Multiple Intelligence - Theories of Multiple Intelligence's

No Child Left Behind isn't going to fix this!

Poor children have smaller brains than affluent children has deepened the national debate about ways to narrow the achievement gap . Neuroscientists who studied the brain scans of nearly 1,100 children and young adults nationwide from ages 3 to 20 found that the surface area of the cerebral cortex was linked to family income. They discovered that the brains of children in families that earned less than $25,000 a year had surface areas 6 percent smaller than those whose families earned $150,000 or more. The poor children also scored lower on average on a battery of cognitive tests. The region of the brain in question handles language, memory, spatial skills and reasoning, all important to success in school and beyond. The study, published last month in Nature Neuroscience, is the largest of its kind to date. It was led by Kimberly Noble, who teaches at both Columbia University's Teachers College and the university's medical school. Elizabeth Sowell, of Children's Hospital Los Angeles, was the senior author. “We've known for so long that poverty and lack of access to resources to enrich the developmental environment are related to poor school performance, poor test scores and fewer educational opportunities,” Sowell said. “But now we can really tie it to a physical thing in the brain. We realized that this is a big deal.”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/new-brain-science-shows-poor-kids-have-smaller-brains-than-affluent-kids/2015/04/15/3b679858-e2bc-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html>

INTERDISCIPLINARY EDUCATIONAL CURRICULUM
Learn about the Multiple Intelligences,
Howard Gardner, Ellen Winner and Arts Advocacy

How Does The Brain Work?

HOWARD GARTNER

is married to Ellen Winner author of Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education reviewed by John Broomall Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Alliance for Arts Education

Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. During the past twenty years, he and colleagues at Project Zero have been working on the design of performance-based assessments, education for understanding, and the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Multiple Intelligence defined:

Multiple Intelligence that can be molded, shaped, modified and exists beyond those intelligences traditionally tested by intelligence and standardized testing situations.

Educators have grouped intelligences needed for school success:
logical/mathematical, verbal/linguistic and interpersonal and intrapersonal

A brief description:

(1) verbal/linguistic intelligence covers the domains relating to language and reading
(2) logical/mathematical intelligence covers the domains relating to logic and mathematics
(3) spatial intelligence is about represent the spatial world internally in your mind
(4) musical intelligence relates to music, tonality, singing, playing instruments, composing music, and its applications
(5) body/kinesthetic intelligence is evidenced by an innate awareness of the body and being able to utilize the body as mechanics, especially shown as athletic abilities ie: basketball, baseball, dance, football, soccer, racecar driving, skiing, surfing, gymnastics, and figure skating
(6) interpersonal - the knowledge needed to function socially ie: president, general, social leader
(7) intrapersonal - knowledge of self
(8) naturalistic - an appreciation of and "kindredness" with nature.

Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence embraces and draws from numerous other branches of behavioural, emotional and communications theories, such as NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), Transactional Analysis, and empathy. By developing our Emotional Intelligence in these areas and the five EQ domains we can become more productive and successful at what we do, and help others to be more productive and successful too. The process and outcomes of Emotional Intelligence development also contain many elements known to reduce stress for individuals and organizations, by decreasing conflict, improving relationships and understanding, and increasing stability, continuity and harmony.

T heorist Dr. Howard Gardner has most recently added, the "naturalist," referring to a person's ability to recognize and classify animals, plants, and minerals in the surrounding environment. Another, the existential intelligence "is in limbo," Gardner revealed during the online session. "We are trying to find good biological evidence for it."

Take the test see what kind of intelligences you are using.

LEARNING STYLES

What are the learning styles - a discussion.

Dr. Felder thinks through learning styles. The
information he has on the web is likely to be very useful to you.
http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/
http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Learning_Styles.html

Differentiated Instruction
- This web Site compiles many helpful web sites that provide strategies for differentiating lessons based on your student's individual needs.

Technology and Differentiated Instruction Web Resources
- This web site also contains many web sites, articles and other resources on multiple intelligence and differentiated learning.

When Sound Is Red: Making Sense of Mixed Sensations
Synesthesia, an unusual phenomenon whereby people experience different senses blending into one another. Some synesthetes experience individual words in particular colors. Others experience smells when exposed to shapes or hear sounds inside tastes. While most experts do not consider it a disorder -- synesthetes are usually glad to have the ability, and it sharply improves their memory -- research into synesthesia is teaching scientists important lessons about the normal brain, perhaps even about aspects of creativity. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15125-2002Oct11.html
and http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050228/full/050228-9.html

THE SIXTH SENSE

Even blindfolded we can sense where our hands and other body parts are .
To sense where the various parts of our body are, we sometimes rely on signals that originate in our brain rather than in our fingers or toes, a new study shows.
The so-called sixth sense, known as proprioception, is essential to many basic actions, including walking without having to look at your feet or touching your nose with your eyes closed. But scientists have long pondered how this sense works. It is generally accepted that sensors in the skin, muscles and joints send information to the brain that is crucial to sensing limb position. Now researchers in Australia have evidence of the importance of outgoing messages from the brain.
"This will provoke debate, because the idea that the sense of position is mostly the result of the sensory receptors is well-entrenched," says Timothy Miles, a physiologist at the University of Adelaide, Australia, who is independent of the study.
Janet Taylor from the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in Sydney and her colleagues strapped the forearm and hand of volunteers into a covered apparatus that prevents the subject from seeing the position of their hand. Under normal conditions, the subject could accurately tell if and how their hand had been moved by an experimenter or by themselves.
Dead hand
Things changed when their forearm and hand were paralysed by a restriction of blood flow and anaesthetized by injection. Volunteers then could not say where their hand had been moved to when it was re-positioned by an experimenter.
But they still felt they could move their hand when directed to do so. In fact they were adamant that they had moved their hand even when it was prevented from moving. The harder they tried, the more they felt it had moved. In the absence of signals coming in from the outside world, from feeling or sight, the brain's motor commands dominated the volunteer's sense of where their hand was.
"We were very surprised that the results were so obvious and so consistent across the subjects," says Taylor. They report the work in the Journal of Physiology.
Proprioception (muscular and joint sense)
Not only is there interoception (visceral sense), but there are more than five regular senses. The teeth are excellent sensors of hardness, reliable enough to judge the Moe scale of hardness; we can detect the presence of static electricity by the hair (we even have muscles at the base of each hair that can enhance the sense by moving and so freeing the hair to move in response to the presence of static electricity); we can sense air pressure with the carotid sinus and the ear drum (apart from sound waves) and so on.
Part of the problem with the other senses is that if we don't live out doors and have our attention drawn to the sense, we tend to lose recognition of it (this is true of any sense unstimulated during maturation).

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
"big picture" oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking

Intelligence

Also See Multiple Intelligences

Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century

Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 15:31:52 -0400
From: "John Winston Bush" <jwb@alumni.stanford.org>
Subject: Re: My child's IQ is bigger than yours
From Sarler's article:
"Special schools are springing up for the 'awesomely bright' and parents will kill for a place as, once, they would have done for a classy zip code. "It is almost laughable that many of the special schools are also the authority which tests the children; they solemnly report back to the gullible parents that, guess what, the child is so intelligent that he or she has won them the\ chance to pay a zillion dollars a year for the school to educate him."

Prize example of what Sarler meant: Since 1965, the toniest private school on Brooklyn has boasted to inquiring parents about how many of its graduates go on to elite universities. http://www.saintanns.k12.ny.us/info/honorframe.html

Virtually in the next breath, they inform the parents that their child will be given an IQ test to help determine his or her suitability for the school. Few parents of my acquaintance have drawn the obvious inference that the school is claiming credit for the talent already evident in its pupils as early as the age of three. Gullible parents, indeed.
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Comment
My child's IQ is bigger than yours

The parents who see their bright offspring as status symbols really do need their heads examined

Carol Sarler
Observer
Sunday May 12, 2002

One of my first tasks in journalism took me to interview a chap whose claim to fame was an IQ so high it couldn't have been measured on the Richter scale; indeed, he became some premier cheese in Mensa and was wheeled out as a promotional tool for the organisation.

The trouble was that the IQ was his only claim to fame: he worked menially - in a bingo hall, as I recall - and had little success with personal relationships because he was, frankly, odd. Not mad or bad, just lacking in social ease or grace, as I had unkind fun in demonstrating within the piece I wrote. Two days after my snitty lump of prose was published, he killed himself. His note did not blame me specifically; it just wailed his feeling that nobody, really, understood him back there in his tormented, excluded isolation, alone as he had been with the genius IQ that had bought him, in his whole life, absolutely nothing.

Full text
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4411931,00.html

Silver bullets or blanks? by www.MarionBrady.com

Bill Gates says that big, impersonal schools are obstacles to improved learner performance. He's right. His Foundation has poured major money into a "small schools initiative," but thus far nothing much of educational consequence has resulted.

Eli Broad says that better leadership is the key to improved learner performance, and the Broad Foundation has put up significant money to train new ones. Obviously, good leaders are essential, but thus far, Broad-trained leaders haven't introduced any revolutionary new approaches to educating.

Jeb Bush, echoing the late Milton Friedman, says bringing market forces to bear shapes schools up. The market-based reforms he put in place in Florida led to teachers and schools being graded, compared, labeled, rewarded, and punished. But cut through the political hype and the statistical game playing, and it's clear that after more than a decade, nothing of academic consequence has changed. Indeed, misapplied, market forces are counterproductive.

Policymakers in Tallahassee, like those in most other state capitols and Washington, have long argued the merits of greater rigor. They've pushed for more math, more science, more Advanced Placement courses, more International Baccalaureate programs, and more testing. But neither the evidence nor common sense suggest that "raising the rigor bar" for learners who can't clear the bars already in place will improve schools.

Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Jeb Bush, and the policymakers in state capitols and Washington aren't the only ones with ideas about what's wrong with schools, and what would set them straight. Op-eds nationwide read about the same: End social promotion! Put all kids in uniform! Disband teacher unions! Close down schools of education! Get tough on parents! Expel the troublemakers! Give everybody vouchers! Put mayors in charge! Abolish tenure! Bring back corporal punishment! Convert all schools to charters! Increase spending! Adopt pay-for-performance schemes!

Check around, and it turns out that somewhere, all these "reform" strategies and many others have been tried and have made little or no difference. That's because - as most educators know but those actually running the big show refuse to admit -- the main reason for poor learner performance is childhood poverty. Take away the test scores of kids on free and reduced lunch - those least likely to have had adequate health care, least likely to have had good diets, least likely to have stable, stress-free home environments, least likely to have been exposed to books and rich, varied conversation, least likely to have travelled, least likely to have had music or other kinds of private lessons - take away their test scores and the average of those left will be right up there with the best, not just in the US but in the world.

Of the 21 richest countries in the world, the US ranks next to last in average measures of childhood well-being. And, according to the Anna E. Casey Foundation, on that near-bottom-of-the-barrel world list, Florida ranks about midway between New Hampshire and Minnesota at the top of the bottom, and Mississippi and Louisiana at the bottom of the bottom.
( http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/Rankings.aspx?ind=137 )

There's a problem, alright, but it isn't a problem that can be addressed by telling teachers to suck it up and get on with the job.

Neither the nation nor the state have the collective will and brains to make a dent in childhood poverty, but I've an education-specific suggestion that could help make the best of a bad situation.

Several years ago, to illustrate a point I wanted to make in a Knight-Ridder/Tribune column written for the Orlando Sentinel, I went to my nearest middle school and asked to see copies of their eighth grade math, science, language arts, and social studies textbooks. They obliged.

Sitting in the school's reception area, I counted the terms in the glossaries of the four books, rightly assuming that they represented what experts thought every kid should know.

One thousand, four hundred, and sixty-five! That's how many terms were in the glossaries of just those four textbooks. That's 1, 465 main ideas for 14-year-olds to learn in a school year, an average of about eight new ones a day. That's not just ridiculous; it's stupid. In the real, adult world, an author who's trying to get just ONE new idea across assumes it will take a whole book. (Think Malcolm Gladwell and The Tipping Point, or Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy In America.)

Americans, philosophically predisposed to think short-term, and more concerned with individual than with the general welfare, aren't going to do anything about childhood poverty. But that doesn't have to mean that it isn't possible to make radical improvements in educating. Information overload is just one of at least 20 problems with the familiar "core curriculum," the static, 19th Century intellectual tool the young are being handed to guide them through the 21st.

Clinging to that curriculum is a recipe not just for educational but for societal disaster. If education policymakers in Tallahassee and Washington knew what they were doing, instead of demanding national standards and tests keyed to a curriculum generated in an era long past and no longer relevant, they'd be calling for an emergency national conference to rethink what's being taught, and why.