Children's Learning Intelligences Can Be Many and Varied

Imagine that you have seen your child spend countless hours building with blocks at home, singing all the lyrics to commercials or staging shows in the living room. Perhaps your child relentlessly reads everything about an interesting subject or draws with a passion. Maybe your child makes up science experiments (like "Which soda tastes best?") and actually charts and graphs the results. What you are seeing is evidence of a talent, or in today's lingo, an "intelligence." There are seven or eight main intelligences or learning types noted by education experts.

Now imagine your child comes home from school and the homework is always the same. There are no projects, charts, markers, songs, artwork. Instead you see standard spelling lists, read-and-answer-questions, or practice of all the odd-numbered math problems. That's how school in K-12 grades was for you, right? Well, today, an alarm should sound. Such homework is a sign that your child's natural talents may be getting ignored. Only one or two traditional "intelligences" are being addressed and they may not be the ones your child could use to flourish in school.

What are Multiple Intelligences, Learning Styles?

Multiple intelligences, briefly, refers to the several ways in which all of us learn. We are used to thinking that people are intelligent, as though that were a single quality. In fact, each of us is more or less intelligent in many different ways.

• Some of us learn best by actively doing things such as playing games, acting, dancing, and solving puzzle or task cards.
• Some would rather listen to lectures, read, tell stories, write and mess about with words in some fashion.
• Some of us need the rhythm of music, perhaps just in the background to learn fast and well. Sounds, instruments, group readings and even nonsense words may be keys to the best learning.
• There are folks who can get a feel for new material if they can understand how the parts and spaces of a project relate to each other. These learners need to look at charts and diagrams, build models, imagine things in detail and use color highlighters whenever possible to note things in books.
• There are learners who thrive on mixing it up with other people, doing service for others, working in groups and interacting with folks who are very different from themselves.
• Interestingly, other learners work best all alone because they can tune in to their inner workings better than others. They may ask the big questions of life, about its meaning and purpose, while gaining insights into themselves and others.

Develop Learning Styles, Strategies

We often are "intelligent" in one or more of these ways. Perhaps we have a great strength in just one way. What matters is that our way of learning is honored and used. Teachers and students can best function within classrooms that strive to teach to these different strengths. No one teacher will ever be perfect in meeting these needs, but all teachers should work to provide children chances to learn in their best way.

Imagine a teacher who is a wonderful storyteller and presents math lessons with stories or word problems most of the time. For the child who responds best to stories and words, this is heaven. But the child who needs to mess about with blocks and cubes and other tools is at a disadvantage. This child can't get the fullest meaning or deepest understanding of the material because his brain is wired for a different kind of learning. Another teacher learns and explains things best when classical music is humming in the background. The child "wired for sound" will get along fine, while the reader or the word player may be distracted beyond measure by the "noise." A balance has to be struck.

What Does a "Multiple Intelligences" or Differentiated Classroom Look Like?

The effort to satisfy all kinds of learning styles requires classrooms that look very different from what adults are used to seeing. The teacher is not the focal point; the classroom itself is the main learning source. Look for a variety of learning centers that offer activities that appeal to different learning styles. All children will visit these centers because learning will occur even if some of the centers aren't perfect fits for every individual. Centers also offer the balance needed to help a teacher reach everyone's style to some degree.

In this center-filled classroom, the teacher is a guide and not a guru. He or she must move from area to area, checking on the progress of each student or team and encouraging and expanding the work done independently. This kind of teacher often works harder creating, maintaining and updating the centers.

The noise level will likely be higher but chaos will be absent, if the centers are done well. Most children like independence, and such a classroom will be a productive, humming operation. Some children will not be able to handle the freedom if it is dumped upon them from out of the blue, so a wise teacher will gradually introduce centers and how to work with them.

What Will Show up in Students' Homework?

Classrooms that address multiple intelligences will produce projects, charts, reports, lists, computer displays, models, art, stories and many more real products. These will be displayed in the room, out in the hallway and throughout the school.

"Grades" may appear on the projects, but they may not. The children and the teacher often figure out new ways to determine what new learning has taken place. You might have to get used to "rubrics" which are lists of learning goals agreed upon ahead of time between the teacher and the children.

Rubrics will be made up for each learning center and should include all learning styles. Rubrics change from topic to topic. They are good road maps to what the child is learning and are good records that children have had a chance to experience several learning styles, including the ones at which they are strongest.

When you go for a teacher conference, look for projects and things other than lists of spelling words and test results. It's a new world in some classrooms and you need to be ready to ask new questions. "How is my child doing?" is not quite what you want to know. "How is my child learning?" might be a better question.

Paul Blundin is a teacher, writer and technology consultant in Wallingford, Pennsylvania.