It is said that variety is the spice of life. This activity has really illustrated just how spicy the average classroom can be! There are so many variances in the way people learn. I clearly have not been effectively tailoring teaching and assessing to suitably meet the diverse needs of students in my classroom. I guess in a large way I have been tailoring things to my own learning needs! Good golly! On the plus side, in planning for this current term I tried to use a greater array of teaching and assessment methods than I did last year!
Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences suggests that a person's collective intelligence is made up of eight different intelligences including linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual spacial, and musical intelligences. Each of these eight are at different levels, with some being much stronger than others. This means that depending on how strong a particular intelligence is, a person may have an easier time learning certain types of information and a more difficult time learning others. In a room of 30 students, the assortment of strong and weak intelligences will quite broad. This has significant bearing on how effective the teaching and learning process will be. It therefore means that lessons and assessments ought to be fashioned in ways that promote the development and use of as many of the intelligences as possible. In so doing, learners not only strengthen their overall intelligence but can rely on different intelligences to assimilate information, link new information to previous knowledge, and communicate their understanding of new materials. Essentially, it is a multifaceted approach that targets individual intelligences to formulate the overall picture.
The spicy stew thickens. Bloom has categorized educational objective into the domains of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. Of course he did not leave it at that. Nope, Bloom theorized several levels for each of these domains. Each of these levels target a particular objective that leads to the realization of the domain. In the cognitive domain for instance, he has given us six levels - Knowledge, Analysis, Comprehension, Application, Synthesis and Evaluation.
With all these categories that Bloom has presented to us, combined with Gardner's explanations of multiple intelligences, it seems quite overwhelming to fashion teaching and assessment to meet the needs of all the students in a class, when each student processes information differently. However, by providing us with these theories, they help teachers to examine their content and come up with ways of appealing to the different intelligences during the teaching/learning/assessing processes. They also provide a good framework for the levels involved in meeting educational objectives. While these levels are not hierarchical, they allow the teacher to have focal points so that specific skills can be assessed as a part of the overarching assessment process.
Having said all that, I know that much more analysis is needed of my teaching/assessment methods. I now need to study my course content and learning objectives, and find ways in which to craft lessons around some of the intelligences outlined by Gardner. It is also necessary, using Bloom's Taxonomy, to come up with assessments that address the domains he laid out so as to have a more rounded approach that caters to the diverse learning abilities that exist in a group of learners. It will be long and hard work, that's for certain.
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