An international partnership project with Denmark, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom
The theory of Multiple Intelligences (Howard Gardiner) is well known across Europe and the rest of the world, though it is not necessarily firmly routed in classroom practice. As Gardiner himself states in his paper, Multiple Intelligences After Twenty Years, presented at the American Educational Research Association (April 2003); ‘Much work needs to be done on the question of how the intelligences can best be mobilized to achieve specific pedagogical goals.’ Our project seeks to build on this question and attempts to offer one solution. During the life time of the project we will develop and enhance an existing Multiple Intelligence (here after referred to as MI) analysis tool to include a pedagogical wizard with the aim of aiding teachers in the effective delivery of current curriculum content through the use of MI. Though there are currently plenty of online MI analysis tools, the majority are linguistic based in their delivery and seek only to ‘assess’ a student’s MI profile. Our tool will indeed seek to analyse a student’s MI profile but will utilize different MI methods of presenting the analysis questions. Once analysis has taken place the results are fed to the teacher. S/he is able to use these results in planning the delivery of the next curriculum content. S/he is included in the preparation of this content, to ensure that its delivery utilises as many of the MIs as relevant and that curriculum content is presented to the students in the class in a way that is easily accessible. In this way, students are presented with their learning in a way that is accessible and interesting to them, the level of student motivation should improve, and therefore the level of motivation of the teachers should also improve. The project will result in the reengineering of an existing MI analysis tool that will be freely available, teacher guide books on how to use the tool, an online network of practitioners sharing and developing their knowledge and pedagogical practice, lead schools across three countries in year one, and spreading beyond through the ELOS network of schools in year two and beyond. The impact of this project will be initially with the schools directly involved with the project, but this will quickly extend through the use of the ELOS network and the online network. The results of the project will also contribute to the growing research base in this area of pedagogical study.
