “You are a colonist from England and you have just landed in the New World. What do you do now?” This makes the group work together to find a solution for what to do next.

Abby
This chapter talked about the different teaching strategies for different types of learning. We all learn differently and so we should have may different teaching strategies. There are many simple ways to incorporate different learning strategies into the classroom and help students to develop more in depth understandings. This chapter presented many different types of strategies for each content area. These suggestions were given to help teachers realize how easily these ideas can be incorporated into the classroom. I really liked all the examples that this chapter offered because it made the MI theory much more achievable for me. I think that we all agree that people learn differently and that we should offer them opportunities to do their best and to learn as much as possible, but it is always the //how// that people get stuck on. I liked that this chapter offered specific examples such as the fact that it is important for students to be able to share things from their own life and how this fits into the intrapersonal intelligences section. Many of the suggestions that it offered were simple and did not require a long time commitment meaning that several could be done allowing many of the multiple intelligences to be addressed in just one class. I was also surprised how many of them I have done before in high school and college classes. I want to be able to take these ideas and use them in my own class because I think that many of these exercises not only meet the needs of different learners but also add to the depth of understanding of a subject on the whole.

Jasmine
Teaching strategies vary hugely among the multiple intelligences. As a teacher, it will become my responsibility to reach all eight intelligences in order to make sure that all of the students are getting an equal opportunity at education. Linguistic learners can learn through storytelling. This is a strategy not used often because it can be time consuming but it is a strategy that would be very appealing to linguistic students. Logical students may like things to be classified and categorized. This makes everything seem more organized and is more appealing to logical students. This can be applied easily to any concentration classroom. Heuristics was a new word for me, but it is appealing to logical students because it is a loose collection of strategies, rules of thumb, guidelines, and suggestions for logical problem solving. Examples of this include finding analogies to the problem you wish to solve, or separating various parts of the problem and then working backward to find a solution. These are both very successful methods to appeal to logical students. Spatial intelligences are drawn to visuals and idea sketching and color cues. These students want to see things and be able to touch them. It makes more sense that way to them. Kinesthetic learners like classroom theater or body answers. Examples of this could be simply raising their hand to answer a question. To appeal to musical learners, I as a teacher could play soft music during class. They would appreciate it because it would make their learning environment better. The rest of the learning styles also have many examples of how to satisfy students’ learning needs. The point is that as a teacher, it will be my responsibility to use teaching strategies that apply to all eight learning styles at one time or another.

Dan
This chapter helps teachers develop several strategies to incorporate within a classroom setting. Forty total teaching strategies are outlined, five for each intelligence. The first one that stood out to me was the linguistic strategies. Because my concentrate is English, I want to focus of linguistic strategies to begin with. The ones outlined in this chapter provided great insight on ways to use linguistic strategies not only for an English classroom, but for others such as math. My favorite technique was journal writing, because I found it very effective in my high school career, so I want to implement it within my own classroom. As I read through these different strategies, I pondered how I would use certain strategies in my classroom, like musical for instance. I understand the need to be aware that some students are more musically inclined than others, but I didn’t know how to accommodate for them. I gained valuable insight on ideas, like allowing students to create music videos analyzing the key characteristics of a main character, or creating a rap song that follows iambic pentameter. Being flexible and catering to students’ strengths provides for more engaged learning as well as better results. Interpersonal strategies also intrigued me, because I believe having the skills to work with other people effectively is vital for success. When I have my own classroom, I will have peer sharing after students have completed written works to access feedback from other classmates and express their ideas.

Roger
Chapter six of MI covers more specific activities that can be used to address all intelligences in the classroom. The chapter essentially repeats the same line that has been carried through the last four chapters, the line that instruction needs to be varied for variable people. The main focus was on more specific activities to use in the classroom, but it is still repetitive. At this point, it’s almost going into common sense territory with some of the lessons the book suggested. It’s hard //not// to come up with the idea of having students verbally tell a story or record their own voice if they’re linguistic learners. It makes good sense that a logical learner would want to use ordering and some form of equations to figure things out. Truth be told, this chapter holds very little in the way of value to the book or the class. The most it does is provide more evidence for things that have already been proven, or things that //do not// need to be proven. The two examples I listed above are just as simple as the rest, and it’s annoying to have to spend time reading about something that has already been beaten to death (also humorous that I said the same thing in the previous chapter review). The idea of giving examples of what to do in the classroom is a good idea, but not something that warranted a full chapter. Most of the key subjects in chapter six have been echoed in other chapters, and the information included in this chapter could have easily been combined into either the previous chapter or spread out through other chapters.

Jenn
In chapter six there are multiple examples under each intelligence to help give ideas for teaching strategies. There were many ideas that I thought were new, exciting and useful in any classroom. One of the ideas that I really like was having tape recorders as a regular resource in the classroom. I think a lot of fellow students or students I’ve worked with would have benefitted greatly from being able to use tape recorders for variation of small written assignments. I also really like the idea of using tape recorders as ways of giving instructions. Then the students would be able to rewind and listen to parts again, instead of asking the teacher to repeat instructions. I also really liked how the book mentioned that students take their bodies with them when they leave the class, therefore using bodily/kinesthetic learning techniques can become extremely effective. Because I am not a kinesthetic learner, this concept was particularly inspiring. I especially liked the strategy of body maps, because I think for many this would help with simple memorization, maybe for something like vocabulary. I hope to find multiple ways to use it in my classroom to help avoid over using boring worksheets. Finally, although the idea of using goal setting sessions isn’t a new one, I think it is worth mentioning. With every subject the teacher should be explaining their goals for the class as a whole, and the students should be able to build off those goals to make personal goals. These goals will not only help the student set up a strategy for how to get through the subject matter, but it will also help the teacher recognize the students’ individual needs and give them the resources necessary to accomplish their goals.

Katie
Chapter 6 of the MI book explains different teaching strategies that teachers can use that involve different multiple intelligences. Certain strategies that are mentioned work better with some students than with others because of the fact that they are specific for different types of intelligences. Linguistic learners are the most common and seem to also be the most easily taught students because linguistic learners focus more on books and lectures and find that these strategies are how the learn the easiest. There are also teaching strategies mentioned for bodily-kinesthetic learners, musical intelligence learners, interpersonal learners, intrapersonal learners, and naturalist learners. The idea for this chapter is for teachers to find activities that best suit their topic that is being taught so they can then incorporate the activity into their unit. I think that every teacher should incorporate some different activity every once in a while that focuses on a certain type of intelligence so that that student that learns best with that intelligence will learn more. Not all intelligences can be focused on in one class period and so they should be broken up into different days or weeks. Maybe one week, the teacher can focus on Interpersonal learners and then the week after they can concentrate on Intrapersonal learners. While reading the section on Naturalist Intelligence, I noticed that there was a lesson involving nature walks. During my junior year of high school, my class had to learn about the different types of trees around our school and we used to take nature walks in order to find the trees and point them out. I am not a naturalist learner, but either way I did find that I benefitted well from this strategy and other students may too.

Ally
In this chapter it went into detail about specific strategies teachers could use in multiple intelligence. For example, linguistic intelligence has strategies for storytelling and brainstorming however that doesn’t utilize technology, so instead a teacher could have them tape record their story or create a journal. I was interested in the visual intelligence more because that is my main intelligence. They suggested color cues, which is using more colors in the worksheet. You can add visual into writing by picture metaphors and idea sketching. That would allow students to continue learning the material but learn it in a way they understand. This will help teachers because it is about thinking ideas that will help different learning styles. As teachers, we can’t be narrowly directed in our thinking for lesson plans or else students will not be engaged or enjoy coming to school. I have had teachers that when they teach it is strictly with a chalkboard and writing notes. I think students would understand more if we could teach content in multiple ways. What if you could draw a picture? What if you could physically move to solve the problem? Teachers should be focusing on all the different ways that they can teach a certain subject. My classroom would be affected by learning through multiple intelligence because it will allow them a chance to succeed. They will be able to question the subject and I want to prepare to explain it in multiple ways, that way they are able to understand and succeed.

Lizz
When it comes to multiple intelligences, many different teaching strategies can be implemented into the classroom. In some cases, the good teachers have been using these strategies for decades. As a future teacher, my responsibility will be to incorporate different strategies to engage my students who will have a wide variety of the eight different intelligences. When it comes to teaching strategies for linguistic intelligence, I was most intrigued by storytelling because I thought it was mostly used for entertainment like the book said. In storytelling, a teacher can weave concepts, ideas, and instructional goals into the story. A logical intelligence strategy is classifications and categorizations, which is used typically by the math and science courses. It can help though by keeping the students organized so they can find the information again if needed to. Spatial intelligences are drawn to visuals and idea sketching and color cues. Color cues are using a bunch of different colors in the classroom such as colored chalk, markers, and transparencies. I personally love color and so I want my classroom to be full of different colors and attract my students into the classroom but I don’t to go over the top where it starts to distract them. Bodily-kinesthetic learners might like/learn the best way through Classroom Theater, which can be educational and fun at the same time. To appeal to musical intelligences my English teacher would play soft music while we were working on papers. As a teacher, I could play music in my classroom when my students were doing something. There are plenty of other ways that chapter six goes over that a teacher could use in their classroom for every intelligence.

Alex Slack
This chapter had very effective ways of engaging the diverse range of children that you are going to be seeing in you classroom. This chapter had engaging and fun things for each class that meets any kids learning style. I am not a naturalist or a visual learner in fact I would score myself negative in those categories but some of the activities that are under those categories such as a nature walk would be something that you could do in any class room. For an example you could take kids on a nature walk to show what resources they had in the year 1812. Then for visual and spatial you could visualize things such as in a history class you could read allowed for the auditory kids and have the visual kids close there eyes and visualize the desired material to have them get a better understanding. If there is a central theme that I could take from this chapter as a whole is that there are always ways to make class more engaging and more fun for not just the students but to get back in touch to why teaching is fun. I think if teachers reconnect with their inner student and remember why they fell in love with learning they could again fall back in love with teaching.

Brittany
This chapter takes examples from the list in chapter five and explains how to use them effectively in more detail. I found some of the examples to be things I could easily incorporate into my classroom. Something such as plants as props when discussing something like the new world. I especially like the idea of choice time, the book says this is a great idea for intrapersonal students, but I think all students could benefit from it because it gives them an opportunity to learn in the way best suited for them. For my class choice time would allow students to learn history in a way that enjoy, making the course something that they look forward to learning about. I also really like the idea of classification and categorizing, because it is easily implemented into a social studies classroom through allowing students to organize dates, people and other information. Another idea the chapter presents the idea of classroom theater, because it is not only a fun way for students to learn but it is also a great way to see how much students have learned without using tests or essays. Overall this chapter gave me some ideas and explanation of how to use them. I think that these ideas will be vital in my classroom because we all learn differently and find it hard to understand other's learning styles, therefore these ideas will allow me to see into their comfort zone.