Week 9

OK, I'm going to start this week's reflection with a quotation.

The following quotation is by Albert Einstein “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” 


This week was about finishing our projects and multiple intelligences and ICT integration. At first, I had thought about applying the project to the current class I am teaching but I realized that I didn't have enough time to do it, so I changed into a Project Plan. The issues I am planning to tackle are lack of motivation and learner independence. I try to design a project that might apply to any teaching situation, any level and any topic. All of the steps for integrating technology in and out of the classroom I presented can easily be integrated into any context. This basic project could be developed and adapted not only to the ELT field but also to other subject areas. I appreciate Cherry Goyal's suggestions on my half-finished draft. These suggestions enlightened me to redirect my project into the right path. Thank you, Cherry! I hope mine have helped you as well.


On the other hand, I spent some hours reading the articles on Multiple Intelligences and reading my e-classmates comments on the discussion thread. For most Venezuelan high school teachers, the theory of multiple intelligences is utopian. Classrooms are usually so crowded and teachers so stressed that they just don't want to apply any new ideas but to stick to the Grammar Translation method which only addresses the logical-mathematical intelligence by giving them formulas on how to build sentences and that's it.


Some other teachers consciously or unconsciously, when planning their lessons, include activities that deal directly with multiple intelligences. I'm going to dare to say that I am in that lot. In the classroom, sometimes I plan activities that involve movement as I know that a couple of my teens are a bit hyperactive and some others are entirely the opposite. I need to dig a bit more into other multiple intelligences so I can try to address at least three or four of them every class. We, as teachers, must exploit every aspect of this intelligences in every single student. Some of their intelligences will be more predominant that others but we have to try to foster all of them.


Technology can definitely help us to achieve this. Whether we can apply only a couple of intelligences in the classroom, we can use technology to work with the rest. I gave some ideas on my nicenet post which I hope are correct and useful. By the way, I was very curious to take the M.I. test so I took it and here there are my results:

It turns out that my most predominant intelligence is Social/Emotional. I need to relate to what I am learning. If it is not meaningful I won't pay too much attention to it and therefore I won't learn it.


I'm going to finish this week's reflective post with the following image:

More thought and reflection should be given to how we plan a lesson, how we teach, what strategies we use, how our students learn and how we evaluate.