Learning opportunities

David Alfonso Pons
9 nov 2015
2 Min. de lectura

As a student, I have felt frustrated a lot of times because I was trying to learn something or figure the answer to some problem and it just did not work. I tried and tried but it was useless. It maybe hapenned because I did not exactly know which was my learning style or it could be because the teacher wanted us to work in a way that did not fit me. Anyway, It is important to remember these kind of situations and figure out the reason.

A few days ago, my teacher was talking about multiple intelligences and I directly thought that that could have been my problem. Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychologist, said in 1983 that every learner had a different mind and so the way of learning was completely different, every process involved in learning or understanding changed in every person. As a consequence, he identified eight types of intelligence: Kinaesthetic, linguistic, logical, naturalistic, spatial, musical, intrapersonal and interpersonal.

I think it could be a great idea to make teachers, not only language teachers, work with the multiple intelligences. It would be a great change for education and obviously it involves a lot more working hours but it would dicrease student's failure rate a lot. It only needs teachers to run a small test and then prepare materials adapted to each one. It could be even funny.

For instance, I made the test that our teacher told us about (which you can find at the end) and my result was that I have body intelligence, I learn by doing. In fact, the test got me. I expected it to fail and tell me that I was a musical learning, which would have been ridiculous for me. Nevertheless, It worked so I started thinking that It would be a great idea to work with it!

Test URL: http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/index.htm

By the way, I also found a video that explains how to apply the multiple intelligences in the classroom. It is a great video and it is worth watching.