Collaborative Approach to Learning - Multiple Intelligences Lesson

Collaborative Approach to Learning – Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardener (1983), states that students should be given a choice on how to do something in order to help with their. If students are allowed to study a topic or subject in their own preferred learning style then they will learn better, retain the information and become better learners.

To put this theory to the test, my colleague and I planned a lesson (see appendix A) on adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions using the multiple intelligences, which was to be delivered to our own groups (B-D grade students). We felt that students would need some time to consider the different intelligences and to decide which was their preferred intelligence but did not want this to eat into our actual lesson time. As a result we used the last twenty minutes of the preceding lesson to explain the objective for the ‘MI’ lesson, explain the multiple intelligences and to recap over the four operations of fractions. Students were asked to consider their preferred MI and the MI that they would least likely use.

At the start of the ‘test’ lesson, I very quickly recapped over the key features and purpose of the lesson and have each student the homework task so that they knew what they were going to be assessed on. The intention here was to give them clear focus and understanding of what they would be required to demonstrate in their Homework, which would hopefully direct their learning within the lesson.

How did it go?

The students took a while to get into the lesson. That is to say that they seemed confused by what they had to do despite having had the instructions twice. They would ask ‘so what have I got to do?’, ‘how do I present it?’, ‘what kind of song?’.  I wonder whether the delay was due to the fact that this was a new style of lesson for the students. Would the outcome have been different if these activities were a staple part of their Mathematics diet?

Some students did very little in the way of presenting the methodology of at least one of the four operations of fractions. I feel that students required more structure and less of their own interpretation.

Most of the group, for their first MI, opted image smart and logic smart and hence set about making posters, mind maps , lists, bullet points etc… When they chose their second MI (their least preferred MI), some of the students really challenged themselves and went out of their comfort zone and tried ‘nature smart’, ‘sound smart’ and even ‘body smart’. The group of girls that chose ‘body smart’ created a dance to explain how to add and subtract fractions. Their creation was very impressive, well thought out and furthermore, made sense in the context of their task. As an observer, I would understand the method by watching their performance.

The other set (lower ability) had the same lesson delivered by my colleague and they struggled greatly to understand what they had to do. They didn’t manage a lot of work and tended to all opt for image smart, creating a poster.

Overall, I am not convinced that for a subject like Mathematics, this type of activity is particularly useful for new learning. Perhaps MI lessons have their place for example as an alternative revision lesson, a one off lesson or homework to act as a break from the ‘usual practice’.

The homework (See Appendix B) was testing facts. It was assessing the students’ ability to recall how to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions based on the learning that took place in the MI lesson. The results from the homework are varied with very few obtaining full marks. That said, a lot of the students lost marks because they did not simplify their answer fully as opposed to not knowing the method of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions.

When asked for their feedback on the lesson, with particular reference to its usefulness, the students were not overly positive. The group of girls who created a dance felt that they had really learned from the process and that they would now remember how to add and subtract fractions. Conversely, the vast majority of the group felt that they wouldn’t remember what they had learned and did not feel that this was an activity they would want to repeat. I wonder whether this is entirely because they are not used these types of lessons and would in fact need to be exposed to this style of collaborative learning more often and in all subjects? Would using MIs become more powerful if used regularly across the whole school?

A big question for me is, ‘Does this type of lesson work well for certain subjects but not others?’ Or are there certain MIs that work better for certain subjects?  When a similar styled lesson was delivered to a top set in year 9, they were able to get ‘stuck in’ immediately and were very resilient, reciprocal and resourceful. They all created some excellent work but again all students produced image smart work. Does this suggest that Image smart and logic smart are the obvious choices for Mathematics?

We will be running a short assessment under test conditions in a couple of weeks’ time to test the students’ ability to retain information and recall it after an MI lesson. Although we only have a relatively small sample size, to compare results and performance, we asked other colleagues to teach the four operations of fractions to the parallel sets in a more traditional teacher led, student practice manner. These groups were set the same homework and will sit the same assessment.