WEEK 9- It's Not How Smart You Are, It's How You're Smart!

Dear all,

I confess that since I have seen all the topics of this course, I have hardly waited for week 9 to come. I have been familiarised with the types of intelligencies at different conferences but, as each week I was amazed to find out so many new things, I expected the same to happen during this week. 

And indeed, my expectations were rewarded. First of all, referring to the classification,  to the seven types of intelligencies I knew about, I found out that I can add others , namely the naturalist and the existentialist intelligences as Gardner proposes. The last one mentioned here is  called by others the spiritual/religious intelligence. 

The types of intelligencies are of utmost importance for teachers, it is as if they have all the necessary data so as to be able to accomplish the best of their activity. The teachers, especially the form teachers should apply tests at the very beginning of the school year in which to see what type of intelligence his/ her students have and also to make them know this. Thus the students would be helped because they will learn what are the best methods to be used by themselves so as to acquire the necessary knowledge. On the othe hand, teachers will be able to use the information when they prepare for their lessons, taking into consideration these aspects. A teacher can’t address within the same class to all types of intelligencies but he/she can be able to do it within a unit. School in our country still insists just on the verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical types of intelligencies since the results here seem to be more palpable. But we, the foreign English teachers have wonderful opportunities to use all the types in our lessons, I repeat, not all at once, but whenever appropriate in our lessons. 

What is more, technology can help us in doing this with great success as I found out by reading the article ”Do Technology Based Lessons Meet the Needs of Student Learning Styles?”, on the site, http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596r/students/Rosen/Rosen.html#ls. We, the teachers, need to do our best so as to meet the needs of our students by providing a variety of lessons using various teaching methods. And since technology and computers easily combine various media formats, they can provide a variety of different learning opportunities and address to various learning styles. Using technology, I personally can provide my students’ types of intelligencies lots of activities to be used both in classrooms and at home.

All people learn in different ways, and we need to take that into account when designing our lessons. There is not one teaching method that will work for all learners. Since all learners are different, we must provide a variety of teaching methods to better match the variety of learning styles that students bring to the classroom. In this way, frustrating situations for both teachers and students will be easily avoided. Teachers will not be frustrated with low test scores, unresponsive or hostile classes, poor attendance and drop outs , while students will be able to understand what they are taught.

Last, but not least, we had to post our final project. It is great to be able to apply almost everything we have learnt during the past weeks in a final product. I have used the ideas my colleagues , Celeste and Natalya oferred me and I hope that this project is better written than the previous one. Still, ideas keep coming into my mind in order to improve it. I am looking forward to Donna’s feed-back. We still have one week to share our thoughts and feelings, so let’s enjoy ourselves!