What can you do to provide a learning environment where you tap into the students’ strengths, encouraging them to stretch and feel comfortable building on their strengths? Howard Gardner and his theory of Multiple Intelligences can assist you in meeting the learning needs of your students.
One way is to administer a learning style inventory. Jonelle A. Beatrice has developed an easy one that can be used with elementary students. It will determine if the student's learning style is visual, kinesthetic or auditory. Thomas Armstrong has developed a multiple intelligence inventory for adults that can be used with older students.
Generally, inventories will determine the learning style of a student, whether they are an auditory, visual, or tactile/kinesthetic learner, and determine their area of cognitive strength, based on Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. Knowing this valuable information will give you a formula for a differentiated curriculum design.
Once you have established your students’ learning styles and their intellectual strengths, you are ready to begin designing lessons based on the required curriculum. You are looking at your teacher’s manual and you are thinking, “Why do I have to take the time to design different levels of lessons when the publisher has provided me with challenge lessons for my gifted students?”
Those challenge lessons are still one size fits all, and from what you have already learned there is no one size gifted student! With that understanding, let’s get into some strategies that will help you to seamlessly integrate the multiple intelligences into your curriculum and allow your students to make choices, empowering them to succeed!