Classroom Confidential Ch. 8 & 9

This week I learned from Schmidt- Don’t neglect the multiple intelligences in your classroom; feed them! Creative and messy learning can be the most impactful, penetrating deep into the students’ minds. The students want to experience learning in ways that are relate-able and engaging (and who wouldn’t!). To do this immersion is an influential tool in getting learners entrenched in the world of the subject or domain being taught. When students are given an opportunity to discover something completely new, it empowers them to make meaning out of their world. Being in PE I have a built-in environment for engaging kinesthetic, spatial, and often visual learners. I thought it was a brilliant and yet astonishingly obvious tactic to get students to practice their classroom academics by incorporating movement. Being a kinesthetic learner myself, I empathize with the students who struggle with retaining abstract or facts and information that seems detached from any type of cohesive structure. Until I manipulate it whether by acting, feeling, performing, etc… such material can be extremely difficult for me to retain or even understand. Although some of the methods of learning that support multiple intelligences may not seem practical in an arena when time never seems to be adequate, they can be a double edged sword, providing opportunities for more authentic assessment.

I love the idea of assessing students with such tools as “Show Me” where each student is participating and highly engaged. Used for comprehension checks, this assessment has kids move, mime, gesture, and use dramatic skills. Of course this assessment may not provide you with objective information you need as students are able to look around and mimic the responses of others. In the gym however, I sometimes encourage this type of behavior. When I want to encourage problem solving, I may ask a student to look around and use their resources to help figure out how to do something. Many times these resources are other students! Then the student has to engage in the process of using a tactic they see someone else doing and figure out how to make it work for themselves.

Lucky for me, most of the assessment in the gym is done in an authentic manner naturally. The learners are given situation activities and asked to engage body and mind in applying the learned content to them. This is not necessarily catering to my learners who have other intelligences such as logical-mathematical or linguistic. One area I could improve on is during our times of reflection or discussion. I have been caught in the position many times of having several students with hands still raised to answer a question but not having time to hear them all. Because the enhanced state standards now require students be moderately to vigorously active for at least 70% of the class period, time is pressed. I would love to integrate more opportunities for authentic assessment. Having students write sport journals, graph or draw game plays and strategies, or even act out stories to begin or end a unit, would all be fantastic ways to have my learners demonstrate their cognitive competence.