Chapter 6 &7 Ubd & 5&6 MI

Flexibility, both in curriculum and learning environment, are essential to addressing the needs of various students. A typical secondary-education teacher will have upwards of one hundred students. Each with various readiness levels, intelligence types, and environmental background. Though daunting, the teacher can plan for various situations that may arise. Chapter six provides various examples of how to manage a differentiated classroom, student patterns, classroom elements, and other strategies the teacher may need. Overtime, the teacher will generally know whose who in readiness level, intelligence type, and environmental background.

            Essential questions can be highly philosophical with no clear answer, or purely pragmatic and likely to occur in the student’s adult life. An example of this is the Geography Essential Questions. “What makes places unique & different?” makes students compare & contrast different environments to determine what makes each one unique. “How does where we live influence how we live?” makes students consider their own lives in Northeastern United States and compare it with other places around the world. My current placement in a Geography classroom has revolved around essential questions similar to this.

            The eight-day lesson plan illustrated on page 68 of MI is one way to implement each intelligence type into a lesson plan. Personally, I am not a proponent of this plan. Dedicating an entire day to focusing on one type of intelligence does not ensure that every student is engaged. They will eventually get to their intelligence, but implementing more than one intelligence type per day sounds much more effective than one day at a time. Chapter 5 also introduces various strategies of implementing each intelligence into a lesson, but does not go in-depth into them.

            Chapter 6 goes in-depth into the strategies introduced in the previous chapter. The chapter provides a list of each strategy in describes the effectiveness it could have in a class. As stated in the above paragraph, I do not think dedicating an entire day to one intelligence is incredibly effective. Multiple activities catering to various intelligences could be implemented in a single class. A lesson could begin with having student sketch their ideas about a given topic. Then describe their sketches in small groups. Ending the activity by writing a one-minute reflection on the group’s response. Linguistic, Spatial, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal intelligences were utilized in this relatively short opening activity.