Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Gardner is first to decide on the facts and procedures a teacher wants a student to understand, and then to figure out how best to present this information, given the student's strengths and weaknesses. Jean McKibben, a fifth-grade teacher at Coyote Creek, provided an example of such an approach when she described a project her students did about the European settlement of the Americas. Among other things, she wanted them to learn about the boats that were used...
...science, then, there may be less to the theory of multiple intelligences than many educators seem to believe. That may not matter so much. Gardner and other researchers say it's not necessary for a theory to enjoy absolute scientific confirmation as long as it shows good results in the classroom. But does MI show such results...
...Gardner has never laid down a detailed plan for applying his theory in schools, and the consultants and publishers who offer training in MI operate independently of him, so there is a wide range of actual practices. A few hundred schools, like Coyote Creek, use the theory in a thoroughgoing way; thousands more adopt pieces of it. The result is that the methods that go under the name of multiple intelligences are often ones Gardner would not approve of. He insists, for example, that it is a waste of time to simply "exercise the intelligence muscles...
...McKibben said of one pupil. "His main emphasis is doing things with his hands. His model of the boat was fantastic. It showed he really knew the information. If I asked him to write it down, it would have been very short." This is just the kind of application Gardner envisions: because McKibben knew that Dave understood the world in a kinesthetic way, she was better able to teach him and assess his knowledge. Dave must still learn to write well, McKibben said, but what counted here was that he showed good understanding of the material...
...possible to raise objections even to an exemplary use of Gardner's theory. Is it a better use of Dave's time to work on his writing or to express himself kinesthetically? Gardner has claimed that "all the intelligences have equal claim to priority," but historically, verbal and math skills may be stronger predictors of job performance than he allows, and employers seem to be placing a higher and higher premium on them. Then there is the problem of superficiality. How deeply can a student comprehend a given topic by relying on his strongest intelligence? Using his hands, Dave...