[ProfessionalDevelopment 1964] from Silja, Debunking in Professional DevelopmentTaylor, Jackie jataylor at utk.eduWed Feb 13 10:52:52 EST 2008
The following post is from Silja Kallenbach, please read on ~ Jackie Taylor -----Original Message----- From: Silja Kallenbach [mailto:silja_kallenbach at worlded.org] Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 10:41 AM To: professionaldevelopment at nifl.gov Subject: Re: [ProfessionalDevelopment 1958] Debunking in ProfessionalDevelopment Hello Tom and Colleagues, MI theory is exactly what it claims to be: a theory about intelligences that posits that intelligence is a pluralistic rather that a unitary trait; that there are many ways to be intelligent; that one way is not better than another; that these intelligences develop at different rates; that everyone, who is not brain damaged, has at least 8 intelligences in varying degrees; that intelligences are not the same as learning styles. Testing intelligences in antithetical to MI theory. Rather, inviting people to do self-reflection in a very subjective way, that may change from time to time, is more in the spirit of this theoretical framework. In this framework an intelligence IS the same as talent. MI theory does have something to offer to K-12 and adult educators and learners, but not to the exclusion of other teaching strategies. It turns out that for adult learners, learning about a different way to think about intelligence can be liberating and affirming *in ways that actually improve their self-efficacy with academic tasks.* Devoting some time to simply talking about the concept of intelligence is not a bad use of class time unless, of course you are delivering the message that people need to meet your narrow definition of intelligence. Feeling good about yourself as a learner has value because it predisposes people to tackle the learning that does not come easy. Certainly, Bandura's research on self-efficacy supports that. MI theory was a useful tool for lesson planning in the experience of the 10 teachers who did teacher research over 18 months on what MI theory has to offer to ESOL, ABE, GED instruction and career counseling as part of the Adult Multiple Intelligences Study (AMI), and with whom I had the pleasure to work. (Wendy Quinones was one of them.) In our experience, MI theory inspires and guided the teachers' lesson planning in positive ways that did translate into improved attendance, GED test scores, reading comprehension, even guidance counseling. Most fundamentally, it pushed the practitioners to intentionally find out about students' talents and look for ways to bridge those talents to the learning objectives. For example, one teacher, who already practiced multi-sensory teaching of reading, had an eye-opening experience of how much more engaged her students were in reading when her lessons took into consideration her students' talents an interests and gave them options for how to demonstrate their comprehension. As a result, she observed improved reading comprehension. We did not set out to measure learning gains across the board so the AMI Study does not meet the gold standard of evidence-based research but I would claim it meets the definition of evidence-based education put forth by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences: "the integration of professional wisdom with the best available empirical evidence in making decisions about how to deliver instruction." The experiences and findings of most of the AMI teacher researchers are captured in free NCSALL's publication, MI in Practice at http://www.ncsall.net/?id=26, as is our (very qualitative) research report, Open to Interpretation. The lessons the AMI teachers developed were published in a sourcebook available through Teachers College Press. If you are only interested in experimental research then don't waste your time reading our reports and books. If you are interested in learning about how ten ABE, GED and ESOL teachers used MI theory then I think the AMI study, and the lessons that grew out of it, are useful and instructive. As for the definition of the word "debunk", who cares? Silja AMI Study Co-Director ********************************************* Silja Kallenbach, Director New England Literacy Resource Center World Education 44 Farnsworth Street Boston, MA 02210 tel. 617-482-9485 x 3826 fax. 617-482-0617 skallenbach at worlded.org www.nelrc.org Get free resources about ABE/ESOL-to-college transitions at www.collegetransition.org Teach critical thinking with The Change Agent, a social justice publication for the adult education community, available at www.nelrc.org/changeagent -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/professionaldevelopment/attachments/20080213/fc195e51/attachment.html
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