Questions for Reflection

Question 1: Doesn't it take way too much time to teach everything from multiple "perspectives?"

Question 2: The high school students appear to be using multiple intelligences as they develop presentations. But as they watch other presentations how will they be engaging multiple intelligences?

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Question 3: When Rebecca Young and Georganne Urso-Flores placed students in different groups and asked them to read a story first, and then talk to their group about what they read, what happens to students who are not reading on grade level? How can they participate? Won't they feel further alienated, if not embarrassed, when they can not participate in the discussion?

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Question 4: Creating multiple activity centers throughout a room, and then allowing students to select which activities they want to participate in is something that is done in elementary schools during "free time." Young and Urso-Flores call this "choice time" and share that this is how they ascertain their students' intellectual preferences. Children are social and usually like to hang out with a friend during free time. How do you know that a child just wants to be with a friend instead of moving towards what stimulates him or her intellectually? In addition, how do you know if the selected activity is a child's intellectual preference instead of just something that he or she wants to do that day?

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Question 5: In one part of the episode, a picture of a "learning style pizza" was shown. The teacher explained that the students feel very good about themselves because they can use multiple intelligences language to describe how smart they are. In the same episode, Howard Gardner warned about not using the eight intelligences to label children. Isn't this a contradiction?

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Question 6: I understand that students learn in different ways. The hard part is constructing lessons with multiple activities that give every student access to the content through their strongest intelligences. Do you design multiple activities for each goal, or do you apply a different intelligence activity to each goal – ultimately addressing all eight intelligences by the end of a semester?

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Question 7: Working with high school students requires lots of structure. Tom Romito encourages teachers to release control. How do you release control and allow the students to have conversations with each other while keeping them focused on the learning and not on personal conversations that are so important at that age level?

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Question 8: It will be impossible for me to implement multiple intelligences theory in my classes because there is no opportunity for me to meet with a team of colleagues to discuss the successes and failures. In both episodes – Young and Urso-Flores, in a elementary setting, and Tom Romito, in a high school setting – the teachers planned collaboratively with their colleagues.

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Question 9: In the video Howard Gardner said, "one of the arts of good pedagogy is to help people, so to speak, cobble together the areas in which they are relatively good so they can master something that's important." What does he mean?

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Question 10: Tom Romito said that when students sit down to take a test they can not discuss, act out, or draw. How, then, is the theory of multiple intelligences respected when, in fact, tests are geared towards linguistic learners?

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Question 11: In the episode, Young and Urso-Flores share that multiple intelligences gives a teacher an opportunity to categorize students for a "first cut" in terms of their learning preferences. Do learning preferences change depending on the objective being introduced?

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Question 12: Tom Romito explained that students learn in different ways, so how can we connect to all of the students so they all reach our learning objectives?

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Return to Support Materials for Session 4.