Working Theory of Practice Page 5
I therefore decided to try out some more inquiry activities. One time, I wanted to play with the kinesthetic intelligence, and see how movement would help students to learn about active and passive transport in the cell. I assigned all of the students roles (i.e. water, phospholipid, etc.) and had them come up to act out their part as I was directing the play. However, when I asked students afterwards how it went, most of them were very wary of it. They came up with words like “awkward and weird”to describe it, and I’m not sure it helped many of them on the upcoming quiz. This experience as a whole brings up one of the main pitfalls that I anticipate: these activities may fail miserably simply because students are not used to them. Some students come into class every day expecting me to lecture them and to take notes, but that is not what student-based teaching is based on, nor is that the kind of teacher that I want to be. In retrospect, I think the flaw in this activity was that I did not differentiate enough—I used only the play to demonstrate this concept and did not supplement it with lecture or notes, which may have been what threw many students off. So how can I design activities to include as many intelligences as possible? Or rather, how can I differentiate my instruction even more to include more students’ main intelligences?
Yet though I openly admit that some of these activities may fail, I’m not going to give up trying to differentiate my instruction using multiple intelligences as a basis, for I strongly believe in using students strengths to help them learn.
So for this upcoming period of time, I’m going to continue to create more inquiry-based activities and trying to pull on as many intelligences as possible as I’m teaching a topic. However, I would like to try some more methods of data collection. I hope to collect as many surveys as possible based on the inquiry techniques that I use and I would also like to try to collect data on student engagement during activities as such. I’ll either gauge it myself, or ask them directly afterwards how engaged they were in the activity, whether they liked it or not, and whether it helped them to learn the activity. I would also like to try teaching one topic in several different manners, and then do a student survey on which method suited them best and why.
Yet though I openly admit that some of these activities may fail, I’m not going to give up trying to differentiate my instruction using multiple intelligences as a basis, for I strongly believe in using students strengths to help them learn.
So for this upcoming period of time, I’m going to continue to create more inquiry-based activities and trying to pull on as many intelligences as possible as I’m teaching a topic. However, I would like to try some more methods of data collection. I hope to collect as many surveys as possible based on the inquiry techniques that I use and I would also like to try to collect data on student engagement during activities as such. I’ll either gauge it myself, or ask them directly afterwards how engaged they were in the activity, whether they liked it or not, and whether it helped them to learn the activity. I would also like to try teaching one topic in several different manners, and then do a student survey on which method suited them best and why.